LOS ANGELES, Nov. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Athos Therapeutics Inc., a late pre-clinical stage biotechnology company pioneering the development of first-in-class precision therapeutics for patients with autoimmune diseases and cancer, today announced the appointment of Keith Bronson Hoffman, Ph.D. as their Chief Business Officer. In this role, Dr. Hoffman will oversee business development, funding, and partnerships, and will report to Dimitrios Iliopoulos, PhD, MBA, Chief Executive Officer.
“Keith brings a remarkable scope of accomplishments and experience with emerging biotechnology companies to Athos, including partnering, strategy, funding, licensing, and intellectual property development. We are very excited to welcome him into the Athos family,” said Dr. Iliopoulos.
“Athos launched just one year ago, and we have rapidly developed a unique platform to identify and develop novel drugs for patients with autoimmune, chronic inflammatory diseases, and cancer. This approach is based on the integration of medicinal chemistry and systems biology through machine learning. Our lead program is for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease), a very large unmet medical need. The Athos pipeline has also quickly expanded, with our platform producing lead compounds for other autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, psoriasis and cancer. We look forward to leveraging Keith’s expertise as we advance into a clinical-stage company.”
“The founders of Athos include three stars within the bioscience community. Dr. Michael Jung from UCLA is globally known as a medicinal chemistry virtuoso with over 280 publications, 55 patents and two FDA-approved drugs originating from his work, representing tens of billions of dollars in sales to date, while the Athos Chairman, Dr. Allan J. Pantuck, was a co-founder of Kite Pharma, a biotech company that successfully developed and obtained FDA approval for an innovative cancer immunotherapy and was acquired by Gilead Sciences for over $12 billion dollars,” said Dr. Hoffman. “In addition to these exceptionally impressive co-founders, Dr. Dimitrios Iliopoulos had an accomplished academic career at both Harvard and UCLA Medical Schools and is the past founder and director of the UCLA Center for Systems Biomedicine. Dimitrios has recruited a stellar pre-clinical research team for Athos and has overseen the development of a potent medicinal chemistry platform that has already generated multiple drug leads. I’m honored to be joining this extraordinary team and I very much look forward to helping make Athos Therapeutics into a household name.”
Dr. Hoffman joins Athos from the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a research institute with over 400 scientists and 600 research projects, where he was the Senior Vice President of Business Development and Technology Transfer. Keith oversaw all commercialization, licensing, startup company formation, and intellectual property, as well as bioscience incubator and biotechnology park developments. Before the Lundquist Institute, he was part of the founding team at Advera Health Analytics where he developed and helped monetize big data platforms that provide real world side effect data on all FDA approved drugs. Dr. Hoffman has also held senior management roles (COO, CBO, VP) in biotechnology, healthcare data, medical device, and consumer product companies. His extensive deal sheet includes financings, licensing, sponsored research, sales and marketing, royalty monetization, collaborations, mergers, and patent litigation. He has published 30 academic papers, 20 white papers, and has drafted over 70 patent applications across various scientific disciplines. Dr. Hoffman earned both his BS in Biology and PhD in Neuropharmacology from UC Irvine in the world-renowned laboratory of Dr. Gary Lynch. His research at Irvine focused on the molecular basis of learning and memory with an emphasis on how neural cell adhesion molecules may modulate synaptic architectures.
About Athos Therapeutics
Athos Therapeutics Inc. is a late-stage preclinical biotech company developing small molecule therapeutics for autoimmune diseases and cancer using an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) process. This process has the ability to identify novel drug targets (hubs) by integrating clinical and molecular datasets into disease interactomes and match them to its small molecule computational chemistry platform. Athos lead drug development program is at the late stages of preclinical development, moving to phase I human clinical trial for patients with Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease next year. Furthermore, Athos has pre-clinical programs for different autoimmune disorders, including lupus and psoriasis.
For more information, visit https://athostx.com
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