Tech on Drugs with Shai Shen-Orr

Hosted by CytoReason

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Dec 2025

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About the show

In a big-data age, drug development needs to be reinvented. The data revolution is already taking place in finance and commerce, in agriculture and transportation. There’s no reason for pharma to stay behind. “Tech on Drugs” is a podcast about the future of pharma. From novel targets to novel biomarkers. From disease models to population models. From clinical trials to synthetic trials. It’s a show about the doctor in the clinic who needs to build on molecular features and about the bioinformatician in the lab who needs to build on clinical endpoints. In each episode, our host, Prof. Shai Shen-Orr, gets to do what he loves to do most. He gets to speak with some of the world’s top scientists and healthcare executives about the industry's digital transformation.

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13 recent

December 15, 2025Episode 335 min

Tech On Drugs - Se3Ep3 - Shai on Nvidia AI Podcast

In this special episode, we are sharing a conversation from the NVIDIA AI Podcast, hosted by Noah Kravitz, featuring our host Shai Shen-Orr.The discussion dives into CytoReason’s partnership with NVIDIA and how computational disease models turn massive biological data into actionable insights for faster, smarter drug development. Shai and Noah discuss:Why biology is a deep data problem with too many features and too few samplesHow agentic AI workflows help scientists keep up with exploding molecular and clinical dataWhy CytoReason encourages teams to automate the routine to focus on what really mattersWhy trust and interpretability are essential, with every prediction grounded in mechanism, not just statisticsAnd how computational disease models help pharma leaders decide what to develop, who to treat, and whyEnjoy this special Tech on Drugs crossover episode!

August 13, 2025Episode 227 min

Season 3 - Episode 2 - The Single Cell Revolution - Prof. Fabian Theis

What happens when two leading computational biologists swap code and models for a lively conversation?Fabian Theis, a pioneer in single-cell and AI-driven biomedical research, joins Shai for a fascinating exchange about:— The single-cell revolution and how it’s reshaping the industry.— The promise (and hype) of foundational models.— And why tomorrow’s R&D lab might be a “virtual biotech” — or even a one-person operation!

May 11, 2025Episode 11 hr 1 min

TOD - 2025_04_17 - Nir Hacohen

We’re kicking off Season 3 of Tech on Drugs with Prof. Nir Hacohen — Director of the Center for Cancer Research at MGH, founding director of the Broad Institute’s Cell Circuits Program, and a distinguished member of CytoReason's Science Advisory Board.Shai and Nir cover everything from the rise of antibodies and the promise (and pitfalls) of STING agonists, to the future of personalized cancer vaccines and a mysterious immune cell that appears only in patients with sepsis — a “cell that doesn’t exist” in healthy individuals.This is a candid look at how deep biology, smart computation, and persistence can reshape how we treat cancer.

November 21, 2024Episode 443 min

Tech On Drugs - Se2Ep4 - Dr. Tom Bumol

Tom Bumol's career spans major roles at Eli Lilly, the Allen Institute, and beyond. He is also a distinguished member of CytoReason's Science Advisory Board.In this episode, Tom shares insights into drug development's successes, failures, and future direction, including:Lessons from lupus - the story of a failed lupus trial that revealed the critical importance of understanding disease heterogeneity and inspired new approaches in immunology.From trial and error to predictability - how AI and systems biology can transform drug development by embracing human complexity.Combination therapies and beyond - designing drugs with precision to improve patient outcomes and broaden therapeutic reach.All this and much more in a captivating discussion with our Chief Scientist Shai Shen-Orr. Enjoy!

