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David de Gruijl
About
I'm gonna try not to butcher your name, by the way.
Best quotes
My name is Dave David. I'm originally from the Netherlands. I'm currently founding a company in the space of the gut microbiome and how the gut microbiome influences how we respond to drugs and foods that we ingest.
Essentially, like modeling the gut microbiome is incredibly hard. So just building like kind of uh large AI models in the way that we do with text doesn't result in great u great models.
So our first product is actually just predicting mechanisms uh of like what the gut microbiome does and how it influences like the way we break down compounds.
If you want to do it in like a human realistic way, you want to test that on on animals.
FAQ
What does Anto do?
Anto is a YC F25 company focused on pharmacology and gastroenterology. The company uses trained foundation models to predict mechanisms of the gut microbiome and how it influences how humans break down drugs and food.
What is Anto's first product and business model?
Anto's first product acts as a tech-enabled service that helps companies figure out whether the microbiome was involved in unexpected clinical trial results. Their initial business model involves forward-deployed software to help deploy these models into clinical trials.
Why is modeling the gut microbiome with AI difficult?
Building large AI models for microbiome data is hard because the data contains a lot of noise and spelling mistakes. Anto solves this by developing pre-processing algorithms that filter out noisy data and spelling mistakes before feeding clean data into their language models.
How do gut microbes affect drug responses like cancer treatments?
Microbes in the gut can change the immune system, leading to competition between the microbes and drugs that target the immune system. Additionally, microbes can produce molecules that bind to the exact same protein targets as drugs, preventing the drugs from binding.
Where can people learn more about David de Gruijl and Anto?
People can find the company online at www.anto.bio, follow them on LinkedIn, and connect with David de Gruijl personally on Twitter.
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