YouSaid · the spoken record

Noam Solomon

lines on the record: 35
first: 2022-12-22
most recent: 2022-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I want everybody to know that we are trying to do something extremely difficult, very unlikely to succeed. Not because internally I don't think we're going to make it. I think every year, every quarter, every month we are making a lot of progress, and I'm becoming increasingly more confident that this problem is solvable and we're going to make it. But the mindset of thinking big and taking risks is the mindset I want to have when we are waking up in the morning, when we don't go to sleep late in the evening, or at least it's my mindset, and I think it's very productive.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I think it's a good mindset. I think that when you understand that the risk is high, you are more likely to take steps that are going to be non-conformist and non-conformal and you're going to think about the problem in a different way. I'm trying to do with immunine, what I'm trying to do with both of the rectals, with our future investors, with our team.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it is similar but also more complicated. And maybe the similarity is exactly what you just said. We are going to train our models on more and more data coming from clinical trials, measuring the accuracy of our algorithms when we are wrong. We are going to recalibrate the models and do it again and again and again and improve the accuracy. But the place where this is really different is that for autonomous vehicles you have experts and every driver that can drive a car you can ask whether an autonomous vehicle drives as good as a driver like me and you. For drug development even the best scientists in the world they don't know as we mentioned earlier only 10% of drugs are going to succeed and the question is how can you build a machine that is not going to to be as good as a scientist it's going to be much much much better”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are putting this information into a machine. This is not the equivalent of Go. No human being will have the intuition to analyze all the relevant data. You have to use a machine to analyze the data. And I think this is where the movement or the unique opportunity comes. There are certain types of problems where there is no human expertise to guide your ways. And until now, we have been only using a very, very small sliver of what is available. And so to what Louis said, there are many counterintuitive things that humans would never come up when they develop or discover therapeutics. And I think a data-driven way to mine a large data set is the way to go.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I would say that what we are doing, this mapping of the human immune system, is much more higher dimensional than the problem that you just mentioned. I'll give an example. So we are measuring from one patient, we are taking, let's say, we're drawing the blood. So we measure 10,000 cells. For each of the cell that we are going to map, we are going to measure 10 or 20,000 different genes and proteins and other measurements. Now we are doing this for, let's say, 1,000 patients.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think for us, being able to ask the right questions really led us to make a lot of progress and became part of our, not only research culture, but also the way that we do business, I'm always open-minded to collaborating with companies that are bringing something novel because maybe the union of the two approaches will be better. Maybe OnePlus One will be three And yeah, sometimes you just don't know the answer, but you ask the right question. It will come out.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, first of all, it's a personal methodology. I like to ask questions. I started the company. I didn't know anything about biology, medicine, business development. And I had to ask a lot of questions. And it became part of our culture as an organization. Because the company has such a bold vision and we had to bring experts from many different disciplines, it became part of the way that we interact with one another, that asking questions is not only allowed, but is encouraged. In some places, you're expected to know the answer.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disciplines and finding the bridges, which makes the challenge much harder, but so much more rewarding when you can figure out a way to use data science to answer a question in a different field. And as a mathematician and somebody that was never used to answer questions in biology, Satisfaction to be able to understand something that can explain why a certain patient may not respond well to a drug. And another patient that is very similar to this person will respond amazingly well to the drug is very fulfilling.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so We have about 150 people that are between New York, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Zurich and Prague that are spanning multiple disciplines, immunology, medicine, technologies in single cell, machine learning, computational biology, software engineering, data engineering, and the secret is not to have those efforts done separately. The secret is to try to create multidisciplinary teams that are going to work together towards a common goal. And mathematicians such as myself are going to have to study a lot of immunology in biology in order to collaborate with their colleagues that come from biology and immunology. And similarly, immunologists are going to study the background they need in engineering or machine learning. And I believe that this is the new type of science that is more about connecting the dots between different”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 were they treated with this therapy. And this is the challenge. So 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 system win the battle and it's a long, long, long road ahead.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a message. You take a patient 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 cue the cancer outside the patient. You're going to cure it by finding a new antibody or a new small molecule. What you really want to know is what will happen within the patient and the thing is that cancer It almost has its own intelligence. So 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?”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A novel therapeutics. And this is what we are doing. So the main point is to try and say when you have one patient that is responding to a drug and another does not respond, it doesn't say much, but if you have 100 patients that respond and 100 patients that don't respond, you can start apply data science. And when you have the right data sets and the right technologies to measure the biology of the patients, you sometimes find very interesting patterns.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we do, and we have been doing for a few years now, is that we will map patients that are being treated with an immunotherapy or combination of immunotherapies and chemotherapies, and we are going to try and find separators between responders and non-responders. And the interesting thing is that when we do our immune profiling of patients, pre and post therapies, we see that some very subtle nuanced differences between responders and non-responders explain or at least partially explain the reason. So we can find that a specific immune cell type and a specific gene within this immune cell type. Correlated with non response to a therapy, so this can become a novel target.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples. So, first of all, when there already are immunotherapies that are being in the clinic treating patients, and for cancer indications like melanoma and non-smooth cell lung cancer, we see how effective they are. But even in the most effective setups, they don't cure 100% of patients.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a lot of our work with our partners is to help them with clinical development. So they have a drug, a drug candidate in clinical trials, and they do a lot of experiments. So they usually have multiple clinical arms. They are trying different combinations of treatments. And we were able to show quite definitively that our platform can identify the preferred combination arm that will demonstrate a superior immune response. So it happened already and it's something it gets both us and our partners very excited about the potential to really leverage this immune profile and capability.