Modeling A Drug's Mechanism of Action
As VP of Biology at a startup funded by two West coast venture capital firms, Gordon was the product manager and product evangelist for a collaborative, cloud-based software platform being developed for modeling complex cell signaling pathways. This platform broke with the more traditional deterministic methods of modeling biological systems (using ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for example) and implemented a stochastic modeling approach underpinned by a rigorous semantic formalism that made possible a set of powerful static analyses of the modeled systems.
The user experience (UX) aspects of the platform were also carefully tuned to the specific needs of life science researchers, allowing them to both frame their questions and receive answers, in an intuitive and familiar biological paradigm. In one application, the platform was used to build a cell signaling model to generate new hypotheses and drive the strategy for a laboratory R&D program to repurpose a failed oncology drug for the treatment of autoimmune disease.