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Korea Herald
23-05-2025
- Business
- Korea Herald
Novonesis Co-Hosts Partnering Day 2025 in Singapore to Advance Biosolutions for a Sustainable Future
SINGAPORE, May 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Novonesis, a world-leading biosolutions company, co-hosted its "Unlocking Value for a Sustainable Future" Partnering Day 2025 in Singapore on May 7 together with Novo Holdings and Flagship Pioneering. The event focused on reshaping the agriculture and food industries through biosolutions and resource recycling. Leaders from food, agri-business, and waste management explored resource optimisation, while industry executives exchanged insights into scaling innovative biosolutions. Investors identified high-growth opportunities in biosolutions and circular economy models for sustainable business impact. With the global population projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, pressure on food systems and sustainability is growing. Biosolutions offer a path forward using microbes, enzymes, and other technologies. The Partnering Day 2025 provided a platform for leaders in business, capital, and innovation to advance circular, bio-based solutions. Showcasing real-world advances including waste valorisation and resource optimisation, the event highlighted how biosolutions are shaping the future of food and agriculture. The event opened with a welcome address by Rasmus Bjørnø, Deputy Head of Mission at the Royal Danish Embassy in Singapore, followed by a keynote speech from Anders Spohr, Managing Partner and Head of Planetary Health at Novo Holdings, outlining the strategic role of biosolutions in reshaping agriculture and food systems. Representatives from three hosting companies shared their insights on what roles that biosolutions and capital play along the way to foster a more sustainable future. Lensey Chen, APAC President of Novonesis, Ignacio Martinez, General Partner of Flagship Pioneering, together with esteemed speakers from industry, NGOs as well as academia explored topics such as resource efficiency, the bioeconomy, and the importance of partnerships in accelerating the bio-revolution. Case studies highlighted how companies are using biosolutions to unlock new value streams and drive sustainable growth. With the planet's resources under growing strain, biosolutions are enabling transformation not just in fields and factories, but across entire value chains. In fields, factories, and homes, they are transforming production by unlocking sustainable protein sources and helping farmers increase efficiency while reducing the use of chemicals, fossil resources, energy, and water. Biosolutions also turn waste into high-value products, enabling economic growth in a sustainable way. Copenhagen Economics Report found that if we made more use of just some biosolutions, we could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by up to 4.3 billion tonnes. That's 8% of total global emissions. For every job created in biotech in general, additional 2 jobs are created across the value chain. Lensey Chen, APAC President of Novonesis, commented: "We know every customer's needs are unique, our portfolio of biosolutions is the market's broadest, and can be used to expand operations through greater flexibility. This is why partnership is key, I am happy to extend an invitation on behalf of Novonesis as a potential partner, we are here to help take our collaboration to a new level of performance by working together with you." Deepa Hingorani, Partner and Head of Planetary Health Asia, Novo Holdings added: "The bioeconomy holds exponential potential, and we see partnerships as essential to unlocking it. We hope today marks the beginning of deeper cross-sector collaboration and a shared commitment to shaping a more sustainable future together." Headquartered in Copenhagen, Novonesis was established in 2024 through the merger of Novozymes and Chr. Hansen—two pioneers in Danish biotechnology. With a portfolio spanning enzymes, microbes, and fermentation-based technologies, the company plays a pivotal role in advancing biosolutions across food, health, agriculture, and sustainability. Partnering Day 2025 reflects Novonesis' ongoing commitment to driving greater impact through innovation, collaboration, and science-based solutions. About Novonesis Novonesis is a global company leading the era of biosolutions. By leveraging the power of microbiology with science, we transform the way the world produces, consumes, and lives. In more than 30 industries, our biosolutions are already creating value for millions of consumers and benefitting the planet. Our 10,000 people worldwide work closely with our partners and customers to transform business with biology. Learn more at About Novo Holdings Novo Holdings is a holding and investment company responsible for managing the assets and wealth of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The purpose of Novo Holdings is to improve people's health and the sustainability of society and the planet by generating attractive long-term returns on the assets of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Wholly owned by the Foundation, Novo Holdings is the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk A/S and Novonesis A/S (formerly Novozymes A/S) and manages an investment portfolio with a long-term return perspective. In addition to managing a broad portfolio of equities, bonds, real estate, infrastructure, and private equity assets, Novo Holdings is a world-leading life sciences investor. Through its Seed, Venture, Growth, Asia, Planetary Health, and Principal Investments teams, Novo Holdings invests in life sciences companies at all stages of development. As of year-end 2024, Novo Holdings had total assets of EUR 142 billion.