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In episode 46 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Luis Voloch.

Luis is co-founder of Immunai, a leading AI-led drug discovery company with over 140 employees and over one billion dollar valuation based out of NYC & Tel Aviv. Before Immunai, Luis was Head of Data Science and Machine Learning at ITC and worked at Palantir, where he worked on a variety of ML efforts. He did his studies and research in Math and CS in MIT.

He has also led AI, genomics, and software efforts at a number of other companies.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (02:25) Luis’s math background and getting into AI

* (06:35) Luis’s PhD experience, proving theoretical guarantees for recommendation systems

* (09:45) Why Luis left his PhD

* (15:45) Why Luis is excited about intersection of ML and biology

* (18:28) Challenges of applying AI to biology

* (22:55) Immunai

* (27:03) Challenges in building a biotech (or “tech-bio”) company

* (30:30) Research at Immunai, Neural Design for Genetic Perturbation Experiments

* (34:43) Interpretability in ML + biology

* (36:00) What Luis plans to do next

* (37:55) Luis’s advice for grad students / ML people interested in biology

* (40:00) Luis’s perspective on the future of AI + biology

* (43:10) Outro

Links:

* Luis on LinkedIn, Crunchbase

* Luis’s article on The convergence of deep neural networks and immunotherapy

* Papers

* Luis’s thesis

* Neural Design for Genetic Perturbation Experiments

* SystemMatch: optimizing preclinical drug models to human clinical outcomes via generative latent-space matching