Healx, the AI-powered, patient-inspired technology company pioneering the next generation of drug discovery, is proud to announce that world-renowned computational drug discovery expert, Nathan Brown, has joined the team as Director of Digital Chemistry.
Nathan joins from BenevolentAI, where he led the Cheminformatics team and was responsible for the research and development of new and effective approaches for computational drug design. Globally recognised as a thought-leader in cheminformatics and computational drug discovery, Nathan is the inventor of the first multi-objective de novo molecular design system and has published over 50 papers and four books on the field. A Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemistry, he is also the 2017 recipient of the Corwin Hansch Award – an award given by the Hansch-Fujita Foundation each year to a scholar under the age of 40 for significant contributions to the field of computer-aided drug design.
Prior to his work at BenevolentAI, Nathan was Head of In Silico Medicinal Chemistry at The Institute of Cancer Research in London where he founded and led the In Silico Medicinal Chemistry team for over ten years. He was also a Presidential Research Fellow at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.
Healx is a mission-driven technology company pioneering the next wave of drug discovery in order to bring novel, effective treatments to rare disease patients around the world. There are 7,000 known rare diseases that affect 400 million people across the globe, but only 5% of those conditions have an approved treatment.
By combining frontier AI technology with deep drug discovery and development expertise, Healx can accelerate the pace, increase the scale and improve the chance of success of rare disease treatment development in order to meet this huge unmet need and have unprecedented patient impact.
Founded in Cambridge, UK, in 2014 by Dr Tim Guilliams (a Biochemical Engineer and tech entrepreneur) and Dr David Brown (co-inventor of Viagra and former Global Head of Drug Discovery at Roche), Healx has raised around $70 million to date, added nearly 20 projects to its risk-balanced therapeutic portfolio, and built a cross-functional team of over 100 tech and drug discovery experts.
Commenting on his appointment, Nathan Brown said: “I’m delighted to be joining Healx at what is an exciting time for the growth of the company. I’m really looking forward to working with the diverse talent at Healx and continuing to build a terrific capability in digital chemistry applied to cutting edge AI and data-driven drug discovery.”
The Director of Digital Chemistry role is a new one within the company and reflects Healx’s ambition to build a truly AI-led approach to drug discovery. Nathan will be looking to rapidly scale Healx’s cheminformatics expertise and technology, and will be ramping up recruitment for his team in the coming weeks.
