Boston-based biotech powers AI with function-anchored data that reveals biological cause—not just correlation—across drug discovery, clinical development, and diagnostics.
Feromics Inc., the first-of-its-kind functional immunomics platform built from the biology up, presented its Intelligent Design™ platform at the MIT AI Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Tuesday. Co-Founder and CEO Shai Schubert, PhD, delivered a lightning talk describing how Feromics addresses a fundamental limitation in immunology AI: training on immune cell data without functional context misses the causal signals that actually drive disease.
Using its Intelligent Design™ platform, Feromics assigns each immune cell a verified functional label and links it to its molecular profile-creating data that enables AI models to learn true biological causality, not just correlation.
“The problem isn’t really the AI—it’s the data behind it. If the data doesn’t reflect what cells actually do, the models miss what matters. We’ve solved the problem at the source.”
— Shai Schubert, PhD, Co-Founder & CEO, Feromics Inc.
Feromics’ Intelligent Design™ platform generates functionally verified immune transcriptomic datasets at single-cell resolution and uses them to train predictive AI models for discovery, diagnostics, and allogeneic donor selection.
Once trained, these models can be applied to standard sequencing data—including bulk RNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, and retrospective clinical datasets—enabling scalable, real-world deployment.
The platform supports three core application areas:
- In drug discovery, Feromics enables functional candidate screening while revealing mechanisms of action and identifying predictive biomarkers.
- In clinical development, it supports donor selection for allogeneic therapies, defines mechanisms of response and resistance, and informs trial design.
- In diagnostics, Feromics applies AI-driven models to predict clinical outcomes using functional biomarkers.
Feromics is supported by patents protecting its platform and has received ARPA-H funding (Contract No. 75N91024C00036), providing independent validation of its approach. The underlying platform has also been recognized through the Sanofi iDEA Award.
Feromics was founded by Dr. Tania Konry, Associate Professor at Northeastern University and a pioneer in single-cell functional assay research, and Dr. Shai Schubert, an accomplished biotech founder with a PhD from the Technion and postdoctoral training at the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. The company’s scientific foundation draws on more than a decade of research and numerous scientific papers and patents.
Explore AITechPark for the latest Artificial Intelligence News advancements in AI, IOT, Cybersecurity, AITech News, and insightful updates from industry experts!