Ron is Co-Founder and CEO of NOETIK, a next generation precision oncology company using multimodal foundation models pre-trained on large-scale human tumor data to discover cancer therapeutics. He holds an MD and PhD from Stanford University School of Medicine, where he completed his doctoral work in Neuroscience, and has a MA in History of Medicine from UCL. Prior to founding Noetik, Ron was Senior Vice President, Head of Research and acting-CSO at Recursion, where he led the company’s scientific organizations and portfolio strategy. At Recursion, he led portfolio and platform builds across rare disease, neuroscience, oncology, and immunology, and was responsible for advancing multiple therapeutic programs from discovery to clinical development.

97. Ron Alfa, CEO of NOETIK, on Biology as a Search Problem

Once a Scientist

Historically, to do science, you have a hypothesis and you go run an experiment. And then it's like sort of one at a time. The way this turned with like tech bio and say like this is really where we got to a recursion, you know, probably around 2020 is you've generated all the data. It's like up front, we generate all the data. And then we say, well, you're turning biology into a search problem.

This is the Once a Scientist podcast. I'm Nick Edwards. We're back with new episodes. So keep an eye out and subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. I'm excited to have the man of the hour on, Ron Alfa. Ron's the CEO and founder at NOETIK, which I will let him tell you about because he's going to give a much better story than me.

But he spent some time at recursion working on early phases of AI and drug discovery. He's an MD, PhD from Stanford. Ron, you are like a hard person to pin down lately. I think I keep seeing you at conferences, though, like and every time you're giving a talk. And the last one I saw you at was the NVIDIA BioNeMo agent toolkit launch. And I was like, oh, yeah, we're going to do a podcast. And you're like, we are. All right.

So you must be busy these days. How have you been? You know, you're doing it. It's busy. There's always stuff happening. You know, I don't I don't actually have an EA. So it's just like kind of I don't know what's on my calendar until I look. So and I just say I say yes to a lot of things. Things have been pretty exciting.

97. Ron Alfa, CEO of NOETIK, on Biology as a Search Problem

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

97. Ron Alfa, CEO of NOETIK, on Biology as a Search Problem

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.