Wishart and DrugBank among honorees at ASTechs

As he accepted the award for Researcher of the Year at the ASTech Awards, metabolomics pioneer David Wishart saluted the Métis heritage invoked by his sash-inspired tie, and noted the depth of collaboration behind the honour he was receiving. "Science is … a tapestry woven of many hands," he told a crowd of about 500 attendees at The Westin on Nov. 6. Wishart was recognized for global leadership through the Human Metabolome Project. It's a large-scale initiative to transform what had been a fragmented discipline into a full branch of science dedicated to identifying, quantifying, and characterizing all of the human body's metabolites (small molecules generated by biological activity) and making that data broadly accessible.

Wishart was also recognized as an entrepreneur with several successful biotechnology companies to his name: Tricca, which develops technologies to make metabolomic applications simple and inexpensive; MetabolomiX, which makes high-quality kits for metabolomics researchers; Metabolomics Innovations, which makes metabolomics databases available to the private sector; Molecular You, which promises deeper information from bloodwork for personalized healthcare; and DrugBank, which provides vital intelligence to the biopharmaceutical industry.

DrugBank was also among the honorees at the ASTechs, taking home the award for commercial applications in health, medical, and life sciences. Co-founder Michael Wilson, who recently left the CEO role to become chief product officer, noted that DrugBank has been cited in more than 60,000 publications. "You don't have to leave here to build something that the world relies on," he said as he accepted the award. While DrugBank contains a wealth of scientific data, it is also a repository for business-oriented information, such as mergers and acquisitions. While large language models help process vast amounts of information, it takes human curation to make sure the knowledge base is sound. "AI has made it possible to tackle problems at a scale that would have been impractical before, but it doesn't remove the need to understand those problems in depth," the team posted. "If anything, this project reinforced just how important that work is."