🧬 Noam Solomon - Immunai - Part 3 | Deciphering the Book That is the Human Immune System | Building Immunai’s Team | The Importance of Single Cell Multi-Omics | Big Pharma & Dancing With Gorillas

The Biotech Startups Podcast

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Part 3 of 4.

My guest for this week’s episode is Noam Solomon, CEO and co-founder at Immunai, a pioneering biotech company that is comprehensively mapping and reprogramming the immune system with single-cell biology and AI to power new therapeutic discoveries, accelerate drug development, and improve patient outcomes.

Prior to co-founding Immunai, Noam had a career in both industry and academia. Noam has a double PhD in math and computer science and served as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Harvard. Noam also worked as an algorithms developer, consultant, and head of data science in several high-tech companies in Israel. Noam's extensive background in math, computer science, AI, and machine learning gives him a unique depth of experience that founders can learn from.

Join us this week and hear about:

• How the human genome project gave us the alphabet to read the book that is the human immune system
• Immunai’s philosophy of doing what's right even if they don’t know what they’re doing
• Balancing a CEO’s naivete with being selective about who’s advise to take
• What single cell multi-omics, the technology behind Immunai, really means
• Why working with different pharma companies is like dancing with a gorilla
  

Please enjoy my conversation with Noam Solomon.

Timestamps:

00:28 Intro

02:04 Episode starts, the human genome project and the alphabet used to read the book of the human immune system

05:10 Bringing an outsider's perspective to Immunai and their unique approach

08:07 Building the the Immunai team with both immunology and computer science experts who are not afraid to ask the stupid questions

12:10 Observing the hospital, pharma, AI landscape and how that shaped their philosophy of doing what's right even if they don’t know what they’re doing

19:00 Balancing both your naivete as a CEO with judging who’s advice to take

20:03 What is single cell multi-omics, the technology behind Immunai and what they learned from Netflix

24:44 How to embrace failure without creating a failure culture and other lessons learned from setting up their first lab

28:22 “Do you know how you dance with a gorilla?” and how to work with different pharma companies

33:05: Outro

Find Our Guest, Noam Solomon, at this link:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-solomon-142393129/

https://www.immunai.com/

Find Our Host, Jon Chee, at these links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee

https://www.excedr.com

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Podcast Website: https://www.thebiotechstartupspodcast.com/

Enriched Notes:

Topics Mentioned:

Immunai https://www.immunai.com/

Human Genome Project https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project

Single Cell Multi-Omics https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5303816/

Recommender Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system

What Is Bioinformatics https://www.excedr.com/blog/what-is-bioinformatics-and-computational-biology

New Drug Application https://www.excedr.com/blog/new-drug-application-process

Guide to the FDA Drug Approval Process https://www.excedr.com/blog/fda-drug-approval-process-guide

Equipment Leasing for Laboratories https://www.excedr.com/leasing

Biotech Startup Support https://www.excedr.com/resources-category/biotech-startup-support

People Mentioned:

Louis Voloch https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisvoloch

Ansuman Satpathy https://www.linkedin.com/in/ansuman-satpathy-3b386639/

Danny Wells https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-wells-bb03453a/

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