Pharmaceutical veteran joins Insilico Medicine to apply Artificial Intelligence to build a portfolio of Insilico Medicine's proprietary assets and further pipeline development
HONG KONG, Feb. 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Insilico Medicine (the "Company"), a global leader in artificial intelligence for drug discovery and biomarker development, today announced the appointment of Dr. Feng Ren as Chief Science Officer ("CSO").
Dr. Feng Ren is a highly respected drug discovery and development leader with a demonstrated track record in both biology and medicinal chemistry. He joins Insilico Medicine from Medicilon, a leading contract research organization ("CRO") providing drug discovery services to the biopharmaceutical companies globally. At Medicilon Dr. Ren served as a Senior Vice President, responsible for the drug R&D service business of the Chemistry Department and Biology Business Unit with a team of 600+ chemists and biologists.
Before joining Medicilon, Dr. Ren spent 11 years in the discovery and development of small molecule innovative drugs at GlaxoSmithKline ("GSK"). He served as the chief researcher, program leader, director and head of chemistry of Neurodegeneration DPU, a global drug R&D unit in neurosciences in GSK.
In his career, Dr. Ren successfully developed multiple clinical 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 holds a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Harvard University, a Master's Degree in Chemistry from the National University of Singapore and a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, said, "I am excited to have Dr. Ren to join Insilico Medicine. Dr. Ren has a stellar track record in running several parallel drug discovery projects at the pre-clinical and clinical level and bringing effective drugs to market. His capability in drug hunting enabled us to build a drug discovery team of top-notch biologists and chemists and will greatly accelerate our progress towards Insilico Medicine's vision of leveraging AI to progress our preclinical programs into clinic and start a large number of new programs to fulfill the growing need for novel medicines, effectively bring medicines to patients in need."
Dr. Feng Ren, CSO of Insilico Medicine, added, "Insilico Medicine is a global leader in AI-powered drug discovery with demonstrated experimentally-proven capabilities in the discovery of novel biological targets and small molecule drug candidates. The data I have seen so far has been very impressive and it convinced me to join the company to build a comprehensive drug discovery team to employ the end-to-end AI engine to produce a portfolio of novel preclinical and clinical assets. I believe the outstanding team at Insilico Medicine will lead the way in transforming the drug discovery and development paradigm using AI and significantly improve the probability of delivering new medicines to address current unmet clinical needs."
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine develops software that leverages generative models, reinforcement learning (RL), and other modern machine learning techniques for the generation of new molecular structures with specific properties. Insilico Medicine also develops software for the generation of synthetic biological data, target identification, and the prediction of clinical trials outcomes. The company integrates two business models: providing AI-powered drug discovery collaborations and software through its Pharma.AI platform (www.insilico.com/platform/) and developing its own pipeline of preclinical/clinical programs. The preclinical programs are the results of pursuing novel drug targets and novel molecules discovered through its platforms. Since its inception in 2014, Insilico Medicine has raised over $52 million and received multiple industry awards. Insilico Medicine has also published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has applied for over 25 patents.
Website http://insilico.com/
Contact: polly.firs@insilicomedicine.com
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