X-Chem, Inc. announced the appointment of Christelle Huguet, Ph.D. as Chief Scientific Officer, along with an executive leadership appointment for Matthew Clark, Ph.D. as Senior Vice President, Chemistry.
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X-Chem Appoints Christelle Huguet, Ph.D. as Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Huguet is a senior pharmaceutical research and development leader with over 20 years of industry experience. Most recently, Dr. Huguet was head of internal research at Alexion, focusing on rare and devastating diseases. Prior to this, she spent 18 years at Pfizer running programs from the early phases of drug discovery to the early clinical development of programs through PhIIb. Dr. Huguet’s most recent position at Pfizer was Chief Scientific Officer Inflammation and Remodelling Unit. Over the course of her career, Dr. Huguet delivered more than 10 NCE candidates for clinical development, and led a number of PhI and PhIIa/b clinical trials.
Dr. Clark is a world renowned pioneer in the field of DNA encoded libraries of small molecules and is a founding scientist at X-Chem. Dr. Clark has overseen the development of the X-Chem DEXTM platform, including the creation of 200 billion molecules in X-Chem’s screening library, along with the successful application of the platform that has led to 44 licensed programs to X-Chem’s 22 active partnerships.
“We are delighted to have Christelle join our team,” said Rick Wagner. “She brings tremendous depth and experience to drive programs successfully into clinical development, as X-Chem continues to forward integrate and expand its research and development capabilities. In addition, we very much look forward to the ongoing and expanded strategic contributions from Matthew as he further builds X-Chem’s internal medicinal chemistry and DMPK functions.”
“X-Chem has proven its drug discovery capabilities across its many partnerships”, said Christelle Huguet. “I am looking forward to helping X-Chem further build out its capabilities and technologies to realize its mission of transforming patients’ lives.”
“We are at a very exciting time at X-Chem,” said Matthew Clark. “We have continued to innovate technologies that we believe will have profound impacts on how drugs are discovered and developed. I look forward to helping X-Chem continue to lead this effort.”
About X-Chem’s DNA-Encoded (DEX™) Libraries and Platform
X-Chem’s DEX drug discovery engine is based on a collection of DNA-encoded libraries comprising over 120 billion unique small molecules derived from iterative combinatorial chemistry processes, where the identity of each compound is recorded in a linked DNA barcode. The pooled libraries are used in low volume, affinity-based screening against biological targets, whereby ligands are ‘fished out’ and identified via DNA sequencing. Innovations in library design, screening methodologies, and bioinformatics underlie the exceptional performance of the DEX platform. The use of previously inaccessible chemical reactions and atom-efficient synthesis schemes generate maximal diversity and rule-of-five compliance. Parallel screens, either varying target concentration or including off-targets, mutants or known ligand competitors, allow for insight into the potency, mechanism of action, and specificity of putative hits. Proprietary statistical and bioinformatics tools identify multiple clusters of related molecules with emergent structure-activity relationships. These innovations underpin X-Chem’s success against difficult and intractable targets that have failed in conventional screening, and have generated over 100 fragment, low molecular weight heterocycle, macrocycle, and irreversible covalent electrophilic lead series that have been licensed by X-Chem’s partners.
