AI-powered drug discovery is outpacing regulators, with Eric Luellen

During the AAPS National Biotech Conference 2025, pharmaphorum’s Jonah Comstock sat down with Eric Luellen, the founder and CTIO of Turing Biosciences. Luellen shared the company's ambitious mission to leverage AI and machine learning to address societal inequalities by solving complex biological problems.

In the video below, Luellen explains how Turing uses publicly available data from submissions to the journal Nature, along with sophisticated machine learning algorithms, to do for functional and systems biology what Google’s AlphaFold did for protein biology. With this multi-omic “GPS system”, the company has been able to make myriad discoveries, including novel diagnostics for Parkinson’s and Autism, he says.

But the company has chosen to focus initially on paediatric rare disease, both because of the unmet need in the space and because of the FDA’s expedited approval process in rare disease. Luellen discusses the challenges his company has run into getting FDA approval while skipping the step of animal models.

In an in-depth conversation, Luellen addresses the challenge of bias in data, the delicate balance between educating and building trust on one hand and protecting proprietary systems on the other, and how the industry needs to evolve to keep up with the tremendous potential of AI.