— Members include pioneers of cancer biology and computational biology who have discovered key drivers of the disease and advanced the discovery of new therapies —
BOSTON, Mass. – June 2, 2022 – Scorpion Therapeutics, Inc. (“Scorpion” or the “Company”), a pioneering oncology company redefining the frontier of precision medicine through its Precision Oncology 2.0 strategy, today announced the composition of its Discovery Scientific Advisory Board (“SAB”).
The members of the Company’s Discovery SAB include:
- Rameen Beroukhim, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
- Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D., Faculty Member, Department of Cancer Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
- Andy Futreal, Ph.D., Department Chair, Department of Genomic Medicine, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
- Robert Gentleman, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine, Harvard Medical School
- Ross Levine, M.D., Deputy Physician-in-Chief, Translational Research, Laurence Joseph Dineen Chair in Leukemia Research, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Elaine Mardis, Ph.D., Co-Executive Director, The Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital Professor of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine
- Kornelia Polyak, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School; Co-Leader, Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center Cancer Cell Biology Program
- David Solit, M.D., Geoffrey Beene Chair for Cancer Research; Director of the Marie-Josée & Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
“We are pleased to announce this prestigious group of advisors and look forward to their input to our discovery strategy as we grow the company into a leader in precision oncology,” said Axel Hoos, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Scorpion. “Working closely with our academic founders Keith Flaherty, M.D., Gaddy Getz, Ph.D., and Liron Bar-Peled, Ph.D., and in partnership with our Chief Scientific Officer, Darrin Stuart, Ph.D., who will serve as chairman of the advisory board, this world-class group will provide key scientific insights that will help us realize our vision.”
“Together, these appointees have discovered some of the most prevalent drivers of cancer and advanced the fields of cancer biology, cancer genetics, computational biology and precision medicine,” said Darrin Stuart, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Scorpion. “We look forward to their many contributions as we continue to advance our drug hunting platform and expand our pipeline with small molecules designed to address untapped cancer drug targets, each with the potential to treat precise, genetically defined patient populations.”
Rameen Beroukhim, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Beroukhim is an associate professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In addition to directing a genomics-focused lab, he sees patients in an adult neuro-oncology clinic. Dr. Beroukhim studied physics and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained an M.Phil and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge for work done at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Medical Biology on electron crystallographic studies of ion channels. He then completed his M.D. and internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco, before completing a medical oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Beroukhim’s research focuses on the development and use of genomic and computational technologies to understand tumor evolution and vulnerabilities, with particular emphases on brain cancers and on alterations in chromosome structure across cancers. Dr. Beroukhim has published over 300 papers, including the first comprehensive analyses of cancer-specific dependencies due to genomic losses.
Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D.
Dr. Cantley is a faculty member in the Department of Cancer Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Over the course of his career, he has made significant advances in cancer research, stemming from his discovery of the signaling pathway PI3K in 1984. His pioneering research has resulted in revolutionary treatments for cancer, diabetes and autoimmune diseases. The author of over 400 original papers and more than 50 book chapters and review articles, Dr. Cantley is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He previously served as Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, where he became chief of Harvard’s new Division of Signal Transduction and a founding member of its Department of Systems Biology in 2002. In 2007, he was appointed director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center. In 2013 he was appointed Director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and in 2022 he returned to Harvard Medical School to assume his current position at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Andy Futreal, Ph.D.
Dr. Futreal is currently a Professor in the Department of Genomic Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he applies his knowledge of cancer genomics to improve both short-term and long-term patient outcomes extending to cancer survivorship, and also serves as a platform leader for genomics and informatics for the Cancer Moonshot initiative. Before joining MD Anderson in July 2012, he was the co-director of the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he continues to be an honorary faculty member. His chief scientific accomplishments include the identification of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast/ovarian cancer susceptibility genes, leading a pioneering effort in large-scale systematic cancer genomics leading to the identification of the BRAF mutations in melanoma, ERBB2 mutations in non-small cell lung cancer and multiple new cancer genes in renal cell carcinoma. He has published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He received the NIH Public Service Award in 1995 for discovering the BRCA1 gene involved in subsets of breast and ovarian cancer.
Robert Gentleman, Ph.D.
