Only the Robust Survive (with Rob Howes)

“Most assays don’t fail because they’re wrong… they fail because they’re fragile.”

This time, Markus Gershater and Phil Kay sat down with Rob Howes (Head of Biology & DMPK at Charles River) to unpack what REALLY happens when you scale biology - and why most teams underestimate how quickly things fall apart.

Rob’s been working with multi-dimensional experimentation since the early 2000s (back when most of us were still painfully tweaking one variable at a time). And the contrast is pretty stark:

Some standout lines:

🔹 “We used to optimise for the highest signal. Now we optimise for something that won’t break.”

🔹 “If your data isn’t high quality, your AI model won’t be either. Garbage in, just faster garbage out.”

🔹 “Why run every experiment, if you can predict most of them?”