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ArrePath Appoints Connor Coley, PhD, and Paul Hergenrother, PhD, to Scientific Advisory Board

Princeton, NJ – November 18, 2022 – ArrePath today announced that it has appointed two new members to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB):  Connor Coley, PhD, Henri Slezynger (1957) Career Development Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at MIT, and Paul Hergenrother, PhD, Kenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Endowed Chair in Natural Products Chemistry, and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“ArrePath is pioneering a highly innovative approach to the discovery of anti-infectives with new mechanisms of action to address antimicrobial resistance that integrates machine learning and imaging technologies into the drug discovery process,” said Lloyd Payne, PhD, ArrePath’s CEO. “Professors Coley and Hergenrother together bring outstanding, visionary leadership in the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in drug discovery and innovative strategies for the design of drugs to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria, respectively. We look forward to many contributions from them as we continue to build out our platform and advance our initial compounds.”

Professors Coley and Hergenrother will join other members of the company’s distinguished SAB, including, Zemer Gitai, PhD, ArrePath’s scientific founder, SAB Chair, and Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology at Princeton University; Barbara Engelhardt, PhD, Professor of Computational Biology at Stanford University; and Todd A. Black, PhD, Senior Director of Biology for the Global Alliance of TB Drug Development.

Connor’s research focuses on computational and experimental techniques to enable autonomous molecular discovery at the intersection of chemistry, data science, machine learning, with an emphasis on small molecule drug discovery. Key research areas in his laboratory include the design of new neural models for representation learning on molecules, data-driven synthesis planning, in silico strategies for predicting the outcomes of organic reactions, model-guided Bayesian optimization, and de novo molecular generation. Connor is a recipient of C&EN’s “Talented Twelve” award, Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” for Healthcare, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT.

Paul’s research interests span the design, synthesis, and evaluation of organic molecules with novel biological properties, including novel anticancer and antibacterial compounds where his group has developed predictive guidelines for compound accumulation in Gram-negative pathogens; chemical biology and synthetic organic chemistry.  His compound discovery work encompasses a variety of approaches, including natural product synthesis, synthesis of complex-and-diverse compounds, structure-based design, and high-throughput screening. Paul’s research has been recognized through many awards, including the 2016 UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, the 2017 ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, and the Eli Lilly Award for Medicinal Chemistry. In 2020, he was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Paul received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame and obtained his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin.

About ArrePath

ArrePath is an anti-infective drug discovery company addressing the global health challenge of drug resistant infections. The company’s proprietary machine learning (ML)-based platform enables the rapid and efficient identification of anti-infective agents with new mechanisms of action at the outset of the discovery process, through a deep understanding and analysis of cell and pathogen behavior. The platform’s proof-of-concept has been demonstrated in studies published in Cell by ArrePath’s scientific founder, Zemer Gitai, Ph.D., Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology at Princeton University. The company is funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Insight Partners, Innospark Ventures, Viva BioInnovator, Arimed Capital, PTX Capital, and Nor’easter Ventures. Learn more at www.arrepath.com and follow us on Twitter @ArrePath.

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Contact:
Robert Gottlieb
RMG Associates, LLC
[email protected]