Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Artis BioSolutions
Ahead of the Gene Editing and RNA Technologies (GEAR) Conference, September 15–17, 2026, in Boston, we spoke with Dr. Kate E. Broderick, PhD, Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer at Artis BioSolutions, about what it takes to get new medicines to patients faster.
COVID reset a lot of expectations about speed. How did it change your sense of what's possible?
Historically, if you worked in drug development, you'd be fortunate to see a single product move all the way through to approval during your entire career. Then COVID struck, and we watched the field compress a decade of development work into a matter of months. That wasn't luck. It was decades of groundwork in nucleic acid science and manufacturing meeting a moment when everyone finally moved in the same direction. The lasting lesson is that the timelines we treated as fixed were never actually fixed. They reflected how we chose to work, and that means we can choose differently.
Which technologies are doing the most to shorten timelines right now?
Computational tools are the clearest example. Something like AlphaFold gives us a credible picture of protein structure in a fraction of the time it used to take, and that improvement ripples through everything downstream. When you pair that kind of modeling with modern screening, you can reach a confident stage gate decision far earlier and spend your time and resources on the candidates most likely to help people. I genuinely believe these tools can cut in half timelines that once ran ten to twenty years. And not by cutting corners, but by removing the guesswork that used to eat away at the calendar.
Where does the real bottleneck sit now?
Often the science is ready before the system around it is. We now have computer models and organoid systems that can tell us a great deal about safety and efficacy, in some cases more than a traditional animal model can. The open question is how quickly regulators grow comfortable accepting these newer models in place of the status quo. That's a solvable problem, and the conversations with regulators are already moving in the right direction. I'm optimistic, because every one of these steps is another entry point where a next-generation approach can improve the medicines that improve people's lives.
You often bring manufacturing into the conversation about speed. Why?
Because a discovery you can't make at scale and quality isn't yet a medicine. One reason the COVID vaccines arrived when they did is that companies had already worked out the manufacturing details in advance. You must be prepared before you need to be. That's why building and keeping capacity close to home matters, and why it must keep running even when there's no crisis. Newer approaches help here too. Being able to produce synthetic DNA on demand, for instance, removes a supply constraint right at the start of the process, so the first step no longer sets the pace for everything that follows.
What are you most optimistic about?
That we can carry the urgency of the pandemic into ordinary times. We proved what this field can do when the tools, the science, and the will all point the same way. The patients desperately waiting on the next therapy don't have ten years to spare, and for the first time we have a real set of technologies that can give some of that time back to them. Surely that's the work worth doing.
Learn more and register for the premier GEAR conference.
Kate E. Broderick
Dr. Kate E. Broderick, PhD., is Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer at Artis BioSolutions, where she leads scientific strategy and innovation across the company's integrated advanced therapy platform.
Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Artis BioSolutions
