2021 HENAAC Awards
Over the last two years, the general public has come to appreciate the tremendous amounts of time, brain power, and resources it takes to bring new medical treatments online. In fact, the ability to rapidly develop and evaluate new chemical compounds and deploy them for pharmacological applications has been a kind of Holy Grail in the scientific community for many decades. In the quest for this particular Holy Grail, Dr. Daniela Brunner is our Indiana Jones.
Born in Argentina, Dr. Brunner earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Buenos Aires. She soon jetted off to England to pursue her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at King’s College Cambridge, before a prestigious post-doctoral position at Columbia University brought her to the United States.
Since joining PsychoGenics during its startup phase over 20 years ago, Dr. Brunner has been a pioneer in the field of preclinical, Artificial Intelligence-driven drug discovery. It was Dr. Brunner who conceived and built Smart Cube, PsychoGenics’ revolutionary platform that unleashes the power of machine-learning on the daunting task of identifying drug compounds with high potential. SmartCube accomplishes this by combing through massive amounts of video and other data to pinpoint particular responses in the central nervous system.
Dr. Brunner’s vision for SmartCube wasn’t merely a theoretical one. Her stroke of genius was to merge the software, the hardware, and the analytical techniques of SmartCube. She assembled a team of robotics engineers to bring her concept of mounting cameras, sensors, computer-controlled stimuli and digital vision for video analysis into one self-contained box – or ‘cube’ – to life.
Before SmartCube, PsychoGenics along with the entire industry had to rely on lengthy and costly behavioral tests to evaluate drugs for the treatment of psychiatric diseases. SmartCube driven initiatives have already resulted in one drug that is now in Phase III clinical trials for treating schizophrenia. Five more drugs are expected to reach late clinical trials in the next few years, potentially benefiting millions of people suffering from additional diseases of the central nervous system such as depression and bipolar disorder, to name just a few.
In addition to her work with PsychoGenics, Dr. Brunner founded Early Signal and Science Forward – organizations focused on merging A.I. with other technologies to improve human health, such as clinical platforms for big-data analytics using wearables and home sensor devices. She is also the author of more than 70 publications, including several book chapters, and she holds more than 10 patents and patent applications.
In receiving this award, Daniela follows in the footsteps of her husband, Dr. Gustavo Stolovitsky, an IBM Fellow and winner of HENAAC Pioneer Award in 2013 for his own groundbreaking work in nano-bio-technology. He was also the mastermind behind his wife’s nomination for this prestigious honor.