Precision Medicine in Pharma: Sanofi’s Frank Nestle

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Artificial intelligence has the potential to scale drug discovery like never before. Find out how one pharma company uses AI on today's episode.

**Frank Nestle** (0:12)
I'm Frank Nestle from Sanofi, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:17)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:35)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI for six years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:01)
Today, Shervin and I are talking with Frank Nestle, Global Head of Research and Chief Scientific Officer at Sanofi.
Frank, thanks for talking to us. Welcome.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:09)
It's really nice to meet you, Dr. Nestle.

**Frank Nestle** (1:12)
Hi, Shervin, nice meeting you too.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:15)
Frank, maybe start with your current role at Sanofi. What are you doing?

**Frank Nestle** (1:19)
I'm the Global Head of Research and CSO at Sanofi.
Sanofi is really a company making medicines available across the world, across 100 countries with approximately 100,000 employees, providing medicines and vaccines literally to millions of people. We're currently going through a very exciting transformation. We've been originally in primary care and now transitioning into specialty care, providing medicines in immunology, oncology, rare disease, including rare hematology disease, neurology as well as vaccines. And my role as global head of research is to really discover and then translate the next generation of breakthrough medicines to patients who are really waiting. I can tell you that.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:02)
Tell us a bit about your background, Frank. How you got started in your career and how you ended up here.

**Frank Nestle** (2:08)
I'm a clinician and a scientist. I trained originally in dermatology and clinical immunology, oligology, but I was always driven by the quest to make a difference to patients.
And I did that by trying to understand disease mechanisms and then translating those mechanistic insights into therapeutics. Hopefully, and ideally, precisely tailored to the needs of an individual patient or a patient population. Now it's called precision medicine, but that's what always drove me. And in terms of the science, I tried to manage to get to those disease mechanisms. One is the science of the immune system.
And I'm happy to say with maybe all your listeners now that during the pandemic, we all became immunologists. So there's a lot of know-how out there about what is the difference between an antibody, a T cell and a B cell.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:00)
I'm not sure there's a lot of know-how. There's a lot of experts.

**Frank Nestle** (3:04)
So lots of experts. That makes actually doing the science, I do even more fun because you can totally dominate any dinner conversation. The other topic I could easily talk about for quite a while is dermatology, which is always a nice topic crossed in our rounds.
But it's incredibly fascinating to think about the immune system. It's essentially a collection of mobile cells circulating through our body. And they move back and forth between tissues where cancer happens or the immune disease happens and the blood.
And they're really accessible via a simple blood draw. And it's quite exciting to understand how this connected system, I strong believe is all biology is connected, is playing out in cancer, for example, to protect us from cancer. And we have huge successes in checkpoint immunotherapy of cancer. But also if it gets out of control, if it overreacts in terms of autoimmunity. And the fundamental hard wiring for the immune system is really what we apply and exploit in vaccines. Our immune system has evolved to fight pathogens.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:10)
Tell us how the new world versus old world of immunology is being transformed by technology, possibly by better analytics, better AI.

**Frank Nestle** (4:23)
Yeah, so there's actually a great story how the great conversions of life sciences with data sciences and engineering has played out to increase our knowledge about the immune system.
And it all converges on the topic of single cell immunology.
We can now assess and analyze the immune system of a patient with just a few thousand cells. And we do this by applying single cell immunology technologies where we can study 2000 genes per cell. So think about the magnitude of gene modifications we can study if we take 100,000 cells and across these 100,000 cells, we study 2000 genes per cell. And this has been possible because of progress in engineering, microfluidics. It has been possible because of AI. For example, at Sanofi, at our institute, we are writing code, we're writing AI algorithm to then essentially analyze those data and to rediscover cell fates. And we annotate then if a cell is a B cell or a T cell or some new immune cell we never ever heard about.