ai-drug-development
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Iker Huerga
Iker Huerga is the CEO of Pathos AI, a New York- and Chicago-based biotech building what it calls the first true AI-enabled drug development platform for oncology. A data scientist by training with more than two decades at the intersection of machine learning and cancer research, he previously served as Chief Data Scientist for Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca and as an EVP at Tempus Labs, and founded three oncology companies with two successful exits. He took the helm at Pathos in May 2025, days before the company closed a $365 million Series D that valued it at roughly $1.6 billion, with a stated mission to get the right therapies to the right patients, sooner.
Emily Nieves
Emily Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Delineate, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building AI agents that read the scientific literature the way a pharmacologist does - pulling numbers out of buried plots and patents to speed up drug development. A University of Georgia biological engineer turned MIT PhD researcher, she worked on computational modeling at Pfizer and AstraZeneca before deciding the bottleneck wasn't the models but the months it took to feed them. Delineate, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, now works with top-10 pharma companies to turn months of systematic review into weeks.
Andrei Georgescu
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.