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Novonesis Co-Hosts Partnering Day 2025 in Singapore to Advance Biosolutions for a Sustainable Future
SINGAPORE, May 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Novonesis, a world-leading biosolutions company, co-hosted its "Unlocking Value for a Sustainable Future" Partnering Day 2025 in Singapore on May 7 together with Novo Holdings and Flagship Pioneering. The event focused on reshaping the agriculture and food industries through biosolutions and resource recycling. Leaders from food, agri-business, and waste management explored resource optimisation, while industry executives exchanged insights into scaling innovative biosolutions. Investors identified high-growth opportunities in biosolutions and circular economy models for sustainable business impact. With the global population projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, pressure on food systems and sustainability is growing. Biosolutions offer a path forward using microbes, enzymes, and other technologies. The Partnering Day 2025 provided a platform for leaders in business, capital, and innovation to advance circular, bio-based solutions. Showcasing real-world advances including waste valorisation and resource optimisation, the event highlighted how biosolutions are shaping the future of food and agriculture. The event opened with a welcome address by Rasmus Bjørnø, Deputy Head of Mission at the Royal Danish Embassy in Singapore, followed by a keynote speech from Anders Spohr, Managing Partner and Head of Planetary Health at Novo Holdings, outlining the strategic role of biosolutions in reshaping agriculture and food systems. Representatives from three hosting companies shared their insights on what roles that biosolutions and capital play along the way to foster a more sustainable future. Lensey Chen, APAC President of Novonesis, Ignacio Martinez, General Partner of Flagship Pioneering, together with esteemed speakers from industry, NGOs as well as academia explored topics such as resource efficiency, the bioeconomy, and the importance of partnerships in accelerating the bio-revolution. Case studies highlighted how companies are using biosolutions to unlock new value streams and drive sustainable growth. With the planet's resources under growing strain, biosolutions are enabling transformation not just in fields and factories, but across entire value chains. In fields, factories, and homes, they are transforming production by unlocking sustainable protein sources and helping farmers increase efficiency while reducing the use of chemicals, fossil resources, energy, and water. Biosolutions also turn waste into high-value products, enabling economic growth in a sustainable way. Copenhagen Economics Report found that if we made more use of just some biosolutions, we could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by up to 4.3 billion tonnes. That's 8% of total global emissions. For every job created in biotech in general, additional 2 jobs are created across the value chain. Lensey Chen, APAC President of Novonesis, commented: "We know every customer's needs are unique, our portfolio of biosolutions is the market's broadest, and can be used to expand operations through greater flexibility. This is why partnership is key, I am happy to extend an invitation on behalf of Novonesis as a potential partner, we are here to help take our collaboration to a new level of performance by working together with you." Deepa Hingorani, Partner and Head of Planetary Health Asia, Novo Holdings added: "The bioeconomy holds exponential potential, and we see partnerships as essential to unlocking it. We hope today marks the beginning of deeper cross-sector collaboration and a shared commitment to shaping a more sustainable future together." Headquartered in Copenhagen, Novonesis was established in 2024 through the merger of Novozymes and Chr. Hansen—two pioneers in Danish biotechnology. With a portfolio spanning enzymes, microbes, and fermentation-based technologies, the company plays a pivotal role in advancing biosolutions across food, health, agriculture, and sustainability. Partnering Day 2025 reflects Novonesis' ongoing commitment to driving greater impact through innovation, collaboration, and science-based solutions. About Novonesis Novonesis is a global company