Robert Gentleman on His Goals for Drug Discovery at 23andMe - Bio-IT World

"Robert Gentleman’s goal is to 'bring bioinformatics and computational drug discovery to complement the really strong genetics' already at 23andMe. Gentleman recently left Genentech along with his boss Richard Scheller to start 23andMe’s new therapeutics group. Scheller joined 23andMe in mid-March and serves as chief science officer and head of therapeutics at the direct-to-consumer genomics company; Gentleman came on board in early April as vice president of computational biology. With only weeks behind him thus far, Gentleman expects to spend his first six months building his team and exploring what drug discovery will look like at Silicon Valley’s personal genomics trailblazer. He spoke with Bio-IT World senior writer Aaron Krol about open science at a for-profit venture, the challenges of drug discovery, and what’s left to find via SNP chips. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity ..."