protein-folding
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Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Demis Hassabis
Sir Demis Hassabis CBE FRS is a British AI researcher, neuroscientist, chess prodigy, and game designer who co-founded DeepMind in 2011 and serves as CEO of Google DeepMind. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's protein structure prediction, was knighted for services to AI, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the development of artificial general intelligence.
Vijay Pande
Vijay Pande is a Trinidadian-American scientist turned venture capitalist who convinced Marc Andreessen to make his first biotech bet. He spent 16 years as a Stanford professor pioneering computational biology, founded the Guinness World Record-holding Folding@home project that turned millions of home computers into a disease-fighting supercomputer, then built a16z's Bio+Health fund into a $3 billion+ powerhouse. Now he's co-founding VZ.VC to focus on AI-driven healthcare innovation - proof that you can go from writing video game code as a teenager to reshaping how Silicon Valley funds the future of medicine.