Atomwise Announces Nomination of its First AI-Driven Development Candidate Focused on TYK2 Inhibition and Appoints Neely Mozaffarian, MD, PhD as Chief Medical Officer

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Atomwise, a leader in using AI for small molecule drug discovery, today announced the nomination of its first AI-driven development candidate focused on TYK2 inhibition and the appointment of Neely Mozaffarian, MD, PhD as Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Mozaffarian brings over 25 years of immunology and clinical research experience to the role of Chief Medical Officer at Atomwise.

Dr. Mozaffarian will drive Atomwise’s first development candidate, an orally bioavailable and allosteric TYK2 inhibitor discovered by leveraging Atomwise’s proprietary AI drug discovery platform AtomNet^®, into clinical trials. TYK2 is a key mediator in cytokine signaling pathways linked to a broad range of immune-mediated inflammatory conditions. By modulating the TYK2 pathway, this development candidate has the potential to treat a wide range of autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, psoriasis, and psoriatic arthritis. Atomwise is targeting IND submission in 2H 2024.

“We’re thrilled that Neely has joined us to advance our first candidate into the clinic. This is a major milestone for Atomwise, as we become a pharmaceutical company focused on discovering and advancing our own proprietary pipeline," said Abraham Heifets, CEO & Co-Founder, Atomwise. "We believe the best path to discovering first-in-class and best-in-class medicines is to explore unique and untapped chemical space, which is what our AI enables. If you want to differentiate, it helps to start different.”

“We expect that this molecule provides an opportunity to deliver a best-in-class asset for the treatment of psoriasis as well as a first- and best-in-class asset for inflammatory bowel disease,” said Neely Mozaffarian, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, Atomwise. “This nomination marks a significant milestone in the Atomwise journey, as we leverage our AI platform to identify the most promising development candidates that have the highest chance of making a meaningful difference to patients.”

Dr. Mozaffarian was most recently CMO at GentiBio, and prior to that, held clinical leadership roles in several companies, including Abbvie, Lilly, Gilead, and Janssen/J&J, where she was responsible for progressing small and large molecules across all phases of development. Neely obtained her MD and PhD degrees at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, followed by a residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Rheumatology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Atomwise's evolution into an AI-driven pharma company aligns with its mission to invent a better way to discover medicines that help patients. The company remains dedicated to collaborating with partners across the healthcare ecosystem to drive forward groundbreaking research and development for patients.

The company’s AI-driven approach shifts the mode of drug discovery away from serendipitous discovery and toward search based on structure, with the objective of making the drug discovery process more rational, effective, and efficient. The AtomNet platform incorporates deep learning for structure-based drug design, enabling the rapid, generative-AI-powered search of Atomwise’s proprietary library of more than 15 quadrillion synthesizable compounds.

About Atomwise

Atomwise is a technology-enabled pharmaceutical company leveraging the power of AI to revolutionize small molecule drug discovery. The Atomwise team invented the use of deep learning for structure-based drug design, a core technology of Atomwise’s best-in-class AI discovery engine, which is differentiated by its ability to find and optimize novel chemical matter. Atomwise has extensively validated its discovery engine, having demonstrated the ability to find compounds with therapeutic potential hundreds of times across a wide variety of protein types and multiple “hard to drug” targets. Atomwise is advancing a proprietary pipeline of small-molecule drug candidates. Our mission is to invent a better way to discover drugs that help patients. Learn more at atomwise.com or follow @AtomwiseInc.

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Kimberly Ha
KKH Advisors
kimberly.ha@kkhadvisors.com
917-291-5744