PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--twoXAR, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biopharmaceutical company, today announced the formation of its Scientific Advisory Board and the appointment of Vijay Pande, PhD and Professors Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD and Marina Sirota, PhD. Dr. Pande is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the firm’s investments in companies, including twoXAR, at the cross section of biology and computer science. Dr. Shah is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford University, Assistant Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, and a core member of the Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. Dr. Sirota is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, a core member of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences and part of the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
“We are honored to have Dr. Pande, Dr. Shah, and Dr. Sirota join as the founding members of our new Scientific Advisory Board. They are all exceptional thought-leaders in the fields of biomedical informatics and drug discovery and have been invaluable collaborators in the development and validation of our novel AI-driven platform,” said Andrew A. Radin, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of twoXAR. “Their backgrounds and scientific rigor bring critical perspective to our team as we work towards discovering and developing new treatment options that deliver better outcomes for patients.”
Prior to joining a16z, Dr. Pande was the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is also the founder of the Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project for disease research which pushes the boundaries of the development and application of computer science techniques (such as distributed systems, machine learning, and exotic computer architectures) into biology and medicine, in both fundamental research as well as the development of new therapeutics. Also during his time at Stanford, Dr. Pande co-founded Globavir Biosciences, where he translated his research advances at Stanford and Folding@Home into a successful startup, discovering cures for Dengue Fever and Ebola. He received a BA in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from MIT.
Dr. Shah's research focuses on combining machine learning and prior knowledge in medical ontologies to enable use cases of the learning health system. He received the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) New Investigator Award and the Stanford Biosciences Faculty Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in his graduate class on Data-Driven Medicine. Dr. Shah was elected into the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 2015 and was inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2016. He holds an MBBS from Baroda Medical College, India, a PhD from Penn State University and completed postdoctoral training in biomedical informatics at Stanford University.
Dr. Sirota joined the faculty of UCSF from Stanford University where she was the Lead Research Scientist in the Division of Systems Medicine. Prior to Stanford, she was a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer where she focused on developing precision medicine strategies in drug discovery. Dr. Sirota has an extensive background in bioinformatics and data integration in the context of clinical and molecular data analysis, drug target identification, and drug repositioning. She has a long-standing interest in studying genetic architecture in complex disease as well as novel applications of next-generation sequencing techniques with a special focus on autoimmunity. Dr. Sirota holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in biomedical informatics from Stanford University.
About twoXAR
twoXAR is an artificial intelligence-driven biopharmaceutical company. The company leverages its computational platform to identify promising drug candidates, de-risks the opportunities through preclinical studies, and progresses drug candidates to the clinic through industry partnerships. Based in Palo Alto, California, the twoXAR team includes experts in drug discovery and development, biomedical informatics, computational biology, data science and software development. For more information, please visit www.twoXAR.com.
