About
Orly Alter is a USTAR associate professor of bioengineering and human genetics at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, a scientific advisory board member of the NCI-DOE Cancer Moonshot collaboration, and the CSO and a co-founder of Prism AI Therapeutics. Her $3.4M NCI Physical Sciences in Oncology project partially supported her developing quantum mechanics-based multi-tensor AI/ML and solving the 75-year-old problem of correctly predicting — glioblastoma patients' survival, targets to sensitize their tumors, and their response — from their genomes. As a genetics postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, she invented the "eigengene" in a top 50 most cited PNAS paper of all time. Her Ph.D. thesis in applied physics, also at Stanford, was published by Wiley and is recognized as crucial to quantum computing.
Alter has mathematically proven that her AI/ML overcomes the challenges of real-world "skinny," noisy, and high-dimensional data. She has computationally shown that her algorithms, known as comparative spectral decompositions, are uniquely able to discover accurate, precise, actionable, and mechanistically interpretable predictors, applicable to the general population, from the multi-omes of as few as 19 patients. She has experimentally demonstrated that the predictors consistently validate across laboratories and sometimes across indications, in federated and imbalanced studies and over time, and outperform all other indicators where they exist.