leading the era of biosolutions. By leveraging the power of microbiology with science, we transform the way the world produces, consumes, and lives. In more than 30 industries, our biosolutions are already creating value for millions of consumers and benefitting the planet. Our 10,000 people worldwide work closely with our partners and customers to transform business with biology. Learn more at About Novo Holdings Novo Holdings is a holding and investment company responsible for managing the assets and wealth of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The purpose of Novo Holdings is to improve people's health and the sustainability of society and the planet by generating attractive long-term returns on the assets of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Wholly owned by the Foundation, Novo Holdings is the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk A/S and Novonesis A/S (formerly Novozymes A/S) and manages an investment portfolio with a long-term return perspective. In addition to managing a broad portfolio of equities, bonds, real estate, infrastructure, and private equity assets, Novo Holdings is a world-leading life sciences investor. Through its Seed, Venture, Growth, Asia, Planetary Health, and Principal Investments teams, Novo Holdings invests in life sciences companies at all stages of development. As of year-end 2024, Novo Holdings had total assets of EUR 142 billion. 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Forbes
24-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
A Discovery Every Day: What Does Superintelligence Actually Look Like?
As we start heading toward a certain critical mass with artificial intelligence, this word keeps coming up – superintelligence. It's easy to throw the word around, and talk about that point when AI becomes smarter than humans, but what does superintelligence actually look like? To find out, I asked a panel of builders and physicists, and we talked about what types of efforts are happening now to support superintelligent results. These are some of the main themes. One of the biggest ideas in today's tech world is the idea of reinventing the scientific process itself. Geoffrey von Maltzahn is part of the team at Flagship Pioneering, where a project called Lila Sciences is looking to create 'autonomous science systems' that will, as he says, allow AI to take over 'every step of the wheel' when it comes to scientific discovery. '(It's) the ability to call upon tools, to model the way that the world works, to propose a brilliant hypothesis, to autonomously design a decisive experiment, (and) to test that hypothesis in the real world,' he clarified. Geoffrey von Maltzahn, CEO, Lila John Werner Making the analogy from vibe coding to outsourcing, von Maltzahn talked about how even though human level intelligence supports everything, it's possible to bring together autonomous results for aspects like material science, chemistry, and life sciences. That, he suggested, will really have a positive effect, partly because of inherent human limitations in scientific inquiry. 'Neither our bodies, nor our brains, are really optimally suited for science,' he said, 'particularly learning about how the world works from the atoms make the same case for math. You know, try as our brains have … in the reality in life science, in chemistry, materials and more, our brains really struggle to understand what is going on … but machines are much better at matching those patterns … the implications for every single technology domain that we're familiar with are really, really amazing.' Panel on Superintelligence John Werner Here's another major part of what superintelligence is likely to be able to do: it will excel at math, even in more intuitive, abstract ways. Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom, a quantitative superintelligence moonshot company, talked about how pattern matching is not reasoning, and how traditional models don't excel in showing their work. 'Large language models, despite all the amazing post training breakthroughs, are still pretty bad at doing proofs,' she said. 'They will give you a numerical answer. In fact, they can do it really well on the American Invitational math examination. Frontier large language models achieve a 96% score. However, when you ask (the model) to show its proof, the score drops to 5%, so why is different? It's because of the way we train them … what we want to build at Axiom is to use programming language to train the machine to be able to speak the language of formal proof.' This, she says, will enable humans to trust the result of these engines, and make the world 'math-rich'. Another aspect of this is the setup. Riccardo Sabbatini is a numerical modeling specialist who works on drug discovery and more. Setting the stage for full robotic automation, he talked about a system where millions of molecular experiments can happen with no human involvement whatsoever. 'I see a transition moment between now and super intelligence,' he said, calling the interim a time of 'vibe intelligence.' 