October 14, 2024Episode 330 min

Tech On Drugs - Se2Ep3 - Dr. Yair Benita

This episode was recorded in the beautiful Island of Crete, at CytoReason's employee conference, the CytoSummit.CytoReason's Co-founder Shai Shen-Orr hosts AION Labs CTO Yair Benita. Yair is a computational biologist who spent more than 20 years studying biology through omics and clinical data in an effort to piece together mechanisms of human disease. He’s been leading computational teams in drug discovery at CytoReason, Compugen, and Merck. In this candid conversation with Shai, Yair reflects on the highs and lows of his professional journey over the past two decades, as well as the broader industry landscape.Key questions discussed include:What major shift did Keytruda's development introduce to the industry?How did pharma's 'Kodak moment’ come about?What needs to happen in pharma R&D so data is no longer JUST supporting decisions, but actually driving them?And plenty of other industry gems. Enjoy!

June 20, 2024Episode 223 min

Tech On Drugs - Se2Ep2 - Prof. Asya Rolls

While most neuroimmunologists try to understand how the immune system affects the brain, Prof. Asya Rolls has taken the road less traveled in her lab at the Technion. She and her team try to understand how the brain affects the immune system. In this episode of Tech on Drugs, Asya and Shai talked about the power of placebo and how brain activity, particularly in the reward system, can influence the immune system. They discussed the immense potential of harnessing brain-immune pathways for new treatment approaches. For example, research that shows that stimulating certain brain areas can boost immune responses and even reduce tumor sizes.But it's not so simple; as Asya put it, this is "complexity on steroids." To better understand the brain-immune connection and develop more holistic treatments, future research will require advanced computational models for different diseases and tissues, as well continuous data integration.

March 21, 2024Episode 125 min

Tech On Drugs - Se2Ep1 - Prof. Eran Segal

This one was fun.In the latest episode of Tech on Drugs, Shai met with Prof. Eran Segal from the Weizmann Institute of Science.Eran heads a multidisciplinary team of computational biologists and experimental scientists working in the area of Computational and Systems biology. His lab at Weizmann aims to develop personalized nutrition and personalized medicine using machine learning, computational biology, probabilistic modeling, and analysis of heterogeneous high-throughput genomic and clinical data.Among other things, Eran and Shai talked about precision nutrition and preventative medicine, and the importance of large-scale, longitudinal health data for advancing personalized medicine and improving drug development efficacy.

September 28, 2023Episode 528 min

Tech On Drugs - Episode 5 - Prof. Ido Amit

Our guest this time was Prof. Ido Amit, whose lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science pioneered single cell transcriptomic analysis and its application to the immune system.Amit’s research focuses on some of the most important questions in immunology – specifically those relevant to novel targets for immunotherapy in autoimmune diseases, neurodegeneration, and cancer.A fascinating discussion between two leading scientists about the potential of single cell RNA analysis to revolutionize target discovery and drug development.

April 28, 2023Episode 426 min

Tech On Drugs - Episode 4 - Dr. Emanuele de Rinaldis, Sanofi

What will the future of precision medicine look like 5-10 years down the line? And how will AI accelerate this future?I asked Dr. Emanuele de Rinaldis to answer this and many other questions. Emanuele is VP, Global Head of Precision Medicine & Computational Biology at Sanofi R&D. He believes that AI will help us define new taxonomies of diseases. We will identify different types of Asthma, different types of Fibrosis.And AI will help us create a new textbook – not one driven by just clinical observations, but a textbook driven by genetics and gene expression, together with real world evidence. This will take drug development and precision medicine to a level we have never seen before.

March 16, 2023Episode 334 min

Tech On Drugs - Episode 3 - Prof. Yanay Ofran

Our guest this time is serial biotech entrepreneur Yanay Ofran. Yanay is a renowned computational biophysicist and the CEO and Co-founder of Biolojic Design. More importantly, Yanay, together with his stellar team, developed the first AI-designed antibody. He shared with Shai his (strong) opinions about: The barriers to precision medicine (and how to overcome them).The potential of AI-designed antibodies (and how, just a few weeks ago, a cancer patient in North Carolina became the first American to receive treatment with such an antibody).The reasons why even in this golden digital era drug development is still insanely expensive (and how - to use a battle metaphor - we've mastered the intelligence phase, we have great ammunition, but we need to seriously up the ante in execution!).Enjoy!