The world of biotech and drug development has long relied on trial and error and statistical averages. While we often associate this approach with diseases like cancer or autoimmune disorders, it has left the immune system, one of the most important systems in the human body, among the least systematically understood in medicine.

That gap is becoming harder to ignore. In the United States, funding cuts threaten to slow basic research at the very moment when the complexity of biological problems is increasing. As public support tightens, the pressure grows to build new kinds of infrastructure that can help translate scientific discovery into long-term medical progress.

To understand some of these challenges more, I spoke with Noam Solomon, the co-founder and CEO of Immunai. The Israeli company has raised almost $300 million with the mission to create “the Google Maps of the immune system.”

And that mission is massive – requiring time and patience on a mathematically enormous scale.

Immunai aggregates and analyzes vast amounts of single-cell data to understand how the immune system behaves over time and across conditions. The work may not deliver immediate breakthroughs, but it could shape how medicine, industry, and governments make decisions in the future.

Ultimately, it will create what Solomon describes not as a dataset, but as a functional map of the immune system. The distinction matters: A map allows prediction, whereas a spreadsheet does not.

Solomon is unusually candid about the structural constraints shaping biotech innovation. He shares how public funding bodies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, remain essential – but their incentives often reward safety over speed.

Venture capital fills the gap, but this can push companies toward milestones that don’t always align with biological truth or expectation. So Immunai, he argues, sits in the tension between those worlds: trying to build long-term infrastructure in an ecosystem optimized for short-term validation.

The company today has raised $297 million from earlier investors TLV Partners and Viola Ventures, as well as later players Koch Disruptive Technologies, Alexandria Venture Investments, 8VC, Piedmont, and ICON. It has also secured partnerships with top pharmaceutical and academic centers such as Teva and AstraZeneca.

Solomon describes the hardest phase in biotech not as a scientific challenge, but as a structural one. Between early discovery and real clinical impact sits what he calls the Valley of Death: the phase where promising research struggles to secure funding, data, or industrial backing. It’s where academic breakthroughs lack the funding, data, or industrial backing to move forward, and where companies are forced to prove value long before biology is fully understood.

In this sector specifically, “the Valley of Death takes longer, and it’s bigger, and more companies die,” he explained. This is not because it’s wrong, but because the system isn’t built to support long-term understanding.

Bridging that “Valley of Death,” he argues, requires infrastructure, patience, and incentives that reward learning — not just results. “We are a tool or a technology that can support biotechnology companies and biopharma companies to bring their drugs to the market faster, better, and cheaper,” Solomon explained.

The broader implication is clear: as biological challenges become more complex and resources more constrained, the future of biotech may depend less on ‘breakthrough’ moments and more on whether the industry is willing to invest in understanding before certainty.

You can learn more about the company and some of the long-term biotech challenges in the video above.

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