The CEO of Verge Genomics shares how she's overcome gender and age biases in biotech by showing people 'there can be a new way of doing things'

By Josée Rose, Insider

Insider published a Q&A with Verge’s CEO and co-founder, Alice Zhang, as part of their “Equity Talk” series of the online news magazine. Alice, who was recently named to Insider’s list of the 30 leaders under 40 who are transforming healthcare, gives insights on how Verge uses artificial intelligence and human data to identify potential treatments for diseases, overcoming gender and age bias, and the importance of building a “conscious culture” by making room for people to be open and vulnerable. Read a brief excerpt from the interview below and check out the full article from Insider: https://tinyurl.com/ehamn7ea.

Alice Zhang never expected to be a CEO. Yet she's at the forefront of the biotech industry as CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics, working on drugs for diseases that don't have good treatments, particularly ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.

Verge Genomics works with data derived from brains and spinal cords donated by people after they die. By generating the right clinical data, Zhang said they can feed it back into the company's AI to train and improve it.

"You can have as much data as you want and the fanciest algorithms but you're still not going to be able to predict something that actually works in humans," she said.

Beyond drugs, Zhang focuses on people and wants to show "there's a new way that people can work together that doesn't need to be ego driven, that doesn't need to be fear driven."