Novartis taps Iya Khalil, physicist co-founder of… Leave a comment

At the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, fin­ish­ing up her PhD in the­o­ret­i­cal physics, Iya Khalil found the ca­reer paths in front of her want­i­ng. Aca­d­e­m­ic post­ings were tough to get, but she couldn’t en­vi­sion ap­ply­ing all she’s learned to pre­dict stocks on Wall Streets, as some of her con­tem­po­raries did.

She was work­ing on mod­els of two-di­men­sion­al elec­tron gas, a top­ic in sol­id-state physics, when she met Col­in Hill, the fel­low Cor­nell physi­cist with whom she would lat­er start a com­pa­ny named Gene Net­work Sci­ences.

“As I start­ed to dig in­to bi­ol­o­gy, we’re deal­ing with — on some lev­el — a far more vast com­plex sys­tem, and peo­ple were just try­ing to use their em­pir­i­cal minds to un­der­stand it,” she re­called on a Tech­Ton­ics pod­cast from 2018. “They ob­serve it and their minds, they go, oh I un­der­stand this path­way. And I thought, OK, this is a field that re­al­ly does need math­e­mat­ics. And if we could ap­ply now, in the same way we do in physics, sort of ob­ser­va­tion with math to make quan­ti­ta­tive pre­dic­tions, per­haps we can get at re­al­ly un­der­stand­ing fun­da­men­tal­ly why a cell be­comes can­cer­ous and start to tar­get it.”

Af­ter 20 years build­ing both the plat­form and a busi­ness mod­el — in­clud­ing a decade as chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer at the re­brand­ed GNS Health­care, sell­ing its tech plat­form to bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies — Khalil is now join­ing No­var­tis as the glob­al head of the AI In­no­va­tion Cen­ter.

In the role, Khalil will be re­spon­si­ble for “lead­ing deep AI in­no­va­tions for the en­ter­prise, at a glob­al scale and be the in­ter­face be­tween No­var­tis and a num­ber of key ex­ter­nal part­ners in­clud­ing Mi­crosoft and lead­ing aca­d­e­m­ic in­sti­tu­tions,” the Swiss drug­mak­er said in a state­ment.

Vas Narasimhan

Vas Narasimhan has made big da­ta a core tenet of his reign at No­var­tis, shin­ing a bright spot­light on things like a NASA-style clin­i­cal tri­al com­mand cen­ter. He was al­so one of the first Big Phar­ma CEOs to hire a chief dig­i­tal of­fi­cer, bring­ing in Bertrand Bod­son from Sains­bury’s Ar­gos ear­ly in 2018.

The AI in­no­va­tion lab was launched last Oc­to­ber in part­ner­ship with Mi­crosoft, with a broad mis­sion to em­pow­er every No­var­tis em­ploy­ee and ex­plore some of the hard­est com­pu­ta­tion­al chal­lenges in drug dis­cov­ery, de­vel­op­ment and op­ti­miza­tion.

Khalil is now tasked with all of that.

In a farewell note to GNS — which is now dis­tin­guish­ing it­self among a new wave of AI play­ers promis­ing to pre­dict pa­tient out­comes, iden­ti­fy bio­mark­ers and sug­gest drug tar­gets with a causal ma­chine learn­ing mod­el — she re­flect­ed on her big bet on what was then a bare­ly ex­is­tent field and what the fu­ture holds.

The po­ten­tial of AI and deep da­ta is lim­it­less in help­ing us de­ci­pher hu­man dis­ease and bi­ol­o­gy, defin­ing AI as a key part of the path for­ward. I am so proud of the work we have done at GNS and the work our part­ners have ac­com­plished with the help of our tech­nol­o­gy. Leav­ing is nev­er easy, but in tak­ing this next step, I am ex­cit­ed to con­tin­ue bring­ing the promise of AI to fruition in life sci­ences. GNS, and the ex­pe­ri­ences we shared here, will al­ways be a huge part of me.

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