Former Insight M and Palantir leader to bolster the scale and AI capabilities of the company’s immune organoid platform for drug discovery
Parallel Bio, a biotech company using the immune system to cure disease, today announced that Ari Gesher has joined as the first head of technology. He will oversee technical infrastructure and the development of advanced AI and robotics infrastructure to rapidly scale its immune organoid platform for drug discovery.
Gesher joins from Insight M (formerly known as Kairos Aerospace), most recently as chief technology officer, where he spent more than seven years developing and growing its wide-area aerial methane detection technology used to manage industrial emissions of the greenhouse gas. Before that, he spent 10 years at Palantir in various engineering and outreach roles, joining in 2006 as one of the first software engineers at the big data software company.
“Ari knows how to solve the tough problems of industrializing and scaling technologies in completely new fields and turning them into world-class platforms,” said Robert DiFazio, co-founder and CEO of Parallel Bio. “His proven leadership and technical prowess will serve us well as we pioneer a completely new way of discovering drugs proven to work in humans from the start.”
Gesher will work with DiFazio and Juliana Hilliard, co-founder and chief scientific officer, on advancing its immune system platform with a focus on software development and the application of AI and robotics to automate lab processes and organoid creation, analyze and report on studies and experiments, and build predictive disease models from biological data.
Parallel Bio’s first platform for scalable and repeatable biology uses arrays of lymph-node organoids to replicate the immune systems of diverse human populations. Organoids are 3D, self-assembling models of human biology, or so-called “mini organs.” They mimic the structure and function of parts of the human body and their response to disease or treatment as if the organoids were individual patients.
“This is a rare opportunity to combine my passion for developing deep technology with cutting-edge applications of human biology to treat human disease better, cheaper, and faster than ever before,” Gesher said. “Working on the frontiers of industrial automation and computational biology, the founding team is well positioned to upend the industry’s reliance on animal models and flip the 95% drug failure rate on its head.”
Parallel Bio recently released its first commercial application called Clinical Trial in a Dish, which studies the efficacy and safety of new immunotherapies using human models at the earliest stages of drug discovery. Five pharmaceutical companies, including a Fortune 500 firm, have begun testing 20 drug candidates with the alternative to animal tests.
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