Boulder’s Enveda forms advisory panel ahead of clinical trials

BOULDER — Enveda Biosciences, a biotechnology company also known as Enveda Therapeutics Inc. that uses artificial intelligence to develop new medicines, has formed a therapeutic advisory board to advise the company as it enters clinical trials this year.

The advisory board is chaired by Nicholas Saccomano, a former chief science officer at  Pfizer’s Boulder Research and Development headquarters. Also on the board are James Mackay, CEO of Kateran Consulting and former AstraZeneca Research and Development leader; Dr. Zoe Diana Draelos, consulting professor of dermatology at Duke University; Dr. Ethan Wiener, consultant at Latimer Brook Pharmaceutical Consultants and former senior vice president and group therapeutic area head at Pfizer Global Research and Development; and John Teijaro, professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute.

“This is an incredibly exciting time for Enveda as we launch our first trials for multiple lead assets and transition into a clinical-stage company. The members of the TAB are all leaders in their respective areas of expertise, including in specific therapeutic areas, drug development and trial design and have already provided meaningful guidance on our pipeline progress,” Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Enveda, said in a written statement. “The TAB is also a voice for the patients, ensuring we are developing medicines that will truly solve patient needs.”

“I find Enveda’s accelerated methodology to navigate plant natural product space with readouts firmly based in phenotypic pharmacology very interesting. What makes it exciting is the nature, activity and progressable properties of the program’s natural product starting points that are elaborated into real drugs by a very capable chemistry team,” Saccomano said. “The leadership has the right balance of technical rigor, curiosity, urgency and team spirit built into its operating philosophy that I have seen in other successful organizations.”

The formation of the TAB marks a milestone for Enveda, the company said in a press statement. “Multiple small molecules were rapidly discovered from unique chemistry found in medicinal plants using a proprietary platform and advanced in parallel to yield Enveda’s initial wave of first-in-class programs. The Enveda platform overcomes many of the long-standing obstacles in natural product drug development such as active molecule identification, property and structure prioritization, amenability to medicinal chemistry, and large-scale material access, thereby enabling the seamless integration of the natural world into the modern drug discovery laboratory,” the statement said.

Founded in 2019, the company plans to launch at least two clinical trials in 2024.

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