Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in generative artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery and biomarker development. Dr. Zhavoronkov has a combined background in biomedicine and computer technology. He has been recognized by Deep Knowledge Analytics in 2019 as one of the top 100 AI leaders in drug discovery and advanced healthcare globally and has been selected as one of Clarivate's Global Highly Cited Scientists for 2022.
Dr. Zhavoronkov founded Insilico in 2014 and applied AI technologies to analyze a wide range of data types, including anti-aging, disease mechanisms, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. In 2016, he pioneered the application of key technologies in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to drug discovery, discovering novel targets and generating novel molecules with satisfied properties.
Dr. Feng Ren received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 2007. He then spent 11 years in the discovery and development of small molecule innovative drugs at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), where he served as the principal scientist, program leader, director and head of chemistry of Neurodegeneration DPU, a global drug R&D unit in neurosciences in GSK. In 2018, Dr. Ren joined Medicilon, a contract research organization (CRO) providing drug discovery services to the biopharmaceutical companies globally, where he served as senior Vice President and head of the drug R&D service business of the Chemistry Department and Biology Department with over 600 chemists and biologists. In 2021, Dr. Ren joined Insilico Medicine as CSO, responsible for internal pipelines and external collaborations in drug discovery and development. In his career Dr. Ren successfully developed multiple preclinical candidate compounds/clinical phase I compounds for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's disease, and neuropathic pain. Dr. Ren published over 30 peer-reviewed papers and over 20 patents.
Alex Aliper, PhD
President
Alex Aliper, PhD, is the President of Insilico Medicine. He pioneered the application of AI in multi-omics data for drug discovery and drug repurposing, generative chemistry and generative biology and put an AI-designed drug into human clinical trials. He built a team of over 100 AI engineers that developed state-of-the-art software products for target discovery, small molecule generation and clinical trial outcome prediction, and he has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications. He was recognised as "Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare" by Deep Knowledge Analytics. In 2020, Endpoint News selected Alex Aliper as the top 20 under 40 biotechnology executives globally.
Michelle Chen, PhD
Chief Business Officer
Ms. Michelle Chen, Ph.D., is the Chief Business Officer of Insilico Medicine. She has over 20 years of experience in business development, R&D and commercialization. She was the former SVP and head of Corporate Development and Discovery Business Development at WuXi Biologics. She was also the former Executive Director of Business Development, Search and Evaluation at Merck and the biotechnology executive role at Roche. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Sujata Rao, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Dr. Sujata Rao, is the Chief Medical Officer of Insilico Medicine. She has over 30 years of experience in extensive clinical development, academic and medical practice. She previously worked at Eli Lilly, and served as a medical director of integrative sciences at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Dr. Rao received her doctor's degree of medicine from the State University of New York in June 1984.
Min Fang
Non-executive Director
Min Fang is based in Shanghai, joined Warburg Pincus in 2007 and focuses on investments in the Healthcare sector in Asia. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group focusing on Management Consulting for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Mr. Fang is a Director of Beijing Amcare Women's and Children's Hospital Group, HTDK (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., Evercare (Beijing) Holding Group Co. Ltd, Shanghai Haihe Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Hygeia Medical Service Group (6078.HK) and Jinxin Fertility Group (1951.HK). He received a B.A. of International Finance from Fudan University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Kan Chen, PhD
Non-executive Director
Mr. Kan Chen is a Principal of Qiming Venture Partners, focusing on healthcare investment.Before joining Qiming Venture Partners, Kan was a senior scientist at Johnson&Johnson discovering innovative cancer medicine. Prior to that, Kan was a group leader at Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, developing new cancer immunotherapies.Kan earned his PhD degree in Cell Biology from Case Western Reserve University in the U.S. and finished his postdoctoral training in Immunology at Harvard Medical School. He got his bachelor's degree in biological sciences from Fudan University.
