SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Entos, Inc. (“Entos” or “the Company”), the creator of a cutting-edge platform combining AI-driven technology and automated synthesis to design small-molecule therapeutics, today announced that it has appointed Jack Taunton, Professor of Cellular Molecular Pharmacology at University of California, San Francisco, and Ken Brameld, Senior Advisor for Samsara Biocapital, to the Company’s Scientific Advisory Board.
“The addition of Jack and Ken to our team brings further drug discovery and pharmaceutical industry experience to our already stellar Scientific Advisory Board,” said Tom Miller, co-founder and CEO of Entos. “We look forward to continuing our work to build out our talented team, accelerate molecular discovery, and revolutionize the process of drug development.”
Prof. Taunton and Dr. Brameld will join Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold, MIT Assistant Professor of Engineering Connor Coley, and Director in Chemical Biology Therapeutics at Novartis, Derek Lowe, on the Company’s Scientific Advisory Board. The Scientific Advisory Board provides Entos with unparalleled expertise and valuable guidance as the Company expands and applies its differentiated technology to overcome the high risk and long timelines associated with traditional therapeutic discovery.
The additions of Prof. Taunton and Dr. Brameld are the latest in a string of recent milestones since Entos was created, including the Company’s $53 million Series A financing round led by Coatue and Catalio Capital Management, as well as the opening of its new, state-of-the art laboratory and office workspaces in San Diego’s centrally located UCSD Science Park.
Bios
Jack Taunton is a Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. His research focuses on the design and discovery of chemical tools to study cellular processes relevant to human disease. Areas of interest include the structure-based design of covalent inhibitors and chemoproteomic probes, as well as mechanistic studies of biologically active natural products. Work in Jack's lab has led to the development of rilzabrutinib, a reversible, cysteine-targeted kinase inhibitor in Phase 3 clinical trials. He is a co-founder of Principia BioPharma, Global Blood Therapeutics, Kezar Life Sciences, and Cedilla Therapeutics.
Ken Brameld earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech under the supervision of Prof. William Goddard, III. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF in the laboratory of Prof. Irwin “Tack” Kuntz. Subsequently, he entered the pharmaceutical industry as a computational chemist, with positions of increasing responsibility at Scios, Array Biopharma, and Celera. At Roche Palo Alto, he was a Principal Scientist and Computational Chemistry group leader until the site closure in 2010. Most recently, he was instrumental in launching Principia Biopharma in 2011, a small molecule drug discovery start-up, where he had many roles including Senior Vice President, Head of Research. In 2020, Principia was acquired by Sanofi for $3.68 billion. Today, Ken is a consultant for drug discovery companies and is a Senior Advisor at Samsara Biocapital.
About Entos
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Diego, California, Entos is focused on disrupting therapeutic discovery with its cutting-edge platform that uses AI-driven automated synthesis to rapidly design small-molecule therapeutics. Driven by technology derived from Caltech and the University of Bristol, the Entos team is comprised of renowned scientists and technologists with world-class expertise in machine learning and software development, as well as computational and medicinal chemistry.
