In 2021, two scientists founded Parallel Bio to harness the human body’s ability to fight disease using the immune system. The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based company is developing a platform for drug discovery and development that replicates human immune systems at population scale.
The company has grand ambitions. “Nearly 95% of drugs that make it to human trials fail even though they worked on animals first,” said CEO Robert DiFazio. “Our goal is to flip that on its head — we want to turn that 95% failure rate into a 95% success rate.”
The company’s co-founders, DiFazio and Chief Scientific Officer Juliana Hilliard, were roommates in San Francisco when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. DiFazio has a Ph.D. in immunology of infectious disease and ran drug discovery programs at Stanford. Hilliard has a masters in molecular bioengineering from the Technical University, Dresden and had worked as the staff scientist, organoid deve…