Michal Ozery-Flato, PhD
IBM Research – Israel
Dr. Michal Ozery-Flato is a research staff member in the AI for Accelerated HC&LS Discovery department in IBM Research-Israel. Since she joined IBM Research in 2009, Michal led various clinical data analysis projects in different disease areas and developed several machine learning and causal AI tools for large-scale biomedical data. Michal holds a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science, and MSc and PhD in Computer Science, all from Tel Aviv University, Israel.
More info at: https://research.ibm.com/people/michal-ozery-flato
Foundation Models for Biomedical Discovery and Reasoning
The discovery of new drugs is a laborious, lengthy, and costly process, often hindered by low success rates and the complexity of biological systems. Typically, it takes 10-15 years for a new drug to progress from initial discovery to market approval, with only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials ultimately receiving FDA approval. However, recent advancements in AI technologies and the growing availability of extensive biomedical data are driving significant innovation in drug development. This talk will explore key challenges in drug discovery, including patient and disease heterogeneity and the integration of multi-modality and multidomain data. It will review critical computational research problems in drug discovery and highlight recent AI methodologies designed to address these challenges. Finally, it will presente IBM’s biomedical foundation model technologies, which leverage large-scale omics and chemical data across various modalities to support downstream tasks in drug discovery, such as generating and validating small molecule and biological drug candidates and identifying novel therapeutic targets.
Roy Cecil
IBM Ireland
Roy Cecil is a Senior Engineer working with the Data and AI Technical Sales team based out of IBM Ireland. Currently he is a Technical Specialist in databases, data replication and data archiving technologies but has held engineering roles in the product development of Db2 and Big SQL in the past. He has joined IBM in 2008 and has 25 years of Industry experience.