Speaker Profile
M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO, Noetik
Biography
Ron Alfa is a physician scientist at the forefront of leveraging technology to tackle unmet therapeutic needs in medicine. He 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. Prior to founding Noetik, Ron was Senior Vice President, Head of Research and acting-CSO at Recursion, where he led the companys 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. Ron 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.
Talk
Foundation models for human biology
Foundation models for human biology
Session Abstract – PMWC 2026 Silicon Valley
Track Chairs:
Gad Getz, Broad Institute & Alex Morgan, Khosla Ventures
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder, OpenAI
• Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder, Apple
Fireside Chat
• Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
• Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder, OpenAI
Target Discovery: Beyond Genomics – Revealing Hidden Layers of Biology with AI
• Keynote: Stephen Quake, CZ Biohub
• Chair: Cindy Lawley, Olink
• Aritro Nath, City of Hope
• Massa Shoura, Phinomics
• Omar Serang, DNAnexus
Foundation Models for Human Biology: Accelerating Immunotherapy Discovery Through Multimodal AI
• Ron Alfa, Noetik
Systems Integration for Drug Discovery and AI
• Hugo Lam, Genentech
Interpretable AI Models for Multi-Modal Biomarker Discovery in Drug Development
• Vitalay Fomin, Numenos
Closing the Loop: Coupling AI with In Vivo Validation
• Gabriel Musso, biosymetrics
Interpretable AI for Biomarker Discovery: Accelerating Drug Development
• Chair: Rajat Roy, PATHOMIQ INC
• Shivanni Kummar, MD, OHSU
Can AI Really Create the Next Blockbuster Drug? Closing the Loop from Discovery to Development
• Chair: Amar Das, Guardant Health
• Ari Caroline, Weave Bio
• Dina Katabi, Emerald/MIT
• Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne
• James Zou, Stanford
Gemini Digital Twins Accelerate Precision Medicine
• Collin Hill, Aitia
Scaling Rare Disease Discovery with AI: From Genomic Data to Therapeutic Insights
• Lisa Gurry, GeneDx
Enabling Targeted Precision Drug & Gene Delivery with Predictive AI
• Andre Watson, Ligandal
Is AI the New Drug?
• Chair: Alex Morgan, Khosla Ventures
• Michael J. Kahana, Nia Therapeutics
