Langer, a co-founder of Moderna along with more than 40 other public companies and one of 12 Institute Professors at MIT, spoke to The Jerusalem Post after deciding to join Immunai’s Board of Directors. It is the first time that Langer is joining a board of directors for an Israeli-based company.
Langer said that he decided to join the company’s board after meeting with Noam Solomon, Immunai CEO and co-founder. “I got to meet Noam and was impressed by him and the other team members that they will make a difference in the world,” Langer said.
Immunai is working on developing a new generation of medicine using a combination of artificial intelligence and big data, with the goal of mapping the entire human immune system.
Langer said that he calls what the company is doing: “immunomics,” similar to genomics, the study of the human genome. “The immune space, if you can unlock it from a disease prediction and drug standpoint, that would be amazing,” he said.
Turning to Moderna, one of the leading developers of the COVID-19 vaccines Israel has purchased, Langer said that as “much as Moderna’s platform for manipulating and programming mRNA has changed the therapeutic landscape, the same can be true with Immunai’s approach to untangling the immune system, perhaps the greatest mystery still to be solved in human biology.”
He also predicted possible collaborations for Immunai with pharmaceutical companies. If a vaccine, for example, has adverse side effects on some people, Immunai, he said, could potentially help predict which people would be affected, including how and why.
“I could see Immunai wanted to start predicting which people it would work for and which side effects people get and why,” he explained.
On Thursday, Immunai announced its acquisition of the Swiss bioinformatics company Nebion. The Israeli company said that Nebion’s technology platform and database would help extend Immunai’s target discovery and drug development capabilities. The company has so far raised more than $90 million in capital.
Some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, including Roche, Novartis, Sanofi and AstraZeneca have used Nebion’s platform to improve their drug development pipelines.
“As with other machine learning endeavors like autonomous driving or NLP, having the right data is key,” said Solomon. “We’re thrilled to bring on the Nebion team and their platform to enhance our target discovery and validation capabilities.”