Jorge reis filho biography of alberta

As Vice President of Cancer Biomarker Development at AstraZeneca, Jorge Reis-Filho seeks to develop and validate the next generation of mechanistically informed and clinically deployable biomarkers and to facilitate access to optimal treatments for cancer patients worldwide.

What are the main responsibilities of your current role? I oversee development of the next generation of cancer biomarkers.

I was a big Sonic Youth fan in the nineties and managed to get some of their guitars. I read it for the first time when I was 13 and go back to re-read it.

What are your hobbies?

Since then, we have made significant strides in advancing the development and implementation of multimodal foundation models and AI agentic frameworks to deliver innovative AI-driven approaches for patient selection and clinical development.

Thank you, Susan Galbraith, for the opportunity to lead the ODSAI team during this transformational period.

I always focus on science first, but find it equally important to remain entrepreneurial, taking calculated and healthy risks. Author of more than 700 peer-reviewed papers, Dr. Reis-Filho has defined molecular taxonomies for rare tumours, created a predictive classification of breast cancer, elucidated the causes and consequences of intra-tumour genetic heterogeneity, and pioneered technologies ranging from single-cell DNA sequencing of archival tissue to FDA-cleared computational pathology diagnostics.

He is also the youngest individual ever elected Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists by published works. My primary focus is creating mechanistically informed and clinically deployable biomarkers to help deliver the right drug to the right patient at the right time in their therapeutic journey. This patient-first approach underpins all our efforts in advancing cancer treatment.

How has digital technology changed your work or workplace culture? The impact could not be more profound.

Jorge S. Reis-Filho leads a cross-therapeutic team of oncology and biopharma AI across AstraZeneca, primarily focusing on the development and deployment of multimodal foundation models, advanced data science approaches, and agentic AI frameworks to drive innovation throughout AstraZeneca’s pipeline and portfolio. I play bass, while he plays the drums.

By uniting the exceptional AI talent across our R&D footprint, we can further accelerate drug discovery and transform clinical development, maximizing the impact of these compounding technologies throughout biopharma and oncology at scale.

This opportunity to build an ecosystem of patient-centric, AI-driven scientific innovation across R&D is a true privilege.

But I imagine a far more interwoven space with clear firewalls at multiple stages to ensure benefit and equitable opportunity for all patients. We have come such a long way."

If you could change one thing about the pharma industry, what would it be? It would be to enhance the visibility and transparency of the remarkable scientific and technical advancements we are achieving in pharma.

It highlights what we can learn from extreme experiences and how much we have to understand about compassion, the challenges of being in a system where everything is being disrupted, and the meaning of our existence in that context. These are crucial values for leading a complex and diverse group of scientists, businesspeople, and experts together to drive strategy.

We'll see a much more holistic way to look at individual patients, integrating data from multiple sources, assisted by AI, to tailor personalised treatment based on predictions with a much greater level of accuracy.

Challenges will arise from regulatory, accountability, and ethical standpoints. It talks about the meaning of our existence, but in the context of an epidemic.

We need to have integrity and compassion, and a drive to do for others what we hope they would do for us. With the strategic investment AstraZeneca made in computational pathology, we will eventually have access to the biomarkers stemming from the analysis of digital images derived from histology and immunohistochemistry.

What do you do in your free time? I collect Rock ‘n Roll memorabilia. Dr. Reis-Filho earned a joint MD from the University of Porto, Portugal, and the Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil; completed histopathology training at the University of Porto; and obtained a PhD in breast cancer molecular pathology from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, where he rose to Team Leader and subsequently Professor and Chair of Molecular Pathology.