Turbine – a ‘techbio’ company with a cell simulation platform that can understand the biology of diseases including cancer and predict the effectiveness of treatments – has strengthened its board with three new appointments.
The additions will help the company to accelerate business development following strong results generated by its Simulated Cell platform in the past 18 months.
Anna Marie Wagner, who joins as an Independent Director, was previously responsible for AI strategy and external innovation at US biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks, and led the company’s IPO in 2021, which was the largest of its type in the biotech sector, raising $1.6 billion. She is also a former investor at Bain Capital Private Equity.
Dr Greg Hersch, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Strategy and Venture at MSD (the trade name of Merck & Co Inc, Rahway, NJ USA) joins as Observer while Alex Gwyther of Mercia Ventures joins as Investor Director. MSD Global Health Innovation Fund and Mercia co-led Turbine’s €20m Series A financing round in November 2022. Dr Hersch has extensive experience in biopharma strategy, while Alex Gwyther previously worked at IBM and for the UK government.
Turbine’s Simulated Cell platform uses AI to build a computer model of human cells and tissue. The company has been working with customers such as AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Ono Pharmaceutical to help them target disease more effectively and develop new drugs. Turbine has offices in London, Cambridge and Budapest.
Szabolcs Nagy, Turbine’s co-founder and CEO, said: “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. Simulated Cells are rapidly becoming the go-to platform for biopharma companies to test billions of ideas and find the right experiments to run.
“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.”