Turbine, the biological simulation company using AI to build predictive computational models of human cells and tissue, today announced several new appointments to its Board of Directors. Turbine’s Simulated Cell™ platform models the foundational protein signaling logic that decides cell fate, allowing global biopharmaceutical customers such as AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Ono Pharmaceutical to more effectively target disease and position therapeutic assets. The Board additions support Turbine as it accelerates business development activities based on strong results generated by the Simulated Cell platform throughout 2023 and 2024.
The updates to the company’s Board are as follows:
Anna Marie joins Turbine’s board as an Independent Director. She most recently served as the Senior Vice President, Head of AI and Head of Corporate Development at Ginkgo Bioworks. In these roles, Anna Marie was responsible for artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, execution, and partnerships as well as all external innovation (whether via partnership or M&A). She also led Ginkgo’s public offering in 2021, raising $1.6 billion in the largest-ever go-public raise in biotech, and served as Ginkgo’s Chief Financial Officer during the pandemic. Previously, Anna Marie spent nearly a decade as an investor at Bain Capital Private Equity. She holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College.
Dr. Hersch is the Senior Vice President, Enterprise Strategy and Venture at MSD (Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ USA). He has joined the board as an Observer on behalf of the MSD Global Health Innovation Fund, which co-led Turbine’s Series A financing.
Alex is an Investor at Mercia Ventures, which co-led Turbine’s Series A financing. He joins the board as an Investor Director. Alex joined Mercia in 2021 following four years at IBM’s consulting business, where he led business development efforts for the company’s AI, analytics, and blockchain solutions, among other technologies. He holds an M.S. in Science Communication from the Imperial College London and a B.A. in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford. Alex replaces Daniela Tsoneva, Mercia’s prior representative on the Turbine Board.
“With the recent advances in data science, including the application of generative AI, biopharma companies are finding themselves bottlenecked not by the number of new ideas they can come up with, but by the ability to select and validate the right hypotheses with the greatest potential to help patients,” said Szabolcs Nagy, Turbine’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Trained to reflect the real world based on our map of protein interactions, molecular profiles, and response data, Simulated Cells are rapidly becoming the go-to platform for biopharma companies to test billions of ideas and find the right experiments to run.”
Nagy continued: “Since mid-2023, Turbine has completed successful financings, announced important pharma and channel partner collaborations, and demonstrated the Simulated Cell platform’s ability to uncover hidden biological insights that expanded drug pipelines and could boost their chance of success in the clinic. Our new Board members bring deep biopharma business experience, and we’re excited to make even more progress with them as we bring the benefits of Turbine’s technology to every corner of the industry.”
Countless resources and time are expended globally to research and advance novel therapies that end in clinical failure and no patient benefit. Imagine a world where it is possible to predict any potential drug’s effect on translatable biological models yet unavailable for lab-based testing – while accurately representing patient biology. Turbine is revolutionizing the status quo by working to ensure that we always run the right wet lab experiments.
With machine learning that understands the logic by which human cells make decisions, Turbine has built the world’s leading predictive simulation of patient biology. The Simulated Cell™ platform models the foundational protein signaling logic that decides cell fate and facilitates in silico experiments at scales that are impossible in the physical world. Billions of simulated experiments can be run in the time it takes to complete even a single test in a wet lab to empower the biopharma industry by identifying and confirming disease driving mechanisms.
Turbine’s platform is already used to guide the pipelines of leading pharma companies such as AstraZeneca, Ono Pharmaceutical, Cancer Research Horizons, and Bayer. In addition, Turbine has received funding from industry leaders such as MSD (Merck & Co, Inc. Rahway NJ, USA) Global Health Innovation Fund, MassMutual Ventures, Accel and Delin Ventures among others.
For more information, visit www.turbine.ai or follow Turbine on LinkedIn.
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