AI in Pharma: Discovery

Wade Davis is VP of Computational Science at Moderna. He holds a PhD in Statistics and completed an NIH Fellowship in Biomedical Informatics. Afterwards, he began his career in academia at Baylor University and then University of Missouri School of Medicine, where he was a tenured Associate Professor. Wade has received research funding from dozens of federal research grants and served on the editorial board for the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Wade then joined AbbVie, where he took roles of increasing responsibility and ultimately became Global Head of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Later, he was VP of Analytics and AI at Karius, a late-stage start-up using artificial intelligence for unbiased diagnosis of pathogens using microbial cell-free DNA. In his current position at Moderna, he leads wet and dry lab teams using computational methods to solve complex problems in R&D. Throughout his career, Wade and his teams have received many awards and he has given multiple conference keynotes. He has authored 100+ publications with dozens focused on target identification, predicting target-indication success, mechanism of action, and precision medicine.

Dr. Xiong Liu is a Director of Data Science and AI at Novartis. He was previously a principal data scientist and NLP lead at Eli Lilly. In the past 10 years, Dr. Liu has led data and AI programs to accelerate drug development, from early discovery to clinical trials and post-marketing research. His work has broad applications across the pharma value chain and impacted several marketed drugs. Prior to Pharma, he has won multiple Small Business Innovation Research awards from US government agencies for his research in data mining and informatics. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and did postdoctoral work in Bioinformatics at Johns Hopkins University.

Nishtha Jain is a strategic, innovative, and futuristic leader with 13+ years of global information technology experience in driving strategic business partnerships, digital technology and platform transformation and innovation in biopharma with past employers – Biogen and GlaxoSmithKline. Experienced in wide range of industry verticals ranging from Healthcare IT, Consulting, Biotech, Pharmaceutical and Vaccine industry– R&D Clinical, R&D Quality, Drug Development, Regulatory, Manufacturing, Medical and Commercial. Trusted adviser to executive leadership seeking to solve highly complex enterprise business challenges in fast-paced, rapidly changing, and challenging environments.

Nishtha is currently Head of Innovation and Digital Technology at Takeda Pharmaceuticals where her role expands across Global R&D Quality in driving digital and data initiatives from concept to execution leveraging emerging technologies and design principles. She has a strong passion for not only for applying emerging and digital technologies in improving patient healthcare but also for diversity and inclusion initiatives. She is currently member of Chief and serves as President for Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association’s (HBA) Mid- Atlantic chapter.

Hannah’s expertise encompasses disease biology and leveraging AI and ML technology to link the right tools to the biggest opportunities in drug discovery. Working with multiple cross-functional teams at Enveda, Hannah’s exceptional ability to establish and implement effective processes and infrastructure enables her to harmonize the strengths of various disciplines.  Outside of her work at Enveda, Hannah enjoys spending time with her family, yoga, backcountry piloting, and exploring the beautiful mountains of Boulder.

Kyle Kaniecki, PhD, is a Vice President of Life Sciences and Healthcare at the NYC Economic Development Corporation where he works to help implement the mayor’s $1B LifeSci NYC initiative by supporting translational R&D and accelerating startup formation, IP creation, and job growth. Before joining NYCEDC, Kyle was Director of Operations for Perception Neuroscience, a VC-backed neuropharmacology company where he led preclinical development.  He spent years at Columbia Technology Ventures supporting licensing activities and startups coming from Columbia University and led the development of the companion diagnostic for the blockbuster drug, Kalydeco.  Kyle earned his PhD in Genetics & Development from Columbia University, his MS in Biotechnology from the Johns Hopkins University, and his BS in Zoology from UW-Madison. 

Aaron Mackey, PhD, is VP of Data & AI/ML at Sonata Therapeutics, where he leads all data engineering, modeling, and insight delivery activities in support of Sonata’s therapeutic development programs and the underlying proprietary biology platform used to identify novel targeted therapeutic candidates that induce immunogenic tumor cell death. Aaron’s 20+ years of career experience have spanned many diverse academic and industrial positions, large pharma and small biotech companies, preclinical and clinical organizations, and scientific and operational management. Originally trained as a wet-bench cellular immunologist, he chose to use his long-standing academic skills and interests with computer science and statistics to cross-train as a computational biologist during the era of the Human Genome Project and is now a generalist in pharma-related AI/ML methods and applications. A frequent speaker and open-source community mentor, he continues to hunt opportunities to mine multiomic data in search of mechanistic hypotheses that reveal disease-relevant (and therapeutically exploitable) insights. Aaron received his B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Reed College; his M.S. in Immunology from Washington University in St. Louis; and his PhD in Microbiology from the University of Virginia, with a short postdoc at the Penn Genomics Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed the first methods for statistically integrated, consensus eukaryotic gene structure prediction.

