Contributor

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 2023 co-chair of the National Cancer Institute Physical Sciences in Oncology Network steering committee, and the chief technology officer and a co-founder of Eigengene, Inc. Alter received her Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University and her B.Sc. magna cum laude in physics at Tel Aviv University. Her Ph.D. thesis, which was published by Wiley, is recognized as crucial to quantum computing and gravitational wave detection.

Inventor of the “eigengene,” Alter develops artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to compare and integrate datasets of any number, dimensions, and sizes. She demonstrated that her data-agnostic algorithms, the multi-tensor comparative spectral decompositions, discover mechanistically interpretable and clinically actionable whole-genome predictors of survival and response to treatment, applicable to the general population from as few as 50–100 patients, and her platform- and reference genome-agnostic predictors outperform all others, where they exist. Her retrospective clinical trial experimentally validated a genome-wide pattern in brain cancer tumors as the most accurate and precise predictor of life expectancy and response to standard of care. All other attempts to link a patient’s outcome with the tumor’s DNA copy numbers failed. For 70 years, the best indicator has been age. She discovered the brain cancer predictor, and predictors in lung, nerve, ovarian, and uterine cancers, in open-source datasets, proving that her AI/ML is uniquely suited to personalized medicine.