Post by Pear VC

New episode of the Pear Healthcare Playbook podcast 🎙️ Rachel Gleyzer sat down with Ron Alfa, MD, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of NOETIK. They're building an AI-native platform for cancer biology that trains foundation models on large-scale human data to predict patient response and uncover new drug targets. In this episode, Ron discusses: 🧬 Why most drugs don't fail because of the wrong target. They fail because companies can't identify which patients will respond 🔬 Why Noetik spent nearly two years generating its own patient datasets before training a single model 🧠 Why spatial context—not just cell-level data—is critical to understanding disease biology 🤝 The thinking behind Noetik's $50M licensing deal with GSK, and what it signals for biology foundation models Link in comments. 🔗