SAN FRANCISCO, May 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Engine Biosciences ("Engine"), the technology company pioneering its platform integrating big data, computation, and experimental biology to unleash faster and more effective drug discovery, today announced it has hired Stephen Harrison, Ph.D. as Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President.
Dr. Harrison most recently served as Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President at Relypsa, Inc., a commercial-stage biotech company acquired by Galencia for US$1.53 billion in 2016. He has also served in executive and leadership roles at Nektar Therapeutics, KAI Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Amgen), Chiron Corporation and Thios. Prior to joining industry, Dr. Harrison received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and was a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Harrison joins as Engine advances its technology platform, expands its team in San Francisco and Asia, and pursues discovery and preclinical studies internally and with partners, which include leading research institutions and a prominent US Fortune 500 company.
Engine's data-driven platform combines massively parallel biological experimentation with artificial intelligence to discover and develop better therapies for important human diseases. The platform builds on the pioneering work of Engine's scientific founders, who have published papers related to Engine's platform in peer-reviewed journals including Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, and PNAS.
"We are thrilled to have Steve join our team," said Engine Co-Founder and CEO Jeffrey Lu. "Steve's extensive experience in leading research and development teams from target discovery to early clinical studies, working across multiple therapeutic areas and modalities, and generating several developmental candidates will be a tremendous asset as Engine seeks to leverage its novel platform in building a drug development pipeline to help patients in need."
Compared with conventional research approaches, which are too slow and costly to test and map the huge number of genetic interactions that underlie complex diseases, Engine's platform drives orders-of-magnitude gains in speed and scale. By integrating data mining and computation with Engine's high-throughput, massively parallel combinatorial genetic perturbation screens, Engine can decipher biological networks to enable more effective drug discovery and more clinically relevant predictions.
"I am honored to have the opportunity to join such a world-class team," said Dr. Harrison. "Engine is uniquely positioned at the forefront of both AI and high-throughput genetic characterization technologies. I am confident that the creative combination of these tools will drive significant breakthroughs in the treatment of human disease, and I am glad to be a part of that effort with Engine."
About Engine Biosciences
Engine Biosciences (www.enginebio.com) is a venture-backed Singapore and San Francisco-based technology company pioneering network biomedicine. Engine's proprietary and patented technologies include both genomics-oriented experimental biology methods for data generation and artificial intelligence algorithms for data analysis, cellular mapping, and predictions. These technologies, developed through years of research at MIT, Harvard, Mayo Clinic, and UCSD by Engine's scientific leadership team, dramatically accelerate and improve the R&D process for new treatments for important diseases.
