Jessica Gibson is the leader of Ariel Precision Medicine, a startup that has built an AI platform designed to help doctors better treat patients with chronic health conditions by crunching germline genetic and clinical data. Her efforts over the years have led Ariel to be one of the region’s most promising life sciences firms. She has guided the roughly 20-person company through the raise of about $8 million since its launch in 2015. Gibson, a frequent flyer between the region and California, is eyeing significant expansion to the company’s Pittsburgh footprint in the next few months. She also sits on the board of directors for the National Pancreas Foundation.
What has been your biggest challenge getting your startup to where it is today?
The biggest challenge in building an innovative company like Ariel has been education. We had to fill the knowledge gaps for where technology like AI integrates into health care, to translate complex data into new insights for providers and use those discoveries to accelerate the development of patient-centered therapeutics.
How can Pittsburgh better serve its startup community?
I think access to funding is one of the biggest barriers to growth for Pittsburgh-based companies. San Francisco, New York and Boston have traditionally led the way. However, we have all of the pieces to make Pittsburgh a global leader in this space. We have access to incredible talent from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, Highmark and UPMC etc., but access to growth capital and building a better funding ecosystem is really needed to support the startup community.
What do you hope your startup will be doing five years from now?
I think we will be a global, fully vertically integrated precision medicine company leveraging our platform to support early and accurate diagnosis, patient-centered management decisions to providers and a pipeline of new treatments for complex diseases. We are building Ariel to set a new standard and hopefully create the template for other innovative companies to be successful.
