Bay Area biotech company says it’s using AI to make cell therapy more accessible

By Max Darrow

From hiking to running marathons, Laurie Adami makes the most of the time she has here on Earth.

“I did the LA Marathon in 2021,” she said. “I did the Washington D.C. Marine Corps Marathon in 2022.”

There was a point, however, where she expected her life would come to an early end.

“I remember it very well,” she said.

It was Good Friday, 2006. Adami was diagnosed with stage 4 follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“It’s like a bomb exploding in your head,” she said. “From 2006 until 2018, I was in continuous treatment, and we could never get my disease to go away.”

Nothing was working. Adami felt like she was nearing the end.

“I was within probably four to six weeks of dying,” she said.

But then, an experimental treatment worked.

“Cell therapy saved my life,” she said.

In the simplest of explanations, cell therapy uses living cells to treat diseases. They’re taken from either healthy donors or the patients, and then grown, altered, or engineered, to be delivered back into the patient’s body.

Cell therapies have shown promise in treating some cancers, blood disorders, and autoimmune diseases. However, they’re complicated to manufacture, expensive, and highly variable — It all amounts to little accessibility. Nina Horowitz and her team at ImmuneBridge are hoping to change that, and they’re working largely in tandem with AI to do so.

“We use AI and machine learning to find optimal donor sources to manufacture these therapies from,” Horowitz, the CEO, said.

She explained AI allows them to better screen donor sources and efficiently identify insights from massive datasets.

“They’re clinically powerful if we can harness them,” she said.

The result? They say it leads to less variability in determining what could become a successful therapy.

“When you add this AI-enabled screening, now you’re getting thousands of doses of the top 1% of donors. The best of the best,” she said. “We are going to turn these top-performing donors into the therapy every time.”

Other biotech and immunology ventures have also been able to accelerate research and processes by working with AI.

“AI has given us superpowers,” said Alexander Zhavoronkov, the CEO of Insilico Medicine. “This AI becomes a superpower and the real influence that allows us to direct our workflows, to make drugs better, make them cheaper, make them much faster, and also even go after mechanisms like pain.”

His company uses artificial intelligence to help accelerate drug discovery. Recently, they shared data they say shows a drug that was developed, with help from AI, which could potentially slow aging.

Zhavoronkov explained AI has helped speed up what were lengthy processes, that could result in better and quicker discoveries.

“Usually in the traditional approach, it would take approximately 4 ½ years to go from zero – program initiation – to one step before a human clinical trial, developmental candidate,” he said. “Now, after nominating 33 developmental candidates, our typical time from zero to that stage is approximately 13 months.”

As for Horowitz, her mission is personal.

“I know first-hand how scary it is to hear the words, you have cancer, and how important it is to hear the words, but we can treat it,” she said.

Horowitz had ovarian cancer twice as a child. She did not have cell therapy, but there was a way forward for her without chemotherapy.

“We are trying to optimize and standardize the manufacturing of cell therapy to bring the price down and make it accessible for patients who otherwise would not be able to have these life-saving treatments,” she said.

Adami is now eight years out from her cell therapy treatment.

“I’m still cancer-free after this one-time, 16-minute infusion of my CAR T cells,” she said.

She’s hopeful more people will be able to access the treatment that she says saved her life. Horowitz hopes to help deliver that future.