June 2020
CHAITI M E
A CIVILIZED WAY TO END THE WORKING WEEK -
WHEREVER YOU ARE
Friday April 24 saw o2h ventures’ inaugural ChaiTime webinar; the first one was themed ‘Early stage investing in a post COVID-19 pandemic environment.’
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global audience logged in not just from the UK, but from the rest of Europe, India, Japan and the USA and included financial advisers, entrepreneurs, scientists, academics and international executive management. Chaired by Sunil Shah, CEO o2h ventures, the panel was comprised of big players in their fields: Peyman Gifani, CEO, AI VIVO; Sanjeev Gordhan, Commercial Director, Newable; Kieran Murphy, President & CEO, GE Healthcare; Deepali Nangia, Angel investor specialising in female founders; Steve Thurlby, Wealth Management Adviser, Fairstone Group and Goncalo de Vasconcelos, CEO Rnwl, Founder Syndicate Room. Given Accenture’s prediction that ‘Every business will be a health business’, ChaiTime 1’s mission was to explore what are the winning and investable technologies of the future? We are not going back to the way things were before; what will be the new normal?
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What makes ChaiTime a bit different is that it’s very relaxed; you don’t feel obliged to take copious notes – on the contrary, it’s more like having a drink and a chat with your peers before heading home for the weekend (yes, we’re at home anyway but the point still stands…) To answer the question “When is this COVID-19 situation all going to be over?”, Sunil Shah turned to Peyman Gifani, who has been deeply involved in developing a comprehensive AI platform to understand how C-19 works; some of the platform’s output has already made the national newspapers. Gifani explained that rather than look at one specific target, they had taken a phenotypic approach and therefore looked at all the changes on all the genes. By creating a large phenotypic representation of the effect of 90,000 different drugs and compounds, some of them already approved, some in phase 2 or 3 of development, we can have a head start and go quickly to clinical setup and trial to test their efficacy against C-19 as soon as possible.
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