Speaker Profile
Founder & CEO, Ligandal
Biography
Watson’s current work focuses on AI-driven biomolecular design, creating predictive peptides and receptor-targeting ligands that are engineered to precisely deliver nanoparticles, gene-editing tools, drugs, and nucleic acids to specific cells and tissues. This approach aims to enhance therapeutic specificity, reduce toxicity, and accelerate the development of curative and preventative delivery of therapeutics. Previously, while researching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he developed gene-editing delivery platforms for guided nucleases like CRISPR and TALEN. Today, he applies AI and predictive physics to rapidly generate and evaluate novel targeting agents, mapping uncharted receptor-ligand relationships as an enabling technology for biopharmaceutical delivery systems. With over 80 pending global patents (22 approved, 6 allowed), Watson’s work pioneered integrating cell surface transcriptomics, predictive targeting ligand design, and drug and gene delivery systems. He and his team aim to transform how we approach the world’s most challenging diseases, advancing the frontier of precision therapeutics and diagnostically-responsive medicine.
Talk
Gene therapy, drug delivery, and nanomedicine have advanced alongside Nobel-winning computational protein prediction breakthroughs. This talk introduces LigandAI, a next-generation diagnostically-responsive platform that utilizes AI-driven peptide design and advanced delivery technologies to enable preventative, personalized, and precision tissue-specific targeting for molecular and genetic engineering.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2025 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Gad Getz, Broad Institute
- PMWC 2025 Luminary Award
Luminary Honoree: Jensen Huang, Nvidia
- Continued Jensen Huang, Nvidia
- Predictive Modeling for Drug Development
- Luca Emili, InSilicoTrials
- Knowledge Graphs, LLMs & Foundation Models for Enhanced Drug Development
- Janusz Dutkowski, Data4Cure
- Paul Rejto, Pfizer
- PMWC Showcase
- Peter Ellman, Certis Oncology
- Beyond LLMs: Harnessing Advanced AI Models for Genomics and Transcriptomics (PANEL)
Chair: Gad Getz, Broad Institute
- Yasin Şenbabaoğlu, CZ Biohub San Francisco
- Orly Alter, PrismAI
- Nicolo Fusi, Microsoft - Empowering AI in Precision Medicine with Federated Data Platforms
- Noah Nasser, Datma
- Advancing Global Health through Data Sharing: Practical Strategies and Success Stories (PANEL)
Chair: Luca Foschinii, Sage Bionetworks
- Peter Goodhand, GA4GH
- Karen Miga, UCSC
- Philip Awadalla, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
- Driving Drug Discovery With Low-cost Foundational Omics Datasets
- Gilad Almogy, Ultima Genomics
- Johnny Yu, Vevo Therapeutics
- Stacie Calad-Thomson, NVDIA - Enabling Targeted Precision Drug & Gene Delivery with Predictive AI
- Andre Watson, Ligandal Inc.
- Quantum Leap: The Future of AI and Machine Learning with Quantum Computing
- Matthias Troyer, Microsoft
