Author —
Asaf Magen, PhD
Dr. Asaf Magen is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Voyant Bio, a company applying AI-native spatial-omics to design more durable cancer immunotherapies. Before launching Voyant, he served as a computational-immunology assistant professor at Mount Sinai’s Precision Immunology Institute, where he led single-cell and spatial-profiling efforts for first-in-human trials of PD-1 blockade in liver cancer.
Scientific Contributions
Assaf’s research rewired how the field thinks about T-cell exhaustion and response to checkpoint inhibition. His 2023 Nature Medicine paper uncovered intratumoral “immune triads”, spatial niches where dendritic cells, CXCL13⁺ T-helper cells, and progenitor CD8 T cells coordinate the fate of anti-tumor immunity. The work provided a mechanistic explanation for why some T-cell–rich tumors still fail PD-1 therapy and outlined druggable bottlenecks now being pursued by multiple companies.
Translation & Leadership
At Voyant Bio, Assaf is turning those insights into a platform that screens patient-derived tissues to reveal the cell-interaction circuits that make or break therapy. The startup has already attracted partnerships with top-ten pharmas and was selected for the Merck Digital Sciences Studio cohort for its potential to redefine target discovery with human-first data.
Training & Perspective
Originally trained in computational biology, Assaf earned his MSc and PhD at the University of Maryland, where he first merged computation with immunology. He has since authored 40-plus papers, delivered invited talks at Keystone, SITC, and MD Anderson, and consults for biopharma on spatial-omics strategy. His through-line: human data beats mouse models, and immune coordination, not brute force, is the lever for long-term clinical benefit.
