Accelerating the development of lifesaving drugs: U of T alum Joseph Geraci

U of T alum Joseph Geraci says his U of T experience gave him the tools and confidence to revolutionize the development of lifesaving drugs as co-founder of NetraMark. Photo by Kemeisha McDonald.

University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science alum Joseph Geraci’s (BSc 2001, MSc 2002, PhD 2008) creativity and curiosity have always been extraordinary. By the age of 10, he had built his own lie detector and a device to separate food colouring from water.

“I was the only student allowed to use fire in my fifth-grade science project,” says Geraci, who earned his bachelor, master’s and PhD degrees from the Department of Mathematics as a member of Victoria College.

Geraci is now leveraging his U of T education to revolutionize clinical trials and accelerate the development of lifesaving drugs as co-founder, chief scientific officer and chief technology officer at NetraMark.

Geraci credits the university's faculty and resources as foundational to his development, first as a data scientist and machine learning expert and later as an entrepreneur.

“The mathematics program at U of T is one of the best in the world,” says Geraci.

“I stayed for my master’s because of the brilliant faculty, including my thesis supervisor, Professor Michael Sigal. He was just a force of nature – tough, brilliant and incredibly inspiring. Professor Catherine Sulem also helped me unlock my potential and pushed me to think in new ways. They both left a huge impact on me.”

Inspiration strikes

Recruiters lined up for Geraci’s services when he finished graduate school. Splitting his PhD time between U of T and the University of Southern California, he completed three post-doctoral programs (two in medicine, one in AI), while helping organizations across the public and private sectors to integrate AI into insurance, medicine and other fields. While at University Health Network, he discovered the inspiration for the foundation of NetraMark.

“I was working with an ovarian cancer dataset where half the patients had survived treatment, and the other half had not. It was small but rich in genetic data, and that’s when I had a eureka moment – I realized I could use math to organize the patient data,” says Geraci.

With NetraMark, Geraci is addressing a big challenge in medicine: understanding why treatments work for some patients but not for others. He developed a breakthrough mathematical framework that reveals meaningful relationships and patterns about subgroups of patients most likely to respond to specific treatments.

The importance of relationships and connection

In the early days of NetraMark, Geraci found support at MaRS, the U of T-backed innovation hub. He attended business lectures, accessed free legal advice and gained valuable mentorship. The programs taught him how to structure his company and make critical decisions before he had the experience to do it himself.

Reflecting on his career across academics and business, Geraci emphasizes the importance of connecting disciplines and building meaningful relationships with people at U of T.

“There are people in the university’s ecosystem who can become critical nodes in your journey and support you in ways you might not even anticipate,” he says.

“Every endeavour we pursue – even something as abstract as math – is ultimately about people. We create music to be heard, write books to be read and even do math to communicate. All scholarship is about connection.”

Read more about Joseph here. 

Originally published by Faculty of Arts & Science