Parallel Bio, an AI biology company pioneering human-first drug discovery, today announced the appointment of Jason Lew as Chief AI Officer (CAIO). Lew will lead the company’s AI strategy end to end, from the robotics that run its automated lab to the data infrastructure and AI models built on its human immune data.

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Jason Lew, Chief AI Officer of Parallel Bio

Jason Lew, Chief AI Officer of Parallel Bio

More than 95% of drugs that clear animal testing fail in human trials, about the same odds as betting on a single number in roulette. Although animal models are poor proxies of human biology, most AI models for drug discovery are still trained on their data, along with unreproducible published human research and mutated cell lines that don’t respond to a drug the way living tissue does. Parallel Bio is fixing that by generating proprietary human data at scale and training AI models on it. The new CAIO role puts both responsibilities under one leader, so every experiment makes the models smarter, and smarter models choose better experiments.

Parallel Bio grows immune organoids, miniature human immune systems, from a biobank of diverse donors. Unlike animal models, the organoids respond to drugs the way people’s immune systems do. A robotics-driven lab runs experiments on them at scale, and the platform is available to partners through an API and an MCP server, so their AI agents can request experiments and iterate on the results.

“Frontier models have been trained on more biology than any scientist could ever read, but much of it comes from mice or irreproducible public data. No amount of scale fixes that, but our lab does,” said Robert DiFazio, co-founder of Parallel Bio. “Jason has spent his career at the forefront of the pieces we’re putting together. He programmed factory robots that mass-produced Apple’s iPhones, built a proprietary device lab at MightySignal that produced data no one else had, and was building on LLMs before ChatGPT existed.”

Lew has spent more than 15 years building products and the engineering teams behind them, and has been building products using large language models since 2020, before they went mainstream. He most recently built the technical org from zero and served as Head of Engineering at a stealth AI startup, where he led evals, agentic harness engineering, and also trained models. In 2020, he founded SkillMagic to build applied AI products on LLMs, with backing from investors including Village Global. Earlier, he co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of MightySignal, whose team was acquired by Instacart and whose business was acquired by Xenon Partners. At Instacart, Lew founded and led the Growth Acquisition team as Director of Engineering, doubling the company’s paid marketing acquisition efficiency. He began his career at Apple as an engineer on the teams that shipped the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Lew holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a master’s degree from Cornell University, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Data is the bottleneck in drug discovery. Drugs spend years in development before anyone knows how people will respond,” said Juliana Hilliard, co-founder of Parallel Bio. “We flip that, starting with human data instead of ending with it. Every experiment tests a drug on real human immune systems, teaching our AI how disease works, and every insight designs the next drug. Jason is here to scale that loop and build AI models that uncover new disease biology and design the drugs to treat it.”

“The outcome we’re after is a big one: knowing which drugs will work in people before they ever reach a trial,” said Lew. “Every great outcome I’ve seen came from exceptional culture, passion, and mission, so that’s what I’m building: an AI-first culture where AI shapes how every person works, and a team driven by a mission to use AI to cure diseases for their fellow humans. There are few better places to pursue that than a lab growing living human immune systems.”

Numerous pharmaceutical companies, including five Fortune 500 companies, are now using Parallel Bio’s platform to test drugs, and the company is also using it to discover new drugs for cancer and autoimmune disease. Named a 2026 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Parallel Bio has its U.S. headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area and its E.U. headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

About Parallel Bio

Parallel Bio is pioneering human-first drug discovery by creating the first map of human biology. The company generates data using groundbreaking biological and computational tools that track real clinical outcomes, enabling earlier, more reliable decisions about disease biology and drug discovery. The platform overcomes the core limitations of traditional animal testing, which almost always fails to predict how drugs will behave in people. Parallel Bio is building its own drug discovery pipeline in cancer and autoimmune disease while collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to evaluate therapies directly in human systems before costly and risky clinical trials. Founded in 2021 by two scientists with deep expertise in cutting-edge human models, Parallel Bio is backed by leading investors in AI and biotech, including Y Combinator, AIX Ventures, Marc Benioff, and Jeff Dean. Learn more at parallel.bio.

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