While many people are growing deeply concerned about the negative impact artificial intelligence might have on our fragile world, mathematician Noam Solomon is literally harnessing the technology to map a key part of the human physiology – the immune system – and help discover and develop therapeutics that will ultimately save lives.
CEO of the rapidly growing biotech company Immunai, Solomon – and a team of tech experts and scientists spread across the world from New York to Tel Aviv via Europe – is using AI to better understand the body’s immune system. This knowledge is already assisting some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, such as AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and Teva, to discover novel targets and design more effective clinical trials for drugs, and crucially predict which patients will benefit best from them.
“If ChatGPT and Claude are unlocking conversational intelligence, we are unlocking immune intelligence,” Solomon told The Jerusalem Report in a recent interview in the company’s offices in Tel Aviv, emphasizing that ChatGPT, which has fast become part of our everyday lives, is just “the tip of the iceberg.”
“We’re living in an age, or in an era, where the term ‘AI’ is both overhyped and underestimated,” Solomon said. “Overhyped because you don’t hear about a company these days that is not doing something with AI; and underestimated because I think that for the few companies that will actually apply the right technologies, the right AI, and the right data, the opportunities for what it has for our future and this world are myriad.”
Finding the answers
In the field of immunology, Solomon believes that AI can provide the answer to long-standing questions about fatal diseases such as cancer and autoimmune illnesses, and come up with therapeutic responses to all of them.
Understanding how the body reacts to harsh cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, radiation, and – more recently – immunotherapies has been at the core of Immunai’s research since its founding in 2018.
“We’re working with multiple partners, and some of them are the big pharma companies, which are paying us many millions of dollars,” Solomon said.
He explained that at this stage, Immunai’s overarching goal is to build a database comprising the blood samples and tissue biopsies of more than a million patients to understand all the different states of immune systems, such as how and when they change these states.
“This mapping of the immune system is an endeavor that could take more than 10 years, maybe even 15 years,” he said.
To date, the company has collected 40,000 samples from patients undergoing treatment for various illnesses in a database called AMICA™ that is doubling every year, with data coming from cancer-related diseases, as well as autoimmune and inflammatory conditions such as Crohn’s, Colitis, atopic dermatitis, arthritis, and lupus.
Using AI-driven single-cell sequencing, thousands of individual immune cells can be analyzed from a single drop of blood, collected from many patients, building vast computational maps of how immune systems behave before, during, and after treatment.
“From one blood draw, we get hundreds of millions of measurements,” Solomon said. “We put that into advanced AI systems, and we can start learning patterns: Who will respond to treatment? Who will not? Who is at risk for severe side effects? And importantly, explain why.”
Waxing philosophical about the arduous task that still lies ahead, Solomon recalled how one of his first investors, who had a PhD in molecular biology from Harvard, was extremely impressed with the concept but warned that “the immune system is infinitely complex.”
“I took this statement that the immune system is infinitely complex to every presentation that I gave to investors, and then replaced ‘infinitely complex’ with ‘incredibly complex’… The difference between ‘incredibly complex’ and ‘infinitely complex’ is that one is impossible, and the other, while incredibly difficult, is still possible,” he said.
Bright future
Solomon’s play on language seems to have paid off. Since its establishment in 2018, Immunai has raised a total of $270 million in funding and has partnered with a range of pharmaceutical giants.
Last October, it announced an $85 million research partnership with AstraZeneca to work together in the early stages of research, using an advanced AI platform to identify biological targets that could lead to the development of specialized drugs for inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), which include Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
This new collaboration is an extension of a longer partnership that began in 2022. In 2024, AstraZeneca invested approximately $18 million to use Immunai’s AI platform in oncology clinical trials.
Last month, the company announced plans to soon start working with US-based medical institutions – Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard Medical School – on projects that would build a larger and clearer picture of how the immune system works across autoimmune disease, solid-tumor immunotherapy, and cell therapy.
Most recently, Immunai announced a partnership with pharma giant Bristol Myers Squibb to support clinical development for some of their drugs. According to Solomon, there are additional partnerships that will be announced in the months to come.
Personal journey
As for his personal journey into the world of AI, immunology, and biology, the path is only now beginning to make sense. Born and raised in Ra’anana, Solomon moved to the US to conduct post-doctoral research in mathematics at Harvard and MIT after completing two PhDs in math and computer science in Israel.
While living in Boston, he initially thought his future path would be in academia, conducting research and publishing papers.
At the time, a friend – who would later become Immunai’s founding CTO – had a grandfather battling cancer, who ultimately passed away. Not long after starting the company, Solomon experienced the fight against the disease closer to home when his wife’s aunt died from breast cancer.
He described that experience as a difficult one for his family and for him personally. Both experiences made him even more determined to find a way to solve such problems.
“Forty percent of us will have to deal with cancer in our lifetime,” Solomon said, adding that every one of us knows someone who is suffering or will suffer from it.
“If we can help even a fraction of those people receive the right treatment, at the right time – that is worth everything,” he said.■