Scientific Advisory Board (SAB)

ASAP has recruited a seasoned Scientific Advisory Board with extensive experience in drug discovery and development, antivirals, computational chemistry, and global access

External Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) Members

Jeremy Burrows

External Scientific Advisory Board Member
Vice President, Head of Drug Discovery, Medicines for Malaria Ventures
web: https://www.mmv.org/about-us/our-team/jeremy-burrows

Dr. Jeremy Burrows is VP, Head of Drug Discovery at Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV). He heads up the Discovery team at MMV and works with Pharmaceutical companies, Universities and other institutions to delivery new candidate drugs for antimalarial therapy, anti-relapse, prophylaxis and transmission blocking.

Jeremy obtained a MA in chemistry and a D.Phil. in synthetic organic chemistry at Oxford University (1989-1996). In 1997 he joined ZENECA/ AstraZeneca as a medicinal chemist working in Infection, Cardiovascular and Inflammation research at Alderley Park in the UK. In 2005 he was seconded to Södertälje, Sweden in CNS/Pain where he led a section focused on Alzheimer’s disease. In 2008, he joined MMV and in 2010 became Head of the Discovery team, overseeing a growing portfolio of enabling technology, screening, Hit-to-lead and Lead Optimisation projects.

He has been involved with the delivery of numerous candidate drugs for multiple disease areas, over 30 of which have been for malaria, and has published over 150 papers, book chapters and patent applications.

He sits on the advisory and review committees for several external drug discovery collaborations within the neglected disease area including the Wellcome funded DNDi-GSK Chagas collaboration. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He is a co-organiser of the Wellcome Practical Aspects of Drug Discovery Course.

Marti Head

External Scientific Advisory Board Member
Executive Director of Computational and Data Sciences, Amgen
web: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mshead/

Martha S. Head (Marti) is Executive Director of Computational and Data Sciences at AMGEN, where she leads a team applying mechanistic and machine-learning computational methods to the understanding of disease biology and the discovery and design of biologic and synthetic therapeutics. Previously, she was the Director of the Joint Institute for Biological Sciences, a collaborative research effort between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee system and Director of Computational Biomedical Initiatives at ORNL. As director, she focused on applying the world-leading capabilities of ORNL and UT to biomedical research and health outcomes of relevance to Tennessee and the Appalachian region.

Before joining ORNL, Dr. Head spent 20 years in R&D at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (GSK). For many of those years, Dr. Head led GSK’s U.S. Computational Chemistry team, whose accountability was to proactively and creatively apply all relevant computational tools to progressing drug discovery efforts from target selection through to selection of a candidate for clinical trials. In the final years of her time at GSK, Dr. Head led GSK’s collaboration with Palantir, a Silicon Valley data integration and exploration company, and built GSK’s Insights from Data team. While at GSK, Dr. Head was a co-creator of the Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM), a public-private partnership under the auspices of the Cancer Moonshot, and at ORNL continued to be a contributor to ATOM and a member of the ATOM Joint Research Council, and Dr. Head leads the “Molecular design and analysis to inform therapeutics related to COVID-19” project sponsored by the US Department of Energy National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory. Dr. Head received her PhD in physical chemistry from Duke University in 1995.

Ann Kwong

External Scientific Advisory Board Member
Principal, Kwong Pharma Consulting, LLC
web: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-d-kwong-phd-0060154/
Ann Kwong, Ph.D. has over 30 years of experience in in the biopharmaceutical industry and has helped move multiple antiviral compounds into the clinic. At Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Kwong played a leading role in the research, development, and commercialization of telaprevir- an HCV protease inhibitor that received the Prix Galien Award for Best Pharmaceutical Agent in 2012. Dr. Kwong also designed Vertex’s influenza virus program, which led to the development of pimodivir, a first in class PB2 inhibitor; she was awarded the Gertrude Elion Memorial Award in 2020 by the International Society for Antiviral Research. Ann founded Trek Therapeutics to develop affordable HCV treatments; and was the EVP of R&D at Dewpoint Therapeutics. She is currently Principal at Kwong Pharma Consulting, LLC. Dr. Kwong is a co-author or inventor on numerous publications and patents and received her BA in Biology and PhD in virology from the University of Chicago.

Lisa Purcell

External Scientific Advisory Board Member
Senior Vice President of Microbiology and Virology, Vir Biotechnology
web: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-purcell-phd-854a3572/
Lisa Purcell, Ph.D. has served as the Senior Vice President of Microbiology and Virology since December 2020. Dr. Purcell’s career has been dedicated to the development of therapies within the immunology and infectious disease areas, including those for SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. From July 2008 to December 2020, Dr. Purcell worked in both the clinical and nonclinical areas at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals focusing on the development of drugs for infectious disease, allergy and inflammation. Dr. Purcell received her B.Sc. with Honors in Biology and M.Sc. in Ecotoxicology from the University of Prince Edward Island, her Ph.D. in Parasitology from McGill University and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Wendy Young

External Scientific Advisory Board Member
Biopharma Executive, Scientific Advisor, Board Member, MPM Capital
web: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendy-young-65a1572/
Distinguished medicinal chemist and pharma executive. Wendy was formerly Senior Vice President at Genentech leading drug discovery. Under her leadership, more than 25 clinical candidates, in the areas of oncology, immunology, neurology, and anti-infectives progressed into development. Wendy is the inventor of fenebrutinib which is in Phase 3 trials for multiple sclerosis. Currently, Wendy is the CEO of a biotech company in stealth mode, Director and/or Scientific Advisory Board Member of several private biotechs, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and an advisor at GV (Google Ventures). Dr. Young brings expertise in medicinal chemistry strategy and business development to the SAB.

Internal Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) Members

John D. Chodera

Principal Investigator; Co-Investigator: Hit-to-Lead; Co-Investigator: Lead Optimization
Associate Member, Sloan Kettering Institute
web: http://choderalab.org
ORCID: 0000-0003-0542-119X | Google Scholar Contact PI; Oversight of cores; Alchemical free energy calculations on Folding@home; computational chemistry and structure-based machine learning

Alpha Lee

Principal Investigator; Project Lead: Hit-to-lead
Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, PostEra
web: http://postera.ai
ORCID: 0000-0002-9616-3108 | Google Scholar Oversight of early-stage discovery; artificial intelligence and machine learning for virtual synthetic libraries and automated ligand optimization; automated hit-to-lead optimization

Peter Sjö

Principal Investigator; Co-Investigator: Preclinical Development
Head of Drug Discovery Programme, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi)
web: https://dndi.org/our-people/peter-sjo/
ORCID: 0000-0002-6768-0536 | Google Scholar Oversight of late-stage discovery and preclinical development; preclinical development; medicinal chemistry

Ben Perry

Internal Scientific Advisory Board Member
Principal, Medicxi
web: https://www.medicxi.com/team/ben-perry
ORCID: 0000-0001-6715-4213 | Google Scholar

Ben is a Principal in the Medicxi Investment team. Prior to joining Medicxi, Ben spent over twenty years leading small molecule discovery projects in various R&D organisations including the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi, Geneva), Addex Therapeutics (Geneva) and UCB (Cambridge, UK) as well as co-founding the early-stage start-ups AiDD SA and MPC Therapeutics SA.

Ben received a MChem from University of Wales Swansea, a PhD in organic chemistry from Imperial College London and an EMBA from IE Business School, Madrid