Iambic Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing novel medicines using its AI-driven discovery and development platform, announced that Michael Secora, Ph.D. will be its Chief Corporate Development Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Dr Secora will lead Iambic’s finance and corporate development activities, helping frame its growing pipeline and industry-leading platform to potential partners, investors, and other stakeholders.
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Michael Secora, PhD, Chief Corporate Development Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Iambic Therapeutics (Photo: Business Wire)
“Michael is a unique and effective leader with experience as a scientist, investor, and operator. He has demonstrated strategic and tactical success leading both scientific and technical teams as well as business-related and capital raising efforts,” said Tom Miller, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Iambic. “More importantly, Michael is passionate about the increased inclusion of technology within the life sciences to transform drug discovery and development. We are excited to welcome Michael to Iambic and look forward to driving our scientific and business objectives forward together.”
For over a decade, Dr. Secora has been a leader in defining the value proposition for technology-driven drug development, drawing on his scientific, capital markets and business expertise. At Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), he led finance, communications, and investor relations activities as well as corporate strategy for translating value both internally and externally across Recursion’s internal pipeline, external partnerships, and data. Dr. Secora led efforts related to Recursion’s entering collaborations with Bayer, Roche-Genentech, NVIDIA, Google, Tempus, and others; combining with Exscientia (EXAI), Cyclica, Valence, and Vium; and raising over $1.3 billion for Recursion across both private and public fundraising rounds.
“There are many things that I am excited about at Iambic. First, committed leadership – I admire how Tom and Fred left their professorships at Caltech and Bristol to found and lead Iambic. Second, experimental platform – I am impressed with the integration and automation of chemical synthesis, mass spectrometry, target and pathway deconvolution, and data flow optimization. Third, AI-technology – I believe that Iambic’s expertise in active learning and multimodal transformer models has created industry-leading computational tools. Lastly, clinical pipeline advancement – Iambic has demonstrated an ability to go from beginning a program to a Phase 1 clinical trial in approximately 2 years, which is extraordinarily fast,” said Dr. Secora.
Iambic’s pipeline includes IAM1363, a potential best-in-class, highly selective and brain penetrant small molecule inhibitor of both wild-type and oncogenic HER2 mutants currently in a Phase 1 study with data anticipated in 2025, as well as a potential first-in-class selective dual CDK2/4 inhibitor for multiple cancer indications, an allosteric inhibitor for KIF18A, and additional new programs.
Dr. Secora went on to say, “I have been impressed with Iambic’s development over the last few years as well as the strength of Iambic’s board, scientific advisors, and partners. As a scientist and investor, I believe in the increasing inclusion of technology into many aspects of our way of life. As a leader, I choose to serve organizations that have the potential for substantial and long-term positive impact. I see Iambic having such an impact in the life science and technology industries now and into the future.”
Prior to Recursion, Dr. Secora had a successful 10-year investing career at Laurion Capital as Managing Director and Head of Capital Markets and Venture, where he focused on emerging technologies and the life sciences and was an early advocate and investor in the TechBio space. Dr. Secora is an alumnus of Princeton University with a doctorate in Applied and Computational Mathematics and has undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Physics and minor degrees in Astronomy and Writing and Humanistic Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
About Iambic’s AI-Driven Discovery Platform
The Iambic AI-driven platform was created to address the most challenging design problems in drug discovery, leveraging technology innovations such as Enchant, a multi-modal transformer model that predicts clinical outcomes from the earliest stages of discovery, and NeuralPLexer, the best-in-class predictor of protein and protein-ligand structures. The integration of physics principles into the platform’s AI architectures improves data efficiency and allows molecular models to venture widely across the space of possible chemical structures. The platform enables identification of novel chemical modalities for engaging difficult-to-address biological targets, discovery of defined product profiles that optimize therapeutic window, and multi-parameter optimization for highly differentiated development candidates. Through close integration of AI-generated molecular designs with automated experimental execution, Iambic completes design-make-test cycles on a weekly cadence.
About Iambic Therapeutics
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Diego, California, Iambic Therapeutics is disrupting the therapeutics landscape with its unique AI-driven drug-discovery platform. Iambic has assembled a world-class team that unites pioneering AI experts and experienced drug hunters with strong track records of success in delivering clinically validated therapeutics. The Iambic platform has been demonstrated to deliver high-quality, differentiated therapeutics to the clinical stage with unprecedented speed and across multiple target classes and mechanisms of action. The Iambic team is advancing an internal pipeline of clinical assets to address urgent unmet patient needs. Learn more about the Iambic team, platform, and pipeline at iambic.ai
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