Jo Varshney
Dr. Jo Varshney is the Founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life, a technology company transforming how the pharmaceutical industry decides which medicines to develop. She created BIOiSIM®, an AI powered translational platform that evaluates drug candidates early and predicts how they are likely to perform in humans, helping companies identify the most viable programs before entering costly clinical trials.
Trained as a veterinarian and PhD in computational biologist, Dr. Varshney built her career at the intersection of biology, data science, and medicine. Through her work in translational research, she saw firsthand how often promising drugs fail late in development because preclinical models cannot accurately predict human outcomes. That insight led her to found VeriSIM Life.
Under her leadership, VeriSIM Life is building a new decision infrastructure for drug development, combining artificial intelligence with deep biological modeling to help pharmaceutical companies prioritize assets, reduce development risk, and accelerate timelines. The platform is being used to evaluate and advance programs across oncology, rare diseases, and neurological disorders, enabling partners to make better strategic choices about where to deploy capital and clinical resources.
The technology has also been applied internally to develop therapeutic programs, including a novel inhaled therapy for pulmonary hypertension that received FDA Orphan Drug Designation and is approaching clinical entry, demonstrating how predictive technologies can materially improve the efficiency of drug development.
Dr. Varshney works closely with pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and regulators to advance a new model for drug innovation where data driven prediction guides development decisions earlier in the pipeline. Her work has earned recognition including Inc. Female Founders 500, Top 100 Women in AI by New York Tech Week, and Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business.