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, we have a database that spends over 100,000 patients, over 500 different disease indications, thousands of studies, and we're trying to put as much clinical context and clinical metadata into the patients. And the more data that we have, the better our mapping of the human immune system is.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a few ways. We have many partnerships with academic centers and biopharma and biotechnology companies, and every one of our partners are sending samples to us. The samples can be blood samples, they can be preserved immune cells from tissues, from solid tissues, from bone marrow. And our work is to try and create a human immune profile of the patients from the different sources of tissues and blood that we are getting. The more partnerships we have, the more biological samples that we get. And every one of the biological samples that are getting to our lab in New York is being profiled and sequenced in our lab. And this data is being uploaded to our database, which is called a MICA. It is the largest of its kind database of the immune system with a single cell resolution.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 set.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first I really like competition. I think there are many competitive companies in our landscape, and I think some companies are 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”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that everybody that joined Immuni and our investor that invested a lot of money, they understand that this is still a very ambitious scientific project.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're paying us not only for our data and insights, but for generating the data on their samples and gleaning insights that are going to improve the clinical trial design and the chance for getting the drugs approved in the clinic. So this is already something that we are doing. And the nice thing about it is that our The other aspect is the core vision and the mission statement of the company is about building something unique and differentiated and it is super risky. So our premise is that we are going to map the unimmune system but that the implications of this is going to make a real dent in the way that we discover developed therapeutics. It's been four years. We have had a lot of progress and successes, but the risk is still here with us.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are a few aspects to the business here. First is that we are already walking and making money by working with our partnerships, large bio-pharmaceutical companies are paying us good money to help them further develop and improve the development of their drug candidates and of their drugs.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will tell you something that a great scientist told me as we will start. He said we can queue every type of cancer And this really gave me a pause, and I've been thinking about this 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 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.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, drug development is becoming increasingly inefficient. It is super expensive. So to develop a new immunotherapy takes more than 2.6 billion dollars. It takes more than 10 years of research and development before market. And more than 90% of drugs fail to get an FDA approval.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the past few months. Maybe there is an immune reason for that. So when we understand the immune system better and better and we map more areas of the immune system, we will be able to cope with more rare autoimmune indications, authentic diseases, and other Cancer indications that only few patients have and there are certain indications that are not getting enough funding because not enough patients have them. The vision that I have and the hope that I have is that maybe in 15 years we'll be able to use our new profile and capabilities to help people remain healthy.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is true, and similarly, I think that the colors of our eyes are slightly different, but there are categories. And I think that when you map thousands of people, of patients, you will find a lot of similarities. So I think the similarities allow us and make us confident that we could measure the human immune system and try to understand how patients that have breast cancer or non-small cell lung cancer open creatic cancer can be clustered into groups and those immune systems profiles will allow us to figure out what will be the right therapy for them. I believe that the world is going into a more personalized way to understand our health. And I really hope that medicine is going to go into preventive care and not only into medical care, right? I mean, when you're very tired.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think technology is changing very rapidly. What happened in the past five years was in some sense a perfect storm where compute power has grown dramatically. We have seen more and more and we keep seeing more and more technologies in biology, in chemistry, that allow us to measure things in unprecedented and resolution granularity. And we have more sophisticated algorithms. So I think this perfect storm of technology and science allows us to do things we couldn't have even dreamed like 15 and 20 years ago.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think today the way that medicine is being discovered and developed is based on a trial and error of scientists in the lab. Having a map of the human immune system will enable researchers to apply data mining tools to come up with novel ways to develop and discover therapeutics.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thousand 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. 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 state or city of disease and they want to go to a state or city of cure. How do you find the way there? And this is where the mapping of the human immune system is a means to an end and the end is to find novel therapies that can help patients get to where they are trying to get.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so the different cells in our body, we have trillions and trillions of cells, they are 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 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 ten years ago. But I think that 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”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's a deep question. Immunotherapy is like the name of drugs that are targeting our immune system. Our immune system is an incredibly complex system that is 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 treatment? So this was the starting point for us. How can you create the knowledge base to answer this question?”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 maybe do something that can impact patients.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About five years before then for my second PhD, I wanted to have some additional income. So I walked in a few startup companies as a data scientist and developed some algorithms in different disciplines and fields. It was not in biology. So e-commerce, ed tech, different types of web applications. And it was mainly to supplement the income. working as an academic, especially in Israel, it's a challenge. A few years later for my postdoc, my co-founder and CTO at the time, we met as friends. He told me about his grandfather. 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 event. So he stopped taking the medication. So eventually, a couple of years later, the grandfather died”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I knew I was going to be an academic even before I was 10 years old. And the plan was to be a faculty member in doing research in methane computer science. And I have a change of plans.”
2022-12-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Immunai: Noam Solomon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT