SynBioBeta Speaker
Vanessa Braunstein
Eli Lilly
Sr. Director, Tunelab
Vanessa has spent her academic and business career exclusively in life sciences & healthcare. She has worked at large pharma/biotech/tech companies such as Sanofi, Abbott, and NVIDIA and start-ups such as Ingenuity Systems and Fabric Genomics. Vanessa is currently Senior Director at Eli Lilly focused on the Lilly TuneLab AI/ML Drug Discovery Platform. Vanessa began her career in academics and clinical research at UC Berkeley and UCSF and then transitioned to roles building new products.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Vanessa
This Year
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AIxBIO
Lightning Talk Brought to you by Lilly TuneLab
Purchase Pass
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AIxBIO
Lightning Talk Brought to you by Lilly TuneLab
Purchase Pass
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Human Health
Bridging Discovery and Delivery: Startup–Pharma Alliances for the AI Era
As biology becomes programmable and AI accelerates discovery, startups are generating breakthrough innovations at unprecedented speed. Yet translating these advances into real-world therapies still depends on effective collaboration with global pharmaceutical organizations. This session explores how the innovation ecosystem connects early-stage breakthroughs to scalable development, bringing together leaders from startup incubation, external innovation, and pharma strategy. Speakers will examine how AI-native biotech companies engage with pharma today: how startups become “pharma-ready,” how external innovation teams evaluate and structure partnerships, and what collaboration models are emerging as biology and computation converge. From early ecosystem support and venture building to strategic alliances and co-development pathways, the discussion will provide a practical look at how ideas move from discovery to patient impact in the AI era.
Purchase Pass
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Human Health
Bridging Discovery and Delivery: Startup–Pharma Alliances for the AI Era
As biology becomes programmable and AI accelerates discovery, startups are generating breakthrough innovations at unprecedented speed. Yet translating these advances into real-world therapies still depends on effective collaboration with global pharmaceutical organizations. This session explores how the innovation ecosystem connects early-stage breakthroughs to scalable development, bringing together leaders from startup incubation, external innovation, and pharma strategy. Speakers will examine how AI-native biotech companies engage with pharma today: how startups become “pharma-ready,” how external innovation teams evaluate and structure partnerships, and what collaboration models are emerging as biology and computation converge. From early ecosystem support and venture building to strategic alliances and co-development pathways, the discussion will provide a practical look at how ideas move from discovery to patient impact in the AI era.
Purchase Pass
Session lineup still growing
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
