BioRender CEO on Anthropic Deal, AI for Complex Imagery

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2:03Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevec on Bloomberg Radio. Garbage in, garbage out. What could you be talking about, Mr. Stenevek? Well, it's like, you know, computer science term from back in the day, but we talk about it a lot with AI. Yeah, like if data that goes into something is flawed, the data that comes out is flawed. It's only as good as the data that goes in.

2:43Yeah, we do talk about this in the context of artificial intelligence, hallucinations. It's like when an LLM gives you an answer that you know is totally off base or gives you a picture or image that's way off the mark as well. Sorry. I'm just thinking my friend like actually asked for an invitation to he wanted to create an invitation for a Halloween party. And he was like, he wanted the image generator to be to really mess it up. And oh, it totally. He's like, no, make it more messed up. Mess it up even more. Did it? Oh, yeah, it did. Yeah. Sometimes it does what it tells you to do. Now it worked.

3:15Now I'm curious. TBD. I'll find it. I bet Shizayoki thinks about this stuff a lot. Not the Halloween part of this, but, you know, the hallucination stuff. She's the founder and CEO of BioRender. It's a company that creates software to generate scientific images and illustrations. It's important that those are accurate. She was formerly the lead medical illustrator for National Geographic. She did that for a decade. She joins us from Toronto. She says, welcome to the program. I'm by a very interesting company. We don't talk about this part of AI a lot. You've got this recent partnership with Anthropic, the maker of the Claude LLM.

3:48You have this incredible background, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, a dual BFA in fine art and pre-med from Queens University. Why is scientific imaging important in the context of AI? Yeah, first, thank you for having me, Carol and Tim. And, you know, for science in particular, accuracy is really paramount. And so we're really excited to partner with companies like Anthropic because this is just actually one big step in making AI safer and more reliable for science. You said that your friend made some Halloween invites or garbage in, garbage out. And that truly is the case right now. It really doesn't do scientists work justice how bad the state of bio images are today.

4:36And actually, Dario, Anthropic CEO, said that AI could compress the next 50 to 100 years of biological progress into just 5 to 10, which means that the bottleneck really shifts from computation to human comprehension. You're talking about Dario Amadei. On 60 Minutes. He was on 60 Minutes last night. Yeah. I've interviewed him before in March in San Francisco. Do you believe him? Do you agree with him? I do. I do. And I agree with him in that we know that AI is great at helping with discoveries in written form. And I think he'll agree that we're still not quite there with making visuals, particularly in science, where it matters so much to be accurate.

5:22We've seen horrific diagrams of, you know, legs with extra bones or maybe less obvious mistakes. But, you know, more dangerous ones are like protein folding the wrong way. It can actually mean the difference between a functioning cell and Alzheimer's disease or even like one arrow moving in the wrong direction and about metabolic pathway could mean that, you know, we're feeding the tumor instead of starving it. And for BioRender, you know, it turns out that this is exactly what AI needed. We've been spending the last eight, nine years building the world's largest library of expert, expert vetted biovisuals.

5:58visuals. And we're very proud to be sort of the trusted source now, the foundational layer for going forward, you know, all the frontier models where accuracy is really non-negotiable in science. Well, tell us a little bit about your company in particular, what you're doing and this idea of, again, these are some of these things I feel like we just take for granted, images within science, right, or medicine. But tell us about the need to have these images makes, you know, and are they constantly being updated? Like, give us an idea of what you guys are doing and what we need to understand about medical imaging, not MRIs, but just understanding everything and anything that's in the body.

6:39Yeah. And that's a great point. You know, MRIs can take us to a certain point, but at the end of the day, the body's very complex. Surgical fields are very bloody. Photos don't cut it. And so we have to rely on a little bit more of, I guess, artistically licensed rendered graphics. And BioRender is a software that helps scientists create beautiful biological diagrams really quickly. You can think of us as sort of the Canva or Figma for biology, for those folks that aren't familiar with the scientific graphics world. So you can imagine a scientist coming in, they drag and drop like an anatomically correct brain, for example, onto the canvas.

7:15You can zoom in and then look at the details of a brain cell interacting with a tumor cell. And then you can zoom in even closer and show the biochemical reactions happening within the brain cell. But you can see how quickly it's getting very technical and complex. And before bio-renders scientists were actually using, and they still do, believe it or not, primarily PowerPoint of all tools. So they spend days, sometimes weeks, just trying to create one image with the circles and squares and the lines and arrow shapes. And so we thought, there's got to be a better way. So my co-founders and I, Ryan, Katya, and I launched FireUnder about eight years ago, hoping to solve this communication gap for scientists.

7:57Who are your customers? And how do you guys make money? Sorry, we do make money. Yeah, yeah, we've been lucky to be profitable pretty early, actually, but it's very fortunate that the scientific community saw the need and just uptook it. And our customers are primarily researchers, including leaders, actually. They're in there making PowerPoint diagrams, hopefully not much longer if these biorender, in pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, academic institutions, and even the publishing world. Yeah, I'm curious about copyright with this. There's an article in Chemistry World from just about a year ago about how thousands of published studies could contain images with incorrect copyright license licenses.

8:43And they mentioned some bio render images created by bio render. Have you guys figured out the copyright issues in terms of what you're looking at and then what you're producing? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, at the end of the day, we have to sort of shift the narrative to war away from sort of the copyright or it's sort of the antiquated era of, you know, kind of who published it first. We're really trying. Our mission is to empower the world to communicate science and understand it faster through visuals. And so what's happening actually now in our library is scientists, we have about 4 million plus users on our platform.

9:25They've been knocking down our doors wanting to share their diagrams in our community library. They say they don't care if scientists, you know, rip it apart and use it. They just feel so compelled to change the narrative and change the status quo of how science is communicated today that they are willing to share the work that they do in BioRender back into the community. So it's almost looking more like instead of the Canva or Figma, more of the GitHub or even Wikipedia, because they share their work back into our library. And either we spot errors or the community is quick to jump on those errors.

10:01We update those and then get back, upload into the repository. So we're kind of shifting the focus away from, you know, who said it first to let's be open and share our work and really further and accelerate science. Yeah, super interesting. Hopefully we can come back and continue this in the future. Shiz Aoki, founder and CEO of BioRender, joining us from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. What if data didn't sit still? What if intelligence moved with us? not buried in reports, but activated in real time, where lives are being shaped, where decisions are being made. It all starts with a question. Where is the potential?

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