The Digital Fingerprint: Accelerating Personalized Drug Discovery and Development With Luis Valente and Waqas Haque, MD, MPH

In this episode of Exploring Artificial Intelligence in Oncology, Dr. Waqas Haque sits down with Luis Valente, CEO and Co-Founder of iLoF, a digital health company pioneering a breakthrough AI platform to accelerate the future of personalized drug discovery and development.

This episode is also available as a podcast. Click here to listen! 

Waqas Haque, MD, MPH: Welcome, everybody, to today’s episode of the Oncology Advisor Podcast and our artificial intelligence (AI) and tech series. I’m joined by our guest today, Luis Valente, who’s the CEO and Co-Founder of iLoF. Thanks so much for joining us today, Luis.

Luis Valente: Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Haque: You’ve had a really interesting background in healthcare entrepreneurship. You’re running this new company at the intersection of AI and improving patient outcomes. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to found iLoF.

Mr. Valente: Absolutely. I’m a CEO of iLoF. iLoF is a deep tech, health tech company working in the personalized medicine space. We’ve been collecting very large amounts of multimodal data ranging from omics to optomics to genomics, and we’ve been building models that can actually help phenotype patients and help drug discovery and drug development in both the clinical and the preclinical phases.

As for my background, actually, I started my life as a computer scientist, and then I worked for a number of years in a wide array of industries from commodities to tech transfer to connected vehicles and smart cities. I spent some time working on a really cool American scale-up that got me into entrepreneurship. Then, after that, together with two amazing co-founders, I went on to found iLoF.

Dr. Haque: Awesome, thanks for sharing that. Just for audience, who are more of an oncology kind of background, tell us more about iLoF’s platform, and tell us a little bit about the fingerprint generation and fingerprint matching. I’m curious to hear more about that.

Mr. Valente: Absolutely. One of the big difficulties that we believe currently exists in the personalized medicine sector is getting reliable data sources and reliable data that you can use to train your models. Basically, what our platform does is we collect and use data from biological samples. We collect digital fingerprints that correlate with the ensemble of particles in patient’s fluids, either serum or plasma. Then, through advanced signal processing, we extract information from this digital fingerprint and train artificial intelligence models that correlate the specifics of each patient’s biology to clinical outcomes.

I can give an example—for example, this allows us to understand why some patients react better to a certain ovarian cancer treatment versus a different one, or why a certain patient is going to have very bad side effects when getting a certain medication and shouldn’t enrolled into a clinical trial because it’ll actually be harmful to the outcomes.

We’ve been running this for five years. We’ve historically been mostly working in the neurogenerative space and in oncology. Historically, we were 100% neurogenerative in the last few years, and then we kind of branched out. We’re still a tiny, under-30-person team that has raised around $10 million so far.

Dr. Haque: I was looking online at the website and some of the other podcasts you’ve done, and it looks like there’s lot of hype around the Alzheimer’s space that you all have worked in. For our oncology physician, can you talk a little bit about the results and some more background about the ovarian cancer stratification that you’re working on?

Mr. Valente: In ovarian cancer, we’ve got access to a really world-class cohort from a leading institution in the UK. We struck up a partnership, and basically, we were able to create an initial model that proves our abilities to do differential screening. In on ovarian cancer, as we know, unfortunately, getting the treatment right is really key. Unlike Alzheimer’s where there are very few treatment approaches, luckily in ovarian cancer, there are already a couple, but it’s very important to understand which ones are right for what patient from the beginning. Depending on the subtype or the phenotype, you might want to work with a more aggressive treatment approach or with a more moderate one. Basically, we’ve created a model that, over 80% of the time, is able to accurately predict the patient that has the highest probability of benefiting from a certain treatment versus another. This, of course, increases the likelihood and probability of a smooth recovery and of reducing negative effects from the cancer.

Dr. Haque: That seems like really great results. I think gynecologic malignancies are a really important area for us to target. Ovarian cancer is obviously very deadly, and I learned recently that endometrial cancer is actually surpassing ovarian cancer in the statistics. There’s a lot of changing biology and a lot of changing data out there, so that’s really cool that you’re able to work on that.

Taking a step back, you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve worked in the startup space. Tell us about some of the challenges that you might face in raising funds and trying to sell your scientific breakthroughs to other people.

Mr. Valente: I always say, number one, that being in a startup is like your entire career is condensed in approximately seven to 10 years. You start at “I don’t understand anything,” and then you start being proficient, and then you start rocking it. You go through what would be your entire career in the period of seven to 10 years, which has good things and bad things. The good thing is that, of course, you grow a lot as a person. The bad thing is that you also grow old a lot. It’s a very intense activity. It’s a little bit like having a baby in a way that it takes a toll on you and it’s rewarding, and you do see why it’s the reason people have kids. It’s extremely rewarding, but it takes its toll on you, and you really need to love what you’re doing.