Steven Kenneth Galson, MD
Independent Director
Dr. Galson served as the senior vice president, research and development at Amgen. Prior to joining Amgen in 2010, where he also led regulatory affairs, Dr. Galson spent more than 20 years in public service roles across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Energy (DOE), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Galson progressed from deputy director, to acting director, to director of CDER at the FDA. From 2007 to 2009 he served as acting surgeon general of the United States.
Robert Spiegel, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Following a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in medical oncology, Dr. Spiegel was the Director of Developmental Therapeutics at NYU Cancer Center and then spent over 25 years at Schering-Plough (now Merck & Co.), where he joined as the first Director for Oncology Clinical Research, and subsequently held a series of senior executive positions, including SVP Worldwide Clinical Development and Chief Medical Officer from 1998-2010. He led the development of Intron A (interferon alpha), Temodar® (temozolomide), and Remicade® (infliximab), and was involved with approval of over 30 New Drug Applications by the FDA. Dr. Spiegel has been a consultant to the biotech industry and has served on the scientific advisory board and board of directors of multiple biotech companies. He received his undergraduate degree, cum laude, from Yale University and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Former Chief Scientific Officer, Sequenom; Former principal scientist of Human Genome Project
After more than 40 years in academia holding positions in chemistry and human genetics & development at Columbia University, molecular biology at the University California Berkeley, and biomedical engineering and pharmacology at Boston University, Dr. Cantor switched to the private sector where he co-founded Sequenom - the company that first commercialized non invasive prenatal testing, and Retrotope, a clinical stage pharmaceutical company using deuterated essential nutrients as drugs.
Michael Levitt, PhD
Professor, Stanford University; Winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2013)
Michael Levitt is a Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist who has conducted pioneering work on the molecular structure of essential biological compounds. He has made many significant contributions to the study of protein folding and helped to popularise the use of computer modelling in biology. Amongst the foremost of Michael's numerous scientific achievements is his development of the first computerised model of an enzyme reaction, which was subsequently expanded to simulate more generalised protein dynamics. He has also carried out important research on the modelling of antibodies as well as DNA and messenger RNA — work that has informed practical advances in biomedical science. Michael has received many honours and awards for his research, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the 2014 DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, since 1987 he has been a Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee
Chairman and CEO, Sinovation Ventures President, Sinovation Ventures Artificial Intelligence Institute
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and President of Sinovation Venture's Artificial Intelligence Institute. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Dr. Lee received his Bachelor degree from Computer Science from Columbia University, Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Honorary Doctorate Degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong. Author of New York Times, Wall Street Journal bestseller AI Superpowers, Dr. Lee is the Co-Chair of Artificial Intelligence Council for World Economic Forum, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Times 100 (The Most Influential People of 2013), WIRED 25 Icons, Asian Business Leader 2018 by Asia House, and is followed by over 50 million audience on social media.
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, PhD
Professor and Director, Vector Institute, University of Toronto
Professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik joined Harvard University in 2006. He leads the Aspuru-Guzik Research Group, a theoretical physical chemistry group in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Their research focuses on the connections between quantum computation, quantum information, and chemistry; theoretical studies of energy and charge transfer in photosynthetic complexes and renewable energy materials; methods development for electronic structure theory: first-principles methods, density functional theory, and quantum Monte Carlo; and development of the Clean Energy Project, the world's largest distributed computing project for calculating the properties of candidate molecules for organic solar cells.
Donald Small, MD, PhD
Director of pediatric oncology and professor,Johns Hopkins Medical Institute (JHMI)
Dr. Donald Small is Director of the Division of Pediatric Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and the Kyle Haydock Professor of Oncology. He holds joint appointments in Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Human Genetics. He also directs the Johns Hopkins/National Cancer Institute Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship program. Dr. Small's laboratory was the first to clone the human FLT3 gene that is the most frequently mutated gene in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and results in very poor chances of cure for these patients. The investigations of FLT3 led Dr. Small and his team to discover drugs able to inhibit the cancer-generating activity of this important gene. His laboratory showed that a new class of drugs known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors could kill FLT3-affected cells, thus developing one of the earliest molecularly targeted cancer therapies.
