Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook!<br>Today we’re thrilled to host Ron Alfa, co-founder and CEO of Noetik. Noetik is building an AI-native platform for cancer biology, generating large-scale human data to train biological foundation models that both predict patient responses to therapy and uncover new drug targets and treatment opportunities. Most recently, Noetik signed a $50 million licensing agreement with GSK, giving GSK access to Noetik’s virtual cell foundation models, along with one of the largest multimodal spatial oncology datasets assembled to date.<br>In this episode, we discuss Ron’s journey to founding Noetik, why building truly useful models of biology requires large-scale, multimodal human data, and how biological foundation models can transform precision oncology. We also explore what it takes to build an AI-native biotech company, lessons from partnering with pharma, the future of drug discovery, and the path toward bringing more personalized cancer treatment to every patient.

Lessons from Ron Alfa, Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, on Bringing AI-Native Precision Oncology to Every Cancer Patient

Pear Healthcare Playbook


# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Pear Healthcare Playbook

## Participants

- **Rachel Gleiser** (None)
- **Ron Alfa** (Noetik)

## Transcript

Hello everyone, I'm Rachel Gleiser, one of the co-hosts of the Pear Healthcare Playbook podcast. On this podcast we sit down with founders building category defining biotech and healthcare companies from idea to scale to learn about their experiences. Today we're joined by Ron Alfa, Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik.

Noetic is building an AI-native platform for cancer biology, generating large-scale human biological data to train models that both predict patient responses to therapy and uncover new drug targets and treatment opportunities. Ron, thanks so much for joining us. For those who don't know you yet, could you please tell us a bit about your background and what inspired you to become a founder? Yeah, thanks Rachel, great to be here with you. Let's see, what inspired me to become a founder?

Well, actually I never wanted to be a founder at the very beginning. I mean that wasn't my initial goal. My initial goal was to go to medical school and find treatments for diseases. That was my initial inspiration. So, and really that came out of a frustration with, you know, the progress in medicine. You know, like many people have had people in my life that suffered from cancers and other diseases.

And you, as you sort of interact with the medical system, you oftentimes get very frustrated and you're like, why can't we do anything here? So, you know, that was my initial motivation. You know, really I felt that if I can get into, you know, translational research, then I can really make an impact for patients and, you know, help to discover new therapies. Then, you know, flash forward maybe a decade.

I was in the MD-PhD program at Stanford and had the opportunity actually to meet Chris Gibson who's co-founder of Recursion. And Chris and I worked together at the Ignite program at the GSB Graduate School of Business. And that was really kind of the first experience I had, you know, in something that was like a startup environment light. You know, we were, we spent the summer working on kind of ideas for Recursion. And that was really fun.

It was, you know, I loved kind of working as part of a team and like working on like a hard problem. And, you know, it was very inspiring. So, Chris left and went and started the company and then I went back to medical school and finished my clinics. And then, you know, back in 2016, I called Chris up and I said, hey, would love to join Recursion. And I, you know, moved to Utah and joined the company. So that was, you know, that's a little bit of my origin story into startups and into tech bio.

Yeah, thanks so much for that origin story. And we definitely want to dig into it a little bit more. So maybe to start, I'd love to hear about what first drew you to the intersection of computation and biology. And when did you start to feel like AI might fundamentally change how we under...

Lessons from Ron Alfa, Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, on Bringing AI-Native Precision Oncology to Every Cancer Patient

Transcript

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Lessons from Ron Alfa, Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, on Bringing AI-Native Precision Oncology to Every Cancer Patient

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.