Cellarity Appoints Head of Platform to Advance Vision for Novel Drug Creation
May 07 2024 - 8:23AM
Business Wire
Cellarity, a life sciences company founded by Flagship
Pioneering to transform the way medicines are created, today
announced the appointment of Christopher (“Topher”) Woelk, Ph.D.,
as Vice President and Head of Platform. In this role, Woelk will
lead Cellarity’s revolutionary platform to create drugs that are
presently out of reach with traditional methods of drug discovery.
The Cellarity platform uses proprietary AI models to link biology
and chemistry with high-dimensional multi-omic data to uncover
novel actionable insights into disease biology and create
non-intuitive drug candidates in a vast array of clinical
conditions. The platform has already produced foundational programs
in several disease areas, including sickle cell disease (SCD) and
metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH, in
collaboration with Novo Nordisk).
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Christopher (“Topher”) Woelk, Ph.D., Vice
President and Head of Platform (Photo: Business Wire)
“We are at a pivotal moment in our journey at Cellarity as our
first drug candidate in sickle cell disease moves to IND enabling
studies,” said Fabrice Chouraqui, Pharm.D., CEO of Cellarity and a
CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “Topher’s experience is
particularly relevant to Cellarity as we continue to invest in our
platform. In both biotech and pharma contexts, Topher has developed
powerful techniques leveraging machine learning and multi-omics for
target identification, drug development, biomarker resolution, and
reverse translation in clinical studies. We are thrilled to welcome
him to help us realize the vision for our transformative
platform.”
Dr. Woelk comes to Cellarity after serving as Head of
Translational Genomics at Verge Genomics and Head of Systems
Biology at Merck’s Exploratory Science Center. Prior to his time in
industry, he was a professor at the University of Southampton in
the United Kingdom and held various academic positions at the
University of California San Diego.
“Cellarity’s platform is second to none, powering biological
discoveries with industry-leading technological advancement,” Woelk
said. “I look forward to helping advance the platform by bringing
to life insights that will open up opportunities for new drug
development programs and help accelerate the company’s pipeline
towards the clinic.”
About Cellarity
Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2019, Cellarity is
fundamentally redesigning the way drugs are created. By shifting
the focus from a single target to the underlying cellular
dysfunction, the company unravels the complexity of disease biology
to create medicines that are out of reach with the target-based
drug discovery approach. Cellarity has developed a platform that
uses proprietary AI models trained on more than 30 million single
cell transcriptomes to discover novel actionable biology and create
non-intuitive drug candidates in a vast array of diseases. The
company currently has programs ongoing in several disease areas
including metabolic disease, hematology, and immunology. For more
information, visit www.cellarity.com.
About Sickle Cell Disease
Sickle cell disease is a group of inherited red blood cell
disorders that require the prevention and treatment of pain
episodes, among other complications, and for which current
treatments fall short or remain inaccessible to most people living
with the condition. Learn more.
About Metabolic Steatohepatitis
Metabolic steatohepatitis, previously known as nonalcoholic
steatohepatitis and for which limited treatments exist, is marked
by inflammation of the liver caused by excess fat cells in it and
eventually leads to progressive liver damage. Learn more.
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Ellen Murphy ellen.murphy@syneoshealth.com 917-628-8097