CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– LifeMine Therapeutics Inc, a biopharmaceutical company reinventing drug discovery by mining fungal biodiversity to develop mechanistically and structurally novel therapeutics, today announced the appointment of William G. Kaelin Jr., M.D., to its board of directors. Dr. Kaelin is the Sidney Farber Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In 2019, Dr. Kaelin won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in understanding how cells sense and adapt to changes in oxygen.
“It is tremendously exciting and a great honor to have an extraordinary life science leader like Bill join our board of directors,” said Gregory Verdine, Ph.D., co-founder, chief executive officer and chief scientific officer of LifeMine. “Bill is an accomplished physician, leading cancer researcher and scholar, and life science entrepreneur who brings exceptional breadth and depth of scientific knowledge and experience to LifeMine. Bill’s expertise will be invaluable as we interrogate the deep biological mysteries of evolution and life on earth while simultaneously advancing multiple novel precision therapeutics through translational studies and into the clinic.”
Dr. Kaelin is among the world’s most prominent cancer cell biologists, having made seminal contributions toward understanding how human cells sense and adapt to changes in intracellular oxygen levels. This and other seminal work in translational cancer biology has garnered him multiple prominent awards, most notably the Nobel Prize in 2019.
Dr. Kaelin is also an accomplished life science entrepreneur, having served as a scientific co-founder of Tango Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics. He is a Duke University trustee and serves on the board of directors for Damon-Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and Eli Lilly and Company. He also recently served on the National Cancer Institute board of scientific advisors, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) board of trustees and the Institute of Medicine National Cancer Policy board. Earlier in his career, Dr. Kaelin was a house officer and chief resident in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was a medical oncology clinical fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Livingston, M.D., where he began his studies of tumor suppressor proteins. Dr. Kaelin is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, Association of American Physicians in 2012, the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2007. Dr. Kaelin received his M.D. from Duke University in 1982.
“By interrogating the fungal biosphere, LifeMine’s approach offers the potential to transform the way small molecule drugs are discovered across all major disease areas,” said Dr. Kaelin. “This approach is exciting and leverages the latest advancements in data science, genomics and synthetic biology. I look forward to contributing to LifeMine’s future growth and success as the Company continues to execute on its scientific and operational initiatives.”
