CYRUS BIOTECHNOLOGY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Scientific Advisor
- Professor at the University of Washington
- Scientific Co - Founder & Advisor
David is a Professor at the University of Washington and an HHMI Investigator. David is the originator of the Rosetta software package and is responsible for numerous scientific breakthroughs and "firsts" in computational modeling of protein structures and design of novel proteins. Highlights include:
The first reliable prediction of small-protein 3D structures.
The design of the first fully de novo protein structure in a computer.
The design of the first protein-protein binding interactions in a computer
The creation of a specific ligand-binding protein by computational methods.
David has published over 330 peer-reviewed scientific papers, including over 20 in Science and Nature alone.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Management Team
- VP of Drug Discovery
Eric joined Cyrus in March of 2022 as Vice President of Drug Discovery. He is a seasoned biotech drug hunter with over 20 years of experience in discovery research and translational drug development, assembling and leading multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams to advance first-in-class therapeutic candidates into the clinic. He has achieved key development milestones in the fields of immuno-oncology, infectious disease, autoimmunity/inflammation, and neuroscience, taking multiple early-stage therapeutics through preclinical development and into early clinical studies. Prior to Cyrus, Eric was a founding scientist and held leadership positions at Kineta Inc., most recently as Executive Vice President of Research and Development responsible for leading discovery, non-clinical, CMC, regulatory and clinical R&D operations. Before Kineta, he was a scientist at Illumigen Biosciences leading efforts in assay development, in vitro and in vivo pharmacology, and CMC process development. Eric is a co-inventor and co-author on numerous patents and publications related to drug discovery, therapeutics formulation and manufacturing, vaccinology, pharmacology, and clinical development. Eric received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Medical Technology and Clinical Laboratory Sciences at Michigan State University and earned his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the Medical University of Ohio at Toledo.
Job Titles:
- Chief Scientific Officer
- Member of the Management Team
- Director of Discovery
Erik holds an Associate Professorship at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and is a pioneer in the use of Big Data mutagenesis to understand membrane proteins and engineer receptors. He was the first to computationally design a truly de novo protein with function - blockade of a viral oncogene associated with pediatric cancers - and apply deep mutational scanning to human GPCRs and transporters to guide modeling algorithms. He is an inventor on multiple patents and has been published in Cell, Nature, and Science. He is the former co-founder and CEO of Orthogonal Biologics, which merged with Cyrus Biotechnology in 2021. Erik graduated with a B.Sc. in Immunology from the University of Adelaide and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Harvard University.
Job Titles:
- Chief Executive Officer
- Member of the Board
- Member of the Management Team
Lucas is trained in computational biophysics and protein engineering. He brought Cyrus to sales with over 120 BioPharma companies and collaboration on over 30 discovery stage programs, including work with the majority of top-20 BioPharma firms including Janssen, Genentech, Selecta Bio, and the Broad Institute. At Cyrus, Lucas was a co-founder of the OpenFold consortium in Protein AI software with Genentech, Amazon, Outpace and Arzeda. Prior to Cyrus he was a Translational Investigator & Senior Fellow at the Baker lab at UW, developing small-molecule binding proteins and protein design algorithms, and leading efforts to improve the stability and usability of the Rosetta software package. Lucas' academic work includes a patented computationally designed enzyme, an RNA-dynamics-modeling software toolkit he built from scratch during his PhD, and algorithm optimization for automation of computational protein design. Harvard A.B., Biochemical Sciences (summa cum laude and Goldwater Scholar) and Ph.D., Biophysics; Hertz Fellow.
Job Titles:
- EVP Business Development
- Member of the Management Team
- President
- Scientist
Mark is a trained scientist and seasoned business development professional. Prior to joining Cyrus, Mark was Chief Business Officer at Q-State Biosciences, a Harvard University company focusing on neuroscience drug discovery. Mark served as CEO of Galenea, an MIT spin out from the lab of Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, which - through partnerships with Otsuka, CHDI, Novartis, Eisai and Janssen, worked on drug discovery for a number of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Prior to Galenea, he was Chief Business Officer at Nura, a company formed out of Nobel Laureate Linda Buck's GPCR work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Mark spent some time in Geneva helping to build and eventually sell a Serono spin-out DNA-sequencing company - Manteia - the core of which forms part of the Illumina sequencing platform, and he was an early employee at Rosetta Inpharmatics - a gene expression profiling and microarray company founded by a Seattle-based team including Nobel laureate Lee Hartwell and systems biology pioneer, Lee Hood, where he headed up Business Development. He has a D.Sc. in Cancer Biology from Harvard University and a B.Sc. (First class, with honors) in Genetics from the University of London.
Will Chen is a leader and innovator in target validation using combined computational and experimental approaches. He was a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School heading an effort in systems pharmacology before moving to industry to work on neurology and immunology drug discovery. Currently he is a Senior Director at Biogen in the Translational Biology group. His work relates to the systematic integration of human genetics and genomics, molecular and clinical data through advanced analytics and disease pathways to generate novel understanding of disease biology and patient outcomes. Will has also been part of the multi-partner private-public consortium Open Targets that counts a number of biotech and pharmaceutical companies as members including Biogen, GSK, Takeda, Sanofi and Celgene. Will completed his bachelors in physics at UC Berkeley and his PhD at Harvard University in biophysics working on protein folding and soft matter systems.
Job Titles:
- Chief Scientific Officer
- Chief Technology Officer
- Member of the Board
Yifan has been at the forefront of computational protein modeling and biophysics in a variety of fields. Yifan was the lead developer on core Rosetta protein modeling functionality, and the project manager at CCNY for an electrostatics calculation software package, MCCE. He pioneered a number of technical refinements in protein structure energy evaluation currently used in Rosetta. Yifan is a leader in computational protein modeling, with experience ranging from ab initio protein structure prediction to crystallography to protein-protein interaction design and over 20 scientific publications in leading journals. He is a former Translational Investigator & Research Scientist at the Baker lab at the University of Washington. Yifan completed a B.S. in Physics at Fudan University and earned his Ph.D. in Physics at CCNY.