Klaus Witte, PhD
Member of the German Society of Pharmacology & Toxicology; Member of the Ethics Commission II, University of Heidelberg
Stevan Djuric, PhD
Adjunct Professor at The University of Kansas; Former head of the global AbbVie Medicinal Chemistry Leadership Team
Dr Stevan Djuric was head of the global AbbVie Medicinal Chemistry Leadership Team at Abbott and is also responsible for the Discovery Chemistry and Technology organization within their Discovery organization and chemistry outsourcing activities. The group's current efforts are focused on new initiatives in the areas of high throughput synthesis and purification, hit to lead chemistry, chemical biology including target identification proteomics and new enabling technology identification and development. He was named an AbbVie Distinguished Research Fellow in 2015. During his tenure at Abbott Laboratories, Dr Djuric has been a Project Leader for groups in the Immunoscience, Metabolic Disease, and Antiinfective areas. Several of these programs have advanced compounds into clinical development and to the market including Abbott's proprietary rapamycin analog, Zotarolimus, currently licensed to Medtronics for use on their vascular stents, marketed in the United States and Europe. Dr Djuric has over 180 scientific publications, presentations and patents/applications pending.
Tudor Oprea, PhD
Professor and Chief, Translational Informatics Division, University of New Mexico
Dr. Oprea has thirty years of experience in machine learning, computational biology, chemistry and medicine, focused on data science, high quality data wrangling and informatics. Expert in drug & target repositioning, cheminformatics & QSAR, virtual screening, and hunting druggable targets. Co-inventor of G1, a selective GPER agonist that received IND clearance and orphan drug designation.Strong interest in Machine Learning/AI using in-depth knowledge mining of electronic medical records, literature, patents, drug labels and clinical trials. Two decades of conceptual development for chemical space exploration, including leadlike and druglike properties, and prioritization of understudied proteins & target selection. Biomedical background with clinical and pharmaco-physiological training.
Bud Mishra, PhD
Professor of Math and CS, Courant Institute, Mathematical Sciences, New York University
Bud Mishra is a professor of computer science and mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, professor of human genetics at Mt Sinai School of Medicine, and a professor of cell biology at NYU School of Medicine. Bud has a degree in Sciences from Utkal University, in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University. Bud is also a visiting scholar at CSHL's Center for Quantitative Biology. From 2001-04, he was a professor at the Watson School of Biological Sciences, Cold Spring Harbor Lab (CSHL) and from 2003-2006, a Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Bud is an IIT, Kharagpur Distinguished Alumnus, NYSTAR Distinguished Professor, AAAS Fellow (engineering: robotics, hardware verification and computational biology), IEEE fellow (robotics and automation) and a fellow of the ACM (computational biology and symbolic computation). His other research activities, outside of computational and systems biology, take place in the newly created Laboratory for Entrepreneurship in Data Sciences (LEDS) focusing on challenges from Finance, Advertising and Ad Technology, Philanthropy, Biomedicine and Engineering. Somewhat immodestly (and with apologies to Albert Arnold "Al" Gore), the laboratory aims to reinvent the Internet of the future.