'When you look at a coder today,' he said, 'instead of going and searching in Stack Overflow every three seconds, and having to copy and paste from (one's) own old code, you have open on the right side of your screen, an LLM: this is going to do boiler plating for you. It's going to like 80% of the boring coding that has been done in the past.' You can watch the video for some additional scientific assessment of things like probabilistic database design, Gaussian curves, and the evolution of AI math. One anecdote from the panel is where Sabbatini talked about image creation models always displaying watches with the same time setting – 10 minutes after 10 o'clock. It's persistent, he said, based on the training set that the LLM gets off of the Internet. 'None of (the generated watches) will show 2:25pm,' he said of an experiment where a user asks for an image of a watch set at this time in the afternoon. 'They will always show 10:10; the reason is that the majority, if not the complete, set, of pictures of watches in the entire world, points at 10:10.' It's an advertising thing, he suggested, based on how people like to see watch faces. 'So any watch in the world has to be at 10:10, stuck there,' he said. 'You can have a pretty analog watch. You can have a classic analog watch - but you can't have a '2:25' analog watch. It is bizarre, if you think about it, such a simple concept learning thing.' That illustrates some of AI's current blind spots that the panel suggested might be solved with superintelligence, eventually. But what von Maltzahn said about the pace of scientific discovery was extremely interesting. With these new tools, he reasoned, we'll be able to speed up science as a human in endeavor: where a ground truth used to take about a year to develop, AI will free us of those time constraints. What if you could have a breakthrough scientific discovery every day? And do it easily? 'The human brain understands a really, really small fraction of how the world works,' von Maltzahn explained. 'And in fact, to understand it, we've been dividing it into sub, sub, sub specialties. So I believe something like imagination and taste for novelty is going to hang around as a human contribution for a while.' 'I believe science is going to get way more fun,' von Maltzahn said. 'If you just take the Edisonian 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, you know, we can put 99% perspiration into a new paradigm … (improving) the quality of life for scientists, and likely the quantity of output.' Panel on Superintelligence John Werner Talking about being able to source rare earth metals in new ways, and perfect a new system of chemistry that's going to change our supply chains and our scientific methods, he suggested that the 'GDP of civilization' is resting on a brand new paradigm. We've had any number of technological revolutions in the past, he argued, but this is the first intelligence revolution. What's going to happen? One such outcome, posited by von Maltzahn as he discussed changes, is that none of our human intellectual contributions to projects will be safe, if AI can do it better. 'None of us really knows in what order the sea level of intelligence will rise and subsume imagination or … logical derivation,' he said. 'But there's probably a rough boundary where, if searching for information within the repository of what is known, then that is underwater now, or will be underwater virtually immediately.' That brings me back to the eternal specter of job displacement, and the question of how we're going to re-order society around these technologies. We seem to have a vague idea that a re-ordering is needed, but not much clarity on what people are going to be doing for jobs in a business world that's dominated by capable AI. In any case, we can anticipate the likelihood of this new era of science, and everything that is going to bring us. This is something every young person should be thinking about as they study and prepare for a career – and something every public planner (or innovator, or entrepreneur) should be thinking about as they try to understand where we're going next.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Etiome, a new Flagship startup, looks to catch disease before it strikes
This story was originally published on BioPharma Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily BioPharma Dive newsletter. Flagship Pioneering unveiled its latest biotechnology startup on Thursday, a company aiming to map the progression of diseases and tailor medicines to stages of a patient's journey. Called Etiome, the biotech wants to take on a slew of medical conditions, from Parkinson's disease and rheumatoid arthritis to the common liver condition known as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. It's starting up with $50 million from Flagship, the biotech company creator that founded Moderna. Etiome's name is a portmanteau of etiology — a disease's origin — and the 'omics' sciences that study types of biological molecules. The company was born out of an initiative within Flagship to