Faculty Feature: Dr. Olivier Elemento

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, fellow SVG members Nicholas Bartelo and Annalise Schweickart interviewed Dr. Olivier Elemento. Dr. Elemento is the Associate Director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine and the Director of Englander Institute for Precision Medicine. He is also an active entrepreneur, having founded multiple precision medicine companies.

SVG: You are the co-founder of multiple companies, including Volastra and OneThree Biotech and are also a very involved PI and academic here in the WCM community. When did you decide to make the transition from a more traditional academic to an entrepreneur academic? How did that process arise in your career?

Elemento: Working in a medical school I just realized that many of the projects that you work on may have the potential to be more directly translated into commercial applications or things that could be helpful to patients. I think reasonably early I also realized that licensing to other companies can be done, but why not just start our own companies, so that we could really focus on commercializing products? As faculty members at Cornell, we can't be full time employees of these companies that we co-found. It has to be people on the ground doing the work.  My first company was actually co-founded with a grad student in my lab, Neel Madhukar. He's one of those students who is a great scientist, but also clearly has management skills, has the ability to pitch, to sell, show visions and so on, in a very effective way. So I think it's also that which contributed to my interest, and also sparked the process of starting companies.

SVG: Do you see that entrepreneurial ventures can align with academic outcomes?

Elemento: I see a lot of complementarity between the two enterprises. Companies have to do a ton of R&D to be able to sell important and effective stuff. The R&D that's happening in companies is not fundamentally different from R&D that's happening at the university. Companies are very focused on what they do, and that's maybe a bit different from what you're allowed to do in an academic lab. There are essentially an infinite number of directions that I can take as a head of the lab. Companies don't really have that luxury. They have to be very focused, because they have a limited amount of money, and the amount of money decreases in time as it's being spent. But honestly the pursuit of the truth, the pursuit of understanding biology and medicine, is very substantial also in companies.

SVG: The startups you are a part of are both very heavy data AI based companies. How do you see simple algorithms or methodologies expanding, and being able to grow into, or achieve the growth, that is necessary for startups right now?

Elemento: I think not enough people realize that there's no AI without data. The data aspect is absolutely critical. And so in cases where we started AI companies, there was some data that we were able to use as a way to essentially start the process and fuel the models that we use. But because it is patient data, we have to be extremely cautious in terms of licensing. There are a lot of discussions now in academia about how to leverage the clinical data that exists in medical centers but without the data ever leaving the medical institution. But in any case, these data centric companies have to manage this kind of firewall that needs to exist between the patient data, which obviously needs to be kept private. 

SVG: You are on the faculty committee of RLab NYC, which is the first in the nation, city-funded research center. Its focus is on virtual and augmented reality and related tech. What made you get involved in this project?

Elemento: I think that virtual reality and augmented reality is going to be a pretty major breakthrough. I think there is a great potential for these technologies to change so much about what we do, for example how we train ourselves, how we educate our workforce, how we interact with other people. I keep saying that if I had to start all over again, if I had to choose a direction, I would probably try to be in that space more, and innovate in a field of this virtual augmented reality because I think there's just so much potential.