ZebiAI Announces Appointment of Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli as Chief Learning Officer

“We are thrilled to welcome Rafa to ZebiAI,” said Rick Wagner, Ph.D., founder and CEO of ZebiAI. “The field of machine learning is on pace to transform drug discovery in the very near term. Rafa brings expertise in cutting-edge machine learning algorithms and will greatly augment our ability to help lead the field in ML-driven small molecule therapeutics.”

“I am very excited to join the ZebiAI team,” said Dr. Gomez-Bombarelli. “The combination of high quality DNA-encoded library screening data, novel biology from the Chemome Initiative, and the latest machine learning algorithms, provides an opportunity to make a major impact on drug discovery.”

In addition to his role with ZebiAI, Dr. Gomez-Bombarelli will maintain his current appointment as Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While at MIT and previously, his research trajectory has ranged from experimental physical organic chemistry and genotoxicity to computer-driven design of molecular materials. By combining first-principles simulation with machine learning, his group works in accelerating the discovery cycle of novel practical materials.

Dr. Gomez-Bombarelli received a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Universidad de Salamanca in Spain, followed by postdoctoral work at Heriot-Watt University and Harvard University after which he was a senior researcher at Kyulux NA applying Harvard-licensed technology to create real-life commercial organic light-emitting diode (OLED) products. He joined the MIT faculty in January 2018 and received the Google Faculty Award in 2019.

About ZebiAI Therapeutics

ZebiAI Therapeutics is a privately held biotechnology company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, focused on improving human health by powering machine learning (ML) to source novel targets and discover new therapeutics. The company’s core technology encompasses applying advanced ML algorithms to vast amounts of the highest quality protein-small molecule data to discover novel compounds from unlimited chemical space and then further utilizing ML to advance compounds to clinical candidates. As one of its core strategic programs, ZebiAI, together with its partner Google Accelerated Science, is applying its ML-driven discovery platform to efficiently deliver new chemical probes to the research community for thousands of human proteins to unlock novel biological targets responsible for human disease.

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