Founder, CEO @epistemic_ai - AI agents x Pharma strategy - #rhabdomyosarcoma dad.
New York
Joined August 2009
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If you work in pharma, pharma services or AI, you know it’s moving at a rapid pace, but also not fast enough. Here are my recent thoughts on where pharma services are headed, along with a few anecdotes from our work @epistemic_ai
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
🚨Last chance 🚨
10 Assistant/Associate Professorship openings
at Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) & University of Potsdam, Germany
Topics: AI / computer science / societal issues of technology / digital health etc.
HPI is a non-profit academic institute seeking to hire several dozens of new professors in the coming years. The positions are also affiliated with the public University of Potsdam.
Apply until Oct 31:
faculty-search.hpi.de/jobpos…
ALT Campus aerial picture including Griebnitzsee Lake
... and by being smarter about what and when to bring to the clinic (or to the next stage).
Despite staggering advances in basic science, drug development research is only getting slower. The main culprit? Increasing clinical trial timelines. The median clinical development pathway has increased from 8.4 years to 9.3 years and pipeline creation has slowed 32% even as R&D spend has gone up.
This is the point I keep making about the main bottleneck to drug discovery and why AI on its own won't be enough. These timelines aren't going anywhere (ofc AI can be used creatively to ease such bottlenecks -- eg via better endpoints that allow smaller cohorts for trials, followed up for shorter periods of time).
Interesting trend of GLP-1 use in oncology (esp. breast and colorectal) in this snapshot from #ASCO26 to #ESMO26 by @epistemic_ai
if you thought cybersecurity had a bad day... get a 2FA you keep for grandma!
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
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Seven hundred and fifty eight subjects received a personalized mRNA, not one of which was described in an IND. Each made in 4 weeks from tumor biopsy.
The process is the product.
Hello personal CRISPR cures.
Today we announced detailed positive results from the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 study evaluating intismeran autogene (mRNA-4157 or V940), an investigational mRNA-based individualized neoantigen therapy, in combination with KEYTRUDA® (pembrolizumab), @Merck's anti-PD-1 therapy, in patients with high-risk melanoma (stage IIB-IV) following complete resection.
These late-breaking results will be presented during a Presidential Symposium at the 2026 European Society for Medical Oncology (@myESMO) Congress.
Read more: feeds.issuerdirect.com/news-…
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
A watershed for FDA regulation. Every patient on the vaccine arm got a different product, with neoantigens chosen from sequencing of each person's own tumor. So FDA had no single active sequence to review. The IND pre-specified how the product would change for each patient.
#ESMO26 embargo lifted following breach.
Detailed data confirm Moderna $MRNA and Merck $MRK cancer vaccine met key endpoints in melanoma trial
Personalized mRNA therapy reduced disease recurrence by 42% compared to standard treatment
statnews.com/2026/10/22/esmo…
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
This is gonna be a bloodbath if Andrew is warning people to go ahead and take any PHP offline until patch drops.
Full details of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the core engine of *all* PHP versions will be released tomorrow, October 21st. If your organization has internet facing PHP applications then you need to be ready to patch the minute the update is released or *strongly* consider taking the application offline until you can:
php.net/index.php#2026-10-20…
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
I’m incredibly excited to share this video, in which I had the extraordinary privilege of mentioning the transformative impact of @OpenAI Codex and AI models on biomedicine, as well as what I’m working to develop using these technologies. I believe the video is beginning to air across various media outlets.
I hope it inspires others to explore the incredible possibilities AI is opening up for biomedical science and humanity! 🖖
I am truly grateful and thankful to OpenAI team for the opportunity and a tiny drop of contribution in this most important era of human existence.🙏
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
Join this amazing community during the era of the RAS Revolution (@DavidHongMD docet)! Do your part at advancing RAS targeting and its clinical impact. We are looking for outstanding findings and clinical trials to be selected for oral presentations😊 submit an abstract by 11/2 – at Towson, MD
Submit an abstract by November 2 for the AACR Conference on Targeting RAS: Mechanisms, Novel Therapeutics, and Clinical Impact (Jan 28-31; San Diego), chaired by Ryan B. Corcoran, Julian Downward, Ignacio Garrido-Laguna, and @Sandra_Misale.
brnw.ch/21x6t0g
#AACRras27
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
My department (Philosophy at UMD) is advertising two positions. First: a junior position in Philosophy of Mind,
philjobs.org/job/show/32477
Second: an assistant, or associate position in, you guessed it, AI Ethics/AI Safety joint with AIM.
philjobs.org/job/show/32633
Spread widely!
The discourse of the impact of AI in biomedicine-pharma suffers from the same binary-outcome fallacy as our political discourse.
What would be the impact on industry if Dario is 20% or 50% instead of 100%? And science is half the battle: strategy, laws, human behavior...
If you care about biotech and drug development watch this interview with Matt Gline, the CEO of Roivant, a biotech firm that is now worth $24 billion.
He talks about why he thinks predictions about AI from people like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are overly optimistic.
“If Dario is right and I'm wrong, and he cures every disease in five years, man, are we all the winners from that outcome,” Gline said.
“I think if you work in this industry, it is very hard not to be skeptical of any of those claims. Because, and I've said this in other settings recently too, biotech is a wood chipper that like is built to like ingest souls and shred them. It's just like such a hard business that like someone comes and they're like, oh, but I've built a computer and I'm going to push a button and all of that goes away and it just works. Like that is probably not the way that's going to go.”
Same in pharma. The context necessary to make a decision is spread across myriads of sources (news, trials, literature, databases, etc.) AND it's much bigger than models' capacity.
The most capable AI model in the world is still limited by the context you give it.
In enterprise software, that context is scattered across repositories, merge requests, issues, pipelines, security findings, and decisions accumulated over years.
Without it, agents guess, repeat work, and make mistakes.
That’s why we’re building GitLab Orbit, a context graph for the entire software lifecycle.
The early results are compelling: up to 45x fewer retries and 4.5x fewer tokens for agentic workflows.
More than 3,500 organizations have already used Orbit during beta. GA coming later this month, try it free while in beta.
This is one of the most important architectural investments we’re making. Better context improves accuracy, reduces cost, and helps agents reason about how a change affects the broader system.
The future of AI isn’t just smarter models. It’s smarter systems around them.
about.gitlab.com/blog/transc…
Doesn't the new Siri AI do that already?
What if Spotlight actually understood the meaning inside your files?
DigUp is an open-source macOS menu bar app powered by EmbeddingGemma 2 that brings 100% local, multimodal semantic search to your Mac.
Instead of searching for file names, you can use natural language to:
📸 Find specific scenes in your photos
⏳ Jump to the exact timestamp in audio or video
💻 Search through your codebase by intent
Everything runs locally in a single vector space.
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work.
At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated.
We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.
Stefano Pacifico retweeted
health of each and every of us with in this complex society is perhaps the most fundamental challenge AI can help us make progress toward.
@OrtetAI is here to be part of this progress toward predictably better care for everyone.
open.spotify.com/episode/10m…