Aridni Shah, co-founder and CEO of immunitoAI
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The next in the series featuring conversations with entrepreneurs, technologists and researchers about emerging technologies and what students need to know about these fields.
What do you do?
I am the co-founder and CEO of immunitoAI, a generative AI platform that can create novel therapeutic antibodies entirely from scratch. It is built to be universal so that once trained, it does not need any re-training or finetuning for each target. The same platform can create antibodies for diverse diseases from viral to cancer to autoimmune disorders.
Why is your work important?
Antibodies have great potential for targeted therapy, ensuring that diseases are treated without causing major side-effects. However, traditional methods on antibody discovery rely heavily on animals, causing not just ethical concerns but also challenges of inefficiency, long timelines, and, overall, a poor success rate. Therefore, we have developed an AI-based platform that can generate antibodies more efficiently to increase the success rates of approval for drug purposes and ensure that we have better therapies for many unmet medical needs.
What is exciting about your work?
Adoption of AI in the biotech and pharma industries is relatively recent. There are many challenges that need to be overcome before we start seeing the translation of AI into real-world biology. This requires innovation. Moreover, rapid innovation in AI/ML has made it possible to solve complex problems in Biology, which were considered to be impossible to solve in the past. All this makes our journey extremely exciting.
Any experiences in college that led you to become an entrepreneur?
I pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, where I was exposed to translational research. It made me realise that I loved problem-solving, especially relating to human diseases. I was selected for the Integrated PhD programme at NCBS in Bengaluru where the problems I went after were much larger. The greater the challenge, more the excitement. Towards the end of my PhD, I decided to quit academia and become an entrepreneur to pursue my passion of solving difficult challenges in healthcare.
What should students specifically know about your field?
First, there are many challenges yet to be solved. But it is a tough journey. Second, becoming an entrepreneur or joining a VC as a subject-matter expert is definitely a career path that students should think about and actively pursue. There is a dearth of both and, in the start-up world, we always talk about the need for more students to seriously consider them as a career, especially in biotech.
The writer is an avid follower of emerging technologies and their applications.
Published – August 10, 2025 08:00 am IST
