The Exchanges

Q work in mathematics and computer science at Harvard, and then you went on to MIT to do more, more postdoc work in mathematics, and that's really kind of where your, I guess your career path was, like, derailed, in a good way, um, because you did not Go in the direction of mathematics and computer science. What, tell me what happened? What started the idea that would eventually become Immuni?

A So about five years before then, I, um, for my second PhD, I wanted to have some, uh, you know, additional income. So I worked in a few startup companies, uh, as a data scientist, uh, and developed some algorithms in different disciplines and, uh, fields. It was not in biology. So e-commerce, ad tech, different types of web applications. And it was mainly to, uh, supplement the income. Uh, working as an academic, especially in Israel, it's a challenge. A few years later for my postdoc, um, my co-founder and CTO at the time we, we met his friends. Uh, he told me about his grandfather. Uh, at the time he had cancer, he was getting a combination of immunotherapies. And it was working for him, so the cancer was regressing, but he couldn't stand the side effects, the adverse events, so he stopped taking the medication. So eventually, a couple of years later, the grandfather died. At the time, I was very, very interested to understand if you could use data science and mathematics to better find the right therapy for the patient. So this was the starting point for me, Whether you can use some of the knowledge and background that I have to, uh, maybe do something that can impact patients.

AI assessment note: “So this was the starting point for me, Whether you can use some of the knowledge”

Q So what does mapping the human immune system mean?

A Right, so the different cells in our body, we have trillions and trillions of cells, they're different. You have cells within your immune system, within the different organs, and what is important is first to understand the makeup of our cells, but also the way that they interact with one another. So let's say somebody is being exposed to a virus or a drug. It's not going to be one cell. It's going to be many cells being impacted by this. How do you measure on a system level that the way that cells interact with one another? So this is the type of challenge that I don't think we were able to cope with five or 10 years ago, but I think the increase of technologies, for example, single cell technologies allow us to measure cells. Individually. So we can map every single cell separately. Every cell is giving you the ability to look at 20,000 different genes, and then you can look at hundreds of different proteins. You can look at many, many different characteristics and variables. So for example, we are going to generate one terabyte of information from every sample that we take from a patient. So it's a massive amount of data that we generate, and then we are trying to make sense of this data. But the reason why I called it Google Maps is because we also want to help people get from where they are today. Sometimes it's a, it's a state or a city of disease, and they want to go to …

AI assessment note: “first to understand the makeup of our cells, but also the way that they interact”

Q What was the opportunity you saw that, that you could contribute to in developing technology that could really transform medicine?

A Yeah, so it's a deep question. Immunotherapies, like the name, are drugs that are targeting our immune system. Our immune system is an incredibly complex system that It's essentially governing our health, the way that we respond to therapeutics, the way that we cope with different bacteria and viruses. Of course, the entire world now understands after the few years that we had with COVID, how important the immune system really is. But how can you know if A patient is going to respond to an immunotherapy or not. And maybe one patient is going to respond to a drug and another patient is not going to respond to the drug. Can you personalize the, the, the treatment? So this was the starting point for us. How can you create the knowledge base to answer this question?

AI assessment note: “Can you personalize the, the, the treatment? So this was the starting point for us.”

Q What does it mean for the kind of insights that you're able to provide to pharmaceutical companies and companies that are developing these therapeutics?

A So take a drug candidate. Some biopharma or biotechnology company invested a lot of money in this drug candidate. There was an FDA approval to start giving this drug as a clinical trial set up to the patients, and you start treating patients that have serious disease. What we are able to do is measure the human immune response of the patients and try to see whether this immune response resembles something which is good, that is effective. And we do it on a way that allows you to leverage the entire power of the database and only a handful of patient samples from the clinical trial. This is kind of the secret. So you have a huge database on the back end, and then you can use this huge database To glean insights by looking at only a handful of patients in a clinical trial setup.

AI assessment note: “What we are able to do is measure the human immune response of the patients”

Q And so essentially what you, what you're saying is if we can begin to map the human immune system with increasing granularity, you could start to solve Some of these development and research challenges?

A So I will tell you something that, um, a great scientist told me as we were starting. He said, we can cure every type of cancer in mice. And this really gave me a pause, and I have been thinking about this for, for years, understanding how to bridge the gap between the human immune response and the way that drugs are being tested in animal models. Is, I believe, the biggest challenge that the biopharma and biotechnology industry should face and will face in the coming, ah, decade or two. And this is our vision. Our vision is to improve the drug development process through an engineering first mapping of the human immune system and through it the human immune response.

AI assessment note: “Our vision is to improve the drug development process through an engineering first mapping”

Q Yeah, I mean, you're, and you're not the only company out there that is doing this work. Do you see the other companies as competitors or as potential collaborators? Is there both, maybe?

A So first, I really like competition. I think there are many competitive companies in our landscape, and I think some companies are, you know, really making progress, and for that, I congratulate them, and I think it's good for all of us. I think that at the end of the day, companies that are building real technology and real science will succeed. And I think that we are working with some of the more ambitious ones. We are very collaborative in our premise. We have over 30 partnerships. Some of them are with companies such as ourselves, earlier stage companies that are building new technologies. Some of them are more mature than us, but I believe that every company that is able to You know, bring a scientific vision that is real and make progress towards an important problem will survive. I always say, lady science has to dance with us. We have to prove our, our premise. We have to show that mapping the human immune system can lead to a real ability to improve patients outcome and improve the clinical trial design. So the collaboration is part of, I believe, The new drug development paradigm shift.

AI assessment note: “I really like competition... We are very collaborative in our premise. We have over 30 partnerships.”

Q you know, incredible granularity at scale, and it sounds like you're on the path to doing that, help me understand what that means for patients, for diseases, 2030, 40 years in the future. I mean, how does this impact how human disease is treated? I mean, realistically, could you imagine a world, even 50 years from now, where all cancers are Treatable diseases, where people don't, don't die from them?

A Yeah, so it's a very interesting question, and I'm going to say things not in the most accurate way, just to make sure that I can communicate the message. You take a patient with, with a cancer, let's say a solid tumor, and you take the biopsy of the tumor, or you dissect the tumor out, and you are going to Do it in a dish or maybe even give it to a mouse and you will be able to cure the cancer outside the patient. And you're going to cure it by finding a new antibody or a new small molecule. But what you really want to know is what will happen within the patient. And the thing is that cancer, it's almost has its own intelligence. So there is, there are different escape mechanisms and different ways that the cancer can Use in order to survive or to grow. And the big question is, can we use this mapping of the human immune system and use different animal models and different in vitro models, different lab models to try and predict what would have happened to the patient. So it's a combination of measuring cancer patients that have different types of cancers. And apply a lot of computer-aided simulations in order to predict what would have happened to a patient where they treated with this therapy. And this is the challenge. So the, the thing is that the human immune system and the cancer, they have this sort of battle. We are trying to understand how to help the human immune sys…

AI assessment note: “We are trying to understand how to help the human immune system win the battle, and it's a long, long, long road ahead.”