Hal Barron feels like he has been training his whole life to run R&D at GlaxoSmithKline, even if he didn’t know it at the time. His broad set of experiences — including an undergraduate degree in physics, a medical degree in cardiology, a professorship in epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as time spent steering R&D at Genentech and Roche and helping to build the Google-backed biotech Calico from scratch — will come in handy as he tackles the challenges of drug discovery and development at scale, he told Asher Mullard. After over a year on the job, he talks about doubling down on genetically validated targets, functional genomics, machine learning, immunology and more.