That’s the second part—that you need to fall in love, but not with the product. You need to fall in love with the problem you’re solving. I think a lot about being an entrepreneur is to be absolutely obsessed with solving a certain problem. It doesn’t matter how, it doesn’t matter your product, it doesn’t matter in which situation. You just need to identify a problem that you care too much about, and then you just can’t help but focus on it. You need to be obsessed. I think those two things are, in a way, what it takes to be an entrepreneur. You need to be ready to make sacrifices that other people wouldn’t, and you need to really be obsessed about solving a particular problem. With these two things, I think that you can tackle most problems in the world.

Dr. Haque: I do think that working in a startup space can kind of make you seem like you get older, but I also think you look very young. I saw that you got a Forbes study award a few years ago too. My wife actually won that award last year, so kudos to some of the drive you have towards solving this problem. Can you talk about any recent partnerships or emerging developments that iLoF is working on?

Mr. Valente: This is still not public, but it’s also not under embargo any longer. We just very recently started to deploy into a large clinical study in the US called Bio-Hermes, with 30 clinical trial sites. It’s within the neurogenerative space. It’s going to allow us to hopefully help 2,000 patients at 30 clinical sites. The trial is mostly in the US but also has a couple of clinical sites in Canada and in the UK. We also just recently started branching out our product offering with a new product within the preclinical space where we’re helping companies that are developing cell and gene therapies, including companies and biotechs that are developing cell and gene therapies in the oncology space. We’re helping them with insights, new data modalities, and overall accelerating the preclinical development, especially in treatments that use nanoparticles as drug delivery systems—next-generation therapeutics including cell and gene therapy. We’ve recently struck up a pilot partnership with an institution in Sweden, and we’re rolling it out slowly across the globe.

Dr. Haque: That’s really exciting, thanks for sharing that. I have just a couple other questions before we go. Obviously, the world of AI medicine is constantly changing. There are always new papers coming out and new results. How do you keep up with literature? What’s your information diet like?

Mr. Valente: That’s an excellent question. In my case, I don’t think it’s very scalable. The way I do it is I go to my co-founder, our COO. She also, in a way, wears the scientific hat, and she’s also obsessed with the problem as much as I am. We have a channel where we share bibliography and where we share interesting papers that came out. Every now and then, especially sometimes on holidays or during weekends, there are a couple of outlets I follow and visit every now and then to check out what cool new technology is out there. One thing that I started doing more recently is advising earlier pre–seed stage companies. A lot of them are spin-outs coming out of academia or scientific groups trying to make an impact, and that allows me also to keep up with a lot of the new tech that is being developed.

Dr. Haque: Last question, for any oncologists or other clinicians who are trying to learn more about AI and incorporate it into their workflow or practice, what kind of advice would you give to those people?

Mr. Valente: My number one piece of advice is to do it. Just do not fall off. Do not let the AI wagon go without you. It’s really going to be one of the transformative technologies of our time. In healthcare, I think there’s even more impact than in most industries to be made, especially in increasing the power or increasing the impact that physicians can actually make for patients. My advice would be to research it and read about it. There are a couple of blogs that I follow. I talk about it every now and then on my LinkedIn page. Just see it as a friend rather than a foe, and do dedicate time to understand it better and understand how it can actually help you do your day-to-day job. Don’t just wait for someone to knock on your door and say, “Hey, you’re a doctor. Here’s this AI tool. Use it.” Just proactively try to see how this can make you a better doctor.

Dr. Haque: It’s really good point. I think for physicians as well, when we’re not really at the forefront of looking at technology advancements, then it kind of advances without our input and it’s not really good for anybody. I think electronic health records are a really good case example of that, so I definitely agree. Oncologists and physicians should be more involved with AI, learn at least a little bit about the vocabulary, keep up with some of the advancements, and then potentially try to incorporate it into their workflow. Thanks so much for sharing your insights today, and thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Mr. Valente: Amazing. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Haque: Of course.

About Luis Valente and Waqas Haque

Luis Valente is the CEO and Co-Founder of iLoF, a digital health company pioneering a breakthrough AI platform to accelerate the future of personalized drug discovery and development. He founded his first company at 18 years old and has been worked in various industries in the technology space. Mr. Valente is an award-winning business manager and engineer and has been named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for Science and Healthcare.

Waqas Haque, MD, MPH, is a Hematology/Oncology Fellow at the University of Chicago. He recently completed his Internal Medicine Residency at New York University (NYU) in a Clinical Investigator Track. Dr. Haque has balanced his patient care work with a variety of research projects. During his fellowship training at the University of Chicago, he plans to further his work in innovative clinical trial design, value-based care delivery to cancer patients, and clinical investigation.

This transcript is edited for clarity. Any views expressed above the speakers’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Oncology Data Advisor.