A Letter From the Founders

The immune system is the master regulator of health and disease. Medicines that target the immune system – called immunotherapies – are the most effective drugs we’ve ever developed, whether it’s a new cancer therapy that rapidly kills tumors or a vaccine that prevents us from getting sick in the first place. Therefore, immunotherapies will be the future of medicine as they continue to be developed and deployed.

However, there are significant challenges in discovering new immunotherapies. Using animal models and other models that don’t fully model the human immune system, an inability to model humans at the population level, and the lack of tools to bring these together with computational approaches are stopping us from realizing the full potential of the next generation of medicine.

Organoids are small, 3D mini models of human organs (about the size of a pencil eraser) that are the world’s most accurate models of disease, and have recently emerged as a powerful technology for drug discovery. Incredible advances in bioengineering and machine learning have also been recently developed that allow us to grow organoids at a huge scale and be able to analyze the hundreds of cells and thousands of molecules that comprise the immune system in a way that humans simply cannot.

Our platform combines our best-in-class human immune organoids with scale and computational methods to generate unprecedented insights into human health and disease. Not only can we rapidly discover new drugs that we know will work in patients from the start, but we will know how well a drug performs across an entire population - something not currently possible with existing technology. This knowledge will allow us to engineer therapies that will work in as many people as possible, ensuring a safe and effective cure for everyone.

Join us on our journey as we create new tools to push the boundaries of what is possible.


Robert & Juliana

Co-Founders of Parallel Bio

Meet the team

Bringing together immunotherapy, data science, bioengineering, and drug discovery experts.

Juliana L. Hilliard

Co-Founder & CSO
  • MSc in Bioengineering
  • Led R&D drug discovery teams
  • Developed novel organoid technologies
  • Discovered novel disease targets
  • Created and commercialized organoid drug discovery platforms

Robert M. DiFazio

Co-Founder & CEO
  • PhD in Immunology
  • Stanford University department director
  • Managed $100M R&D portfolio
  • Led program to invent first immune organoid
  • Led drug discovery teams over 10+ years

Anya Flood Taylor

Senior Research Associate

Ari Gesher

Head of Technology

Jacob Turner

Senior Scientist (Immunology)

Kelly Volk

Associate Scientist

Olivia Balduf

Senior Research Associate

Victor Carriere

Associate Scientist

Advisors

Darrell Irvine

Bioengineering & Immunology
Underwood-Prescott Professor at MIT, HHMI

Matt Hicks

Communications
Former Facebook, Zendesk, Celonis

Nima Aghaeepour

Data Science
Vice Chair of Research at Stanford University

Sara Sperling

People & Culture
Oxegen Consulting

Our Investors