Aviv Regev

Large pharmaceutical firms typically turn to clinician scientists to head up their R&D and early development operations. When Roche hired Aviv Regev last year to lead Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED), the company instead opted for a computational and systems biologist. Regev was one of the most prolific researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT prior to taking on her new role, with diverse interests spanning the life sciences and their interface with technology and computation. With projects like Perturb-seq , combining single-cell RNA profiling with CRISPR-based genetic perturbations, she showed how computational approaches could be used to dissect the molecular circuitry of the cell. With The Human Cell Atlas , she set out to collaboratively and comprehensively characterize all of the cell types in the human body. Now, she brings this big picture mindset to Roche’s Genentech. Advances in human biology, massively parallel high-resolution methods, modalities, and computation and mathematics are on track to change the nature of drug discovery, she told Asher Mullard . Aviv Regev, head of Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED), discusses how advances in human biology, massively parallel high-resolution methods, and computation and mathematics could transform drug discovery.