develop preventive medicines. It's using a type of AI technology and a trove of health data to closely analyze the various biological changes that occur as certain diseases take hold. It hopes to use this information to pinpoint markers of different disease 'stages,' better understand which people are more likely to progress, and intervene with a medicine before they do. Without that detailed data, it can be hard for drugmakers to figure out why some medicines don't work on certain people, and why disease moves faster in some but not others. Having it should 'lead to a dramatic increase in probability of success of the drugs that we push forward," said Etiome president and Flagship origination partner Scott Lipnick. In Parkinson's, for example, Lipnick noted how there may be different molecular processes driving a person's struggle to walk or control their brain, necessitating different therapeutic interventions. In metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, or MASH, certain changes might underlie the progrssion from a fatty liver to inflammation and eventually cirrhosis. If Etiome can understand those changes and target them at the right time, 'we know it's not too late,' Lipnick said. 'That's when you actually need to make a difference.' Like many other Flagship startups, Etiome is launching with lofty ambitions. The company aims to develop medicines that can slow, stop or even reverse a variety of conditions, though it hasn't yet revealed specific drug programs or when human testing might begin. A tough funding climate has made it difficult for startups to pursue a journey like that, in turn heightening the importance of pharmaceutical partnerships. A Flagship initiative focused on fostering alliances for its portfolio companies has yielded several deals over the last year or so, and Lipnick said such collaborations are 'key.' 'We are not going to do everything alone,' he said.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Valo Health Appoints Accomplished Executive Peggy Dalicandro as Vice President, Head of Human Resources
LEXINGTON, Mass., March 20, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Valo Health, Inc. ("Valo"), a biotechnology company focused on transforming the drug discovery and development process using human-centric data and artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the appointment of Peggy Dalicandro as Vice President, Head of Human Resources. In this newly created role, Dalicandro will shape Valo's human capital strategy, lead talent acquisition, and support the scaling of the company. "The success of Valo depends on collaborative, talented, and passionate people who connect the seams of science, technology, medicine, and human health. We are excited to welcome Peggy to Valo, and we look forward to benefitting from her wealth of experience building and expanding high-performing teams," said Brian Alexander, CEO of Valo Health and CEO-Partner, Flagship Pioneering. "As part of our leadership team, Peggy will guide Valo's continued investment in our people and culture, helping us realize the full potential of our human-centric approach to AI-enabled drug discovery and development." At Valo, Dalicandro is responsible for leading the global human resources (HR) function and significantly expanding the company's workforce. She brings more than 20 years of highly relevant HR experience, with a focus on supporting, growing, and scaling businesses across innovative industries and geographies. "Valo has a tremendous opportunity to strengthen its capabilities to discover and develop better medicines at greater speed and scale," said Dalicandro. "I look forward to maximizing the organization's potential by developing employee-centered programs across the company as it grows." Prior to joining Valo, Dalicandro led the talent strategy across five venture origination business units at Flagship Pioneering. Her experience includes senior HR roles at Oxford Biomedica Solutions, where she was responsible for the HR function, and Alexion, the rare disease subsidiary of Astra Zeneca, where she built and led the People and Culture team for the US and Ireland. Dalicandro also served as the HR lead for Amazon's Alexa Artificial Intelligence team, where she drove the talent strategy for the Science and Engineering group. About Valo Health Valo Health, Inc. is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to better learn from the patient experience to discover and develop better medicines at greater speed and scale. The company's Opal Computational Platform™ is a human-centric, AI-driven drug development engine that uses AI to identify and validate novel drug targets, using real-world data and human models to rapidly discover and develop small molecule therapies against those targets with more predictable safety and efficacy. Founded by Flagship Pioneering and headquartered in Lexington, Mass., Valo also has offices in New York, N.Y. and Tel Aviv, Israel. To learn more, visit View source version on Contacts SmithSolveCorey Carmichael(862) Sign in to access your portfolio
