I have long been fascinated by the complexity of the human condition and how technology may reveal the secrets of that complexity. We have tens of thousands of molecules within any human cell but an understanding of only a fraction of these essential factors; within the unknown ‘deep end’ of human biology is where the answers lie. This passion for biological exploration led me to pursue training in both medicine and basic science as an M.D. and PhD. It was after graduating that my real education began, through over a decade in clinical and scientific training programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad Institute. I was fortunate to be in Boston at the dawn of the human genomics revolution and witnessed in real time how technology was transforming discovery; those moments gave birth to the vision that would become Sapient.
While genomics provides a human ‘blueprint’, it enables limited insight into the dynamic wiring that governs health and disease – everything we eat, drink, smell, smoke, the microbes that co-inhabit our environment, the diet and medications that we ingest, and how our internal cellular systems respond to each of these stimuli. Capturing this dynamic information stream is the key in my mind to influencing the human condition – advancing disease diagnosis at its earliest stages, accelerating drug development, and enhancing treatments for each and every patient. My passion to understand these dynamic processes led to the next decade of my work, developing next-generation mass spectrometry, integrative computational tools, and large-scale human datasets that would reveal those bioactive metabolites, lipids, and proteins that marked modulated human disease. This mission began in 2013 through Jain Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, where I worked with an interdisciplinary team of scientists with support from the NIH, pharmaceutical companies, and international foundations to spearhead these technologies, and culminated in 2020 with the founding of Sapient.
Not long after founding Sapient, I was introduced to Pete Batesko and over the coming months shared a collective vision for Sapient and its potential impact if we built it with a bias for the long-term. In the first half of 2021, we accepted a growth capital investment from Care Equity and I left my role at UCSD, along with a number of scientists from my group, to realize the promise of Sapient’s large-scale bioanalytical technologies and data. We have had the pleasure of working with now dozens of pharmaceutical, emerging biotech, and foundational organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which presented us with the challenge of leveraging our technologies to develop diagnostic tests across tens of thousands of mothers and children in resource-limited regions of the world.
In just several short years at Sapient, we’ve established a state-of-the-art $40M high-capacity biomarker discovery lab and a team composed of industry-leading interdisciplinary scientists in the fields of analytical chemistry, computational biology, and software engineering. The resulting scale and throughput advantages we’ve developed allow us to uniquely support our client’s drug discovery efforts and continue on our journey to realize Sapient’s and my personal mission – to transform medicine.
Mo Jain is not an investor with Care Equity and is not being compensated for sharing his opinion about Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team. Care Equity has invested in a company led by Mo Jain, which creates a conflict of interest. Mo Jain’s opinion may not be representative of any other person’s experience with Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team.