Dr. Gentleman is the founding executive director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Computational Biomedicine. An accomplished statistician and bioinformatician, Dr. Gentleman is one of the creators of the R programming language and a founder of the Bioconductor project, an open-source collaborative software tool to promote statistical analysis of biological data. He has served as vice president of 23andMe, where he helped launch their therapeutic division, and he was senior director for bioinformatics and computational biology at Genentech. He was head of computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and held academic positions at Harvard University, University of Auckland and the University of Waterloo. Dr. Gentleman’s research interests are related to genomics, machine learning, data visualization, and the application of statistical and computational methods to study human disease.
Ross Levine, M.D.
Dr. Levine is the Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Translational Research, Laurence Joseph Dineen Chair in Leukemia Research, Member of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, and Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he cares for patients with blood and bone marrow cancers. Dr. Levine’s pioneering research has illuminated the genetic basis of myeloid malignancies, including studies that delineated the role of the JAK-STAT pathway and other oncogenic drivers in the pathogenesis of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). His current efforts focus on the role of mutations in epigenetic modifiers in MPN and AML pathogenesis and therapeutic response, investigation of the role of different signaling pathways in hematopoietic transformation, and mechanisms of resistance to targeted therapies in MPN/AML. He has been honored with the Dameshek Prize from the American Society of Hematology, a Scholar Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Boyer Award for Clinical Investigation from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and an NCI Outstanding Investigator R35 Award. In 2011 he was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and in 2018 to the Association of American Physicians.
Elaine Mardis, Ph.D.
Dr. Mardis is co-Executive Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine. She also is Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Her research focuses on cancer genomics from a discovery and translational perspective, with the goal of identifying the best therapeutic approach to fighting an individual’s cancer by determining common driver mutations/genes and pathways that can cause cancer to develop and progress. Dr. Mardis has authored over 350 articles in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and has written book chapters for several medical textbooks. She serves as Deputy Editor for Disease Models and Mechanisms, Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Cancer Research, and Co-Editor in Chief of Cancer Research Communications. Dr. Mardis has given lectures at scientific meetings worldwide, and was awarded the Morton K Schwartz award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry in 2016, and the Heath Memorial Award from MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2019. She has been listed since 2013 as one of the most highly cited researchers in the world by Clarivate/Thompson Reuters. Dr. Mardis has been a member of the AACR since 2007, was the program committee chair for the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting, and served as the AACR President from 2019-2020. She was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
Kornelia Polyak, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Polyak is Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and a co-leader of the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center Cancer Cell Biology Program. Dr. Polyak is an internationally-recognized leader of breast cancer research. Her laboratory is dedicated to improving the clinical management of breast cancer patients by understanding of breast tumor evolution. Dr. Polyak has devoted much effort to develop new ways to study tumors as a whole and to apply interdisciplinary approaches. Dr. Polyak have received numerous awards including the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, and the 14th Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science. She is a recipient of the NCI Outstanding Investigator award and received a Distinguished Alumna Award from Weill Cornell. Dr. Polyak is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Association for Cancer Research Academy, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
David Solit, M.D.
Dr. Solit is the Geoffrey Beene Chair for Cancer Research and the Director of the Marie-Josée & Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology (“CMO”) at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. A member of the Genitourinary Oncology Service, he is a medical oncologist specializing in the treatment of prostate, bladder, kidney, testis and other related cancers. Dr. Solit was formerly the Chief of the MSKCC Developmental Therapeutics Service during which time he initiated a program to promote pan-cancer Basket trials. His laboratory research focuses on the identification of molecular predictors of drug response and mechanisms of drug resistance, with a focus on BRAF, MEK and other kinases inhibitors. As Director of the CMO, he leads a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, geneticists, bioinformaticians, and laboratory scientists, which seek to integrate molecular and clinical information to develop therapies that are individualized to each patient’s cancer. He is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians.
About Scorpion Therapeutics
Scorpion Therapeutics is a pioneering oncology company redefining the frontier of precision medicine to deliver optimized and transformational therapies for larger populations of patients with cancer, a strategy Scorpion Therapeutics refers to as Precision Oncology 2.0. Scorpion Therapeutics has built a proprietary and fully integrated platform of the most advanced technologies across cancer biology, medicinal chemistry, and data sciences, with the goal of consistently and rapidly creating exquisitely selective small molecule compounds against an unprecedented spectrum of targets. Scorpion Therapeutics aims to leverage its platform to advance a broad pipeline of wholly owned, optimized compounds across three target categories: best-in-class molecules targeting validated oncogene targets; first-in-class molecules for previously undruggable targets; and first-in-class molecules for novel cancer targets. For more information, visit www.scorpiontx.com.
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