Bissan Al-Lazikani, PhD, FRSB, FISCB, MBCS

About Dr. Al-Lazikani ::

Dr. Al-Lazikani is a data scientist and drug discoverer. She applies data science and machine learning to address key challenges in cancer drug discovery and development. Dr. Al-Lazikani has drug discovery experience in both academia and the biotechnology industry. Through this experience, she encountered the myriad of hurdles faced through drug discovery and development pipelines. Dr Al-Lazikani’s research focuses on bringing the power of Data and Artificial Intelligence to address these hurdles, accelerating drug discovery and de-risking innovation. Specifically, she applies data science approaches to integrate multi-disciplinary and multi-modal data to inform all aspects of cancer translational research; and to develop novel machine learning algorithms that learn from these integrated data. Together, her approaches inform decision-making and experimental design throughout the drug discovery and development pipeline. She led the development of the world’s largest public cancer drug discovery platform (canSAR.ai) to inform target selection and prioritization for drug discovery. She now leads the Therapeutics Data Science Initiative at MD Anderson Cancer Center to maximally exploit data to discovery novel drugs and individualize drugs and drug combinations for patients. ::