Welcome to UNLOCK 2026 Michelle Lee, CEO & Founder, Medra

Author: Michelle Lee, CEO & Founder, Medra Collection: UNLOCK-2026-Sessions Source: [Welcome to UNLOCK 2026](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4L7L-mdchI)

Summary

Michelle Lee, CEO and Founder of Medra, delivers the opening welcome address at the inaugural UNLOCK 2026 conference in San Francisco on April 22, 2026. Her talk establishes the conference's founding rationale: amid enormous hype around AI for drug discovery and life sciences — with government and tech leaders claiming cures for cancer within 5 to 10 years — there is widespread skepticism asking "what's actually different this time?" compared to unfulfilled deep learning promises of 10 years earlier. UNLOCK was designed explicitly to bring together practitioners who are doing the actual research and building the actual tools, rather than just announcing partnerships or sharing company news.

Lee traces the conference's origin to a dinner she hosted at JPMorgan (JPM) Healthcare Conference in January 2026, where she and Aviv (EVP of Genentech) sketched the idea of scaling this practitioner conversation from 10 people to a much larger room. Medra had exited stealth on December 11th of the prior year with a $52 million Series A. The event was originally planned as a 100–200 person invite-only gathering but expanded to an open event a month and a half before the April date due to overwhelming interest.

The final conference drew 500+ registered attendees including 125+ founders and CEOs, 36+ Directors/VPs/SVPs from pharma companies, 50+ investors and VCs, representing 300+ unique companies. The speaker roster spanned pharma companies, startups, foundation model companies, and academic labs — covering AI, biology, robotics, math, and materials discovery. Planned sessions included fireside chats with Sam Stanton (Coefficient Bio/Anthropic) and George from AstraZeneca, plus panels on AI-native biology, autonomous discovery, data engines, scaling laws for science, and what is real versus hype.