virtual-cell
(3)
Daehwan Kim
Daehwan Kim is a computational biologist and software engineer whose genome-alignment tools - TopHat, HISAT and HISAT2 - are cited more than 78,000 times and are used by researchers worldwide to read DNA and RNA data. A former Michael L. Rosenberg Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he co-founded Omphalos Lifesciences, where he invented L++, a high-level programming language meant to describe living systems the way C++ describes machines. His goal is a fully programmable, simulatable virtual cell.
Shafique Virani
Shafique Virani is a neurosurgeon-turned-biotech dealmaker who serves as Chief Business Officer of Noetik, an AI-native cancer therapeutics company in South San Francisco. He has spent two decades turning early-stage science into landmark partnerships, including one of the largest drug discovery deals ever struck at Recursion, and earlier built a neuroscience and rare-disease portfolio at Roche/Genentech that produced approved medicines like Risdiplam and Enspryng. At Noetik he is selling a new idea to pharma: not AI services, but licensable AI infrastructure for biology.
Ron Alfa
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.