Three Senior Pharma R&D Leaders Join BenchSci's Science Advisory Board

TORONTO, June 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BenchSci, an emerging global leader in machine learning applications for novel medicine development, announces Steve Hitchcock, Philip Larsen, and Philip Tagari have joined its science advisory board. They join existing technology advisors Milind Kamkolkar and Richard Zemel.

Hitchock, Larsen, and Tagari's vast and valuable expertise in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries will be instrumental as BenchSci advances towards its vision of bringing novel medicines to patients 50% faster by 2025. 

"We're honored to have Steve, Philip, and Philip join our advisory board," says Liran Belenzon, CEO, BenchSci. "Each of them brings a wealth of global industry experience, invaluable leadership perspectives, and a deep understanding of the challenges facing life science research that our platform is addressing. We look forward to implementing their strategic guidance as we focus on exponentially increasing the speed and quality of life-saving research."

Steve Hitchcock is the Global Head of Research at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. He is responsible for the global research organization at Takeda across the four therapeutic areas of neuroscience, oncology, gastrointestinal diseases, and rare diseases.

"I'm delighted to be able to work with the outstanding team at BenchSci who are broadly applying cutting-edge AI technologies to accelerate the discovery of new therapeutics," says Hitchcock. 

Philip Larsen is the Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research at Bayer Pharmaceuticals. He has 27 years of pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry experience in diabetes and obesity, with 20 years of experience leading research divisions.

"The frontier of innovation for the life science industry is defined by those who can bring sense to the overwhelming amount of data points generated every day," says Larsen. "I am impressed by BenchSci's ability and vision to do exactly that as it will not only improve research efficiencies but also bring the scientific community novel insights to complex biologic systems."

Philip Tagari is Vice President of Research (Therapeutic Discovery) at Amgen Inc. His global laboratories are responsible for multi-modality platforms resulting in the successful progression of over 30 innovative molecules into clinical development in recent years.

The expertise of these new science advisors complements the counsel provided by existing technology advisors Kamkolkar, CDO at Cellarity, and Zemel, Research Director at Vector Institute, who guide BenchSci on using big data and machine learning to drive drug discovery.

For more information on BenchSci's Advisors: www.benchsci.com/advisors.

About BenchSci

BenchSci's vision is to bring medicine to patients 50% faster by 2025. We're doing this by empowering scientists with the world's most advanced biomedical artificial intelligence to run more successful experiments. Backed by F-Prime, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), and Inovia Capital, our platform accelerates science at 15 top-20 pharmaceutical companies and over 4,300 leading research centers worldwide. We're a CIX Top 10 Growth company, certified Great Place to Work®, and top-ranked company on Glassdoor. Learn more at www.benchsci.com.

For more information, please contact Marie Cook at [email protected].

SOURCE BenchSci