Ryan is a computational biologist with over a decade of experience designing algorithms and pipelines for analyzing high-throughput sequencing data at scale and building machine learning models with large sequence datasets. He has led the development and launch of computational infrastructure for multiple platform technologies and clinical products. As VP of Data Science at A-Alpha Bio, Ryan leads the development and application of AlphaBind, utilizing the immense size and quantitative resolution of AlphaSeq data to build ML models that accelerate the design and optimization of new therapeutics.  Prior to joining A-Alpha, Ryan led the Computational Biology department and the Antigen Map project at Adaptive Biotechnologies.  Ryan earned his PhD in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington School of Medicine and his MBA from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.

Brad Parry, Ph.D. is the Head of Artificial Intelligence at AI Therapeutics. Dr. Parry graduated with a Ph.D. from Yale University in the lab of Christine Jacobs-Wagner where he pursued questions in biological physics concerning single living cells. To answer these questions, he developed novel experimental and computational approaches based in machine learning and deep learning to investigate the physical nature of the cytoplasm. After completing his degree, he continued developing and applying deep learning based approaches to investigate questions in cell biology as a research scientist at Yale. He now leads efforts to develop new datasets, algorithms and predict novel disease treatments as the Head of AI at AI Therapeutics.

Camilo is a data scientist currently leading the commercial advanced analytics team supporting the biologics business unit at Astrazeneca. Before Astrazeneca he led the commercial advanced analytics organization at Alkermes, the compliance analytics efforts at Pfizer and the text mining and natural language processing hub at Lilly. He also co-led the creation of the advanced business analytics group at Lilly and he was responsible for building the analytical capabilities of Lilly’s clinical supply chain organization. 

Camilo is an engineer by training with M.S. degrees in Chemical and industrial engineering and a PhD in Chemical engineering from Purdue University.

Dr. Nagy-Szakal has 15+ years of experience in translational medicine and microbiology, extensively focused on clinical metagenomics using NGS-based technologies powered by AI. She led cutting-edge clinical trials on fecal microbiota transplantation, gut-brain axis, multi-omics studies and the COVID-19 pandemic response with the ultimate goal of improving diagnostics and developing novel therapies. She currently holds a position as a Research Assistant Professor at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and also the Chief Medical Officer at Biotia, where she drives strategic communications with the FDA, CDC, NYS DOH, leading enterprise medical centers and is responsible for the clinical operations, medical affairs and clinical/R&D laboratory operations. She earned her MD and PhD in clinical medicine from Semmelweis University of Medicine in Hungary, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children’s Hospital and Columbia University.

Han Chang is a seasoned leader of computational biology and data science with strong leadership skills, extensive experience in biopharma R&D, and proven track record of making critical impacts on discovery, translational, and clinical strategies. He leads a team of analysts; applying cutting-edge bioinformatics, statistics, and machine learning methods; to work with clinical and large-scale data sets from BMS’s industry-leading late stage oncology pipeline, thus influencing development strategies and advancing the BMS late clinical oncology pipeline.

Dr. Mohindru is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Member of Novasenta, Inc. a privately held biotechnology company focused on the discovery of novel targets to develop innovative therapies for cancers. She also serves as a member of the board of directors of CytomX Therapeutics and Cardiff Oncology. Prior to Novasenta, she has held senior leadership positions in the biotech industry, having served as Chief Executive Officer of CereXis, Inc. (private), Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of Cara Therapeutics, Inc. (public), and Chief Strategy Officer of Curis, Inc (public). 

Prior to her leadership roles in the biotechnology industry, Dr. Mohindru spent several years as an equity research analyst covering the biotechnology sector at UBS, Credit Suisse and ThinkEquity. She also co-founded a private biotechnology company and was a healthcare industry consultant. On the non-profit side, she is a member of the Executive Advisory Board of the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute of Northwestern University and a member of the Scientific Investment Advisory Committee of the Gates Center of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Colorado. 

Dr. Mohindru received her Ph.D. in Neurosciences from Northwestern University and her Masters in Biotechnology and BS in Human Biology (Hons) from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, India.