13+ years experience in molecular biology, cell biology, and immuno-oncology in GSK, Biotech, and academia
Xiao Ding, PhD
Head of Chemistry
10+ years experience in medicinal chemistry in Pharma (Roche & GSK). Proven track record to deliver key milestones for small molecule drug discovery including lead ID, PCC, and IND
Liena Qin
Head of Protac Design and Development
Luoheng Qin, PhD
Director of Medicinal Chemistry
8+ years' experience in medicinal chemistry & project leadership in Eli Lilly, J&J and Jiangsu Hansoh Pharma
Yingtao Liu, PhD
Head of CADD
8+ years of experiences in local pharma/biotech and MNC, and multidisciplinary background, including biology, chemistry and informatics
Jimmy Yen-Chu Lin, PhD
CEO of Insilico Medicine Taiwan
Dr. Lin is CEO of Insilico Medicine Taiwan. He demonstrates his leadership in accomplishing several multimillion pharma collaboration deals and in achieving targeted milestones. Jimmy is experienced in applying multidisciplinary techniques including AIDD and CADD in drug target identification and molecular design. Before joining Insilico, he was a post-doc researcher with Sir David Lane (A*STAR, Singapore) and Gregory Verdine (Harvard University, USA) focused on developing peptides and mini-proteins targeting critical protein-protein interaction in cancers by diversity-oriented biological techniques. He obtained his PhD from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) working at Gisbert Schneider lab where he pioneered in the peptide research field adopting machine learning approaches combining with experimental-lead strategies to multidimensionally design peptides with desired activities and selectivity. He has published several influential papers in high-impact journals across different scientific sectors including AI, computational chemistry, chemical biology and pharmacology. He holds bachelor's degree in pharmacy and chemistry and master's degree in pharmacology both from NTU.
Tzu-Lan Yeh, PhD
Senior Director, External Innovation and Strategic Alliances
Proven records in the filed of computational biology, structural biology, and pre-clinical drug development
Andrey Kukharenko, PhD, PMP
Director, Preclinical Development
11+ years experience in preclinical development & CMC management, regulatory compliance and registration
Xing Liang, PhD
Head of CMC
10+ years of experience in novel drug API process development and CMC project management at Roche and Cinkate
Qingyuan Meng, PhD
Project leader
5+ years biology experience in Amgen and 5 years postdoctoral experience in Columbia University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Jun Wang
General Counsel
10+ year's experience in practicing corporate law at top international law firms and a Top 500 TMT MNC. Have broad experience in financing, merger and acquisition and various general corporate matters. Comprehensive understanding of business collaboration, corporate strategy, corporate governance and investor relationships.
Petrina Kamya, PhD
Business Development Director – Chemistry42
Petrina is the Global Business Development Director at Insilico Medicine focusing on Chemistry42. She has a PhD in Chemistry specializing in Computer Aided Drug Design and a Bachelors Degree in Biochemistry. Petrina has broad experience in the drug discovery and development value chain. She began her career in management consulting for the biopharma industry before joining Chemical Computing Group - a software company specializing in developing Computer-Aided Drug Design platforms - in business development and applications support. At Certara - a global leader in life sciences consulting - Petrina specialized in Market Access and Health Economics and Outcomes Research. Petrina's primary role as Global Business Development Director for Chemistry42 at Insilico Medicine is to forge relationships with key partners in the pharmaceutical industry around the world by leveraging Insilico's assets and services.
Ján Szöllös, MBA
Business Development Director – Europe
Jan is the Business Development Director at Insilico Medicine. He has a Bachelor's degree in Business Management and Economics from the University of Economics in Bratislava and an MBA from the European Polytechnical Institute. Jan's has started his career in life sciences in 2011 when he joined Next Level Life Sciences, first as a Global BD Executive and was later promoted to the position of Senior Conference Producer. In 2019, Jan joined a Slovak AI company Cognexa, where he served as the Head of BD for the life sciences vertical. Since May 2020, Jan is part of the Insilico Medicine, managing company's business presence in the European region and globally covering business activities related to commercialisation of target discovery products and services.
Education: European Polytechnic Institute,Kunovice Master of Business Administration – MBA (Digital Enterprise Management)
University of Economics, Bratislava Bachelor's Degree in Business Management and Economics
Background: Head of Business Unit – Life science, BD Manager Cognexa (AI startup developing AI analytics for medical imaging processing) Responsible for all business operations within the LS industry – BD, sales, marketing, partnerships
Head of Production Next Level Pharma (conference organiser specialising in life science industry) Responsible for a portfolio of events with an annual revenue exceeding 1,5 mil EUR Pioneering topics such as Big Data Analytics and AI utilization in pharma industry