Shai Shen-Orr, PhD, argues that the immune system is the body’s most sensitive recorder of the environment, and that reading it well is a computational problem.
Prof. Shen-Orr is a Professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, where he heads the Laboratory of Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine. He is a computational biologist by training — a bachelor’s degree from the Technion, a PhD from Harvard University — and his research centers on immune variation: its evolution, its drivers, and its applications for precision medicine.
That focus is where his work meets the exposome. Much of the variation between two immune systems is not written in the genome; it accumulates over a lifetime of infections, diet, medications, stress, and chemical and physical surroundings. Reading those drivers out of immune data is a measurement problem before it is a biological one, and Prof. Shen-Orr frames the obstacle as a growing data-insight gap — the distance between how much biological data we can now generate and how little of it we can actually act on. To close it, he develops new computational approaches purpose-built for immune system data.
That line of work produced IMM-AGE, the first high-dimensional metric of immune health. Rather than reporting a single marker, it summarizes the state of a person’s immune system as a whole, and it is now in use in the XPRIZE Healthspan clinical trials.
Prof. Shen-Orr directs two institutes at the Technion. The Zimin Institute for AI Solutions in Healthcare works to ensure that academic advances in AI reach patients rather than stopping at publication. The Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Healthy Aging Institute tackles the gap between lifespan and healthspan — the years in which people remain healthy and independent — as global life expectancy rises.
Extending his work on immune diversity to global scale, he is co-chief science officer of the Human Immunome Project, which aims to map the diversity of the immune system across the globe to enable predictive outcomes and causal interpretation. Its ambition, and its reliance on standardized measurement across many populations, closely parallels the case being made for a Human Exposome Project.
On the basis of his research he co-founded CytoReason, where he serves as chief scientist. The company is a leading PharmaAI computational disease modeling firm, deployed at enterprise level across multiple top-15 pharmaceutical companies, with the goal of moving drug development from trial and error to a predictable practice at scale.
Fun Fact:
Prof. Shen-Orr hugs a tree every day.