About Us
Accelerating the speed that healing reaches those in need
Our Mission
Therapeutic antibodies have helped millions of people, including our own family members. Even though they are highly effective medicines, 90% of the antibodies being tested in labs today will fail to make it to clinical trials. Those that are approved by the FDA must pay for the failures - resulting in antibody therapies with costs of over $100,000.
Our mission is to leverage advances in computation to EVQLVe the cost and time of developing these life-changing therapies. We do this by failing in the computer, where it’s fast and scalable, as opposed to the lab, where it’s capital intensive, time consuming, and risky. We love to prove our skeptics wrong, and will keep doing it as we accelerate healing to those in need.
Our Vision
Therapeutic antibodies have been revolutionary in helping many people, however they can be ineffective in as many as 50% of patients. That’s because medicines are designed to work best for the greatest number of people - not to be most effective for you. With over 75% of doctor's visits leading to a one-size-fits-all prescription, the scale and urgency of this oversight requires new ways of thinking.
We envision a future where your doctor will design a medicine specifically for you - one that will work best for you, one that may only work for you. That is the dream of personalized medicine. And while reaching that future could take decades, an essential step is teaching computers to create medicines today. That is precisely what we work towards, everyday, here at EVQLV.
Our Team
Andrew Satz
CEO & Co-Founder
Andrew Satz is the CEO and Co-Founder of EVQLV. A data scientist by training, Andrew is a seasoned innovator with nearly two decades of experience in applied artificial intelligence. He has founded or led multiple technology companies across industries, including a biotech, where he helped bring 3 drugs from discovery to human trials. He co-developed EVQLV's antibody discovery engine, which uses a wide range of machine learning and software engineering techniques to design therapeutic antibodies. In addition to designing the foundational technology for EVQLV, Andrew has sourced and negotiated multiple licensing deals with biotech, pharmaceutical companies, and universities. He earned a B.A. in Economic-Philosophy at Columbia University and an M.S. in Data Science from Columbia University School of Engineering.
Brett Averso
CTO & Co-Founder
Brett Averso is the CTO and Co-Founder of EVQLV. Brett is an expert in the computational design and engineering of monoclonal antibodies and antibody fragments. As the principal architect of EVQLV’s platform, his work produced 7 de novo binding antibodies several months after the founding of EVQLV. Brett’s machine learning expertise is focused on reinforcement learning applied to generative evolutionary fitness. Brett leads the EVQLV technology team and spearheads the strategy and development of EVQLV’s platform. His technical and scientific expertise includes machine learning, antibody engineering, scalable cloud computing, immunoinformatics, and agile development. Brett started his career in data analytics as a consultant in the asset management industry. He earned a B.A. in Accounting-Finance at University Connecticut School of Business in and an M.S. in Data Science from Columbia University School of Engineering.
Ben Maida
Chief Business Officer
Ben currently serves as EVQLV’s Chief Business Officer and General Counsel. In his roles, he leads the company’s commercial, business development, sales and legal operations. Among his accomplishments since joining EVQLV in Q2 of 2021, Ben has structured and closed a variety of commercial transactions, rebuilt the sales and lead generation process for EVQLV, exponentially increased the number of qualified leads in the sales funnel, and supported the founders in fundraising and various other operational components of the company. His diverse background consists of 6 years as a naval officer, 6 years as a general corporate attorney/general outside counsel at Cooley and Jones Day, and roles at multiple early-stage startup companies. He earned a B.S. in Political Science from the United States Naval Academy and Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School.
Borys Shor
CSO (Interim)
Dr. Shor has 15 years of experience in leading oncology discovery programs and external R&D partnerships at large pharmas (Wyeth, Pfizer) and biotech companies, with specific focus on preclinical discovery and development of biologics, small molecule kinase inhibitors and nanoparticles. He is a founder and the CEO of Manhattan BioSolutions Inc. and also serves as a BioEntrepreneur-In-Residence with the New York State Biotechnology Center. Att Pfizer, Dr. Shor led cross-functional oncology research teams to develop novel antibody-drug conjugates and supported Biological License Application (BLA) filing for Inotuzumab, which was approved for the treatment of leukemia in 2017. Prior to that, Dr. Shor served as a project team leader at the department of Oncology Discovery at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, managing the discovery and characterization of novel mTOR/PI3K kinase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer. Dr Shor earned an M.S. degree in molecular genetics from St. Petersburg State University, a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center and performed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Inflammation Research team at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D prior to joining Wyeth.
Alexander Sonneborn
Finance & Operations
Alexander is an accomplished finance leader with over 7 years of experience spanning multiple industries including: software, biotech, and e-commerce. Alex has served in finance and operations at multiple technology startups and is an expert in building and managing financial planning and analysis tools. At EVQLV, Alexander leads project management, financial planning & operations for the technology, business development, legal, and scientific teams. His role focuses on maximizing profitability based on business strategy while identifying cost savings opportunities and efficiencies. Alexander holds an MS in Biostatistics from Columbia University, an MBA from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, and a BA from the University of Virginia.
Allegra Bonomi
Data Science
Allegra currently leads immunoinformatics at EVQLV. She leverages the EVQLV platform to classify immune repertoires, with a heavy focus on computer science. Allegra also applies data science, bioinformatics and ML tools to solve challenges in identifying unique and diverse antibody candidates. Allegra has previous R&D experience from the Neuroscience, Surgery and Trauma Center at the Blizard Institute in London, as well as from Epibone, a Brooklyn-based tissue engineering company. Allegra pursued her BSc in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University before joining EVQLV as a Summer Intern.
Brett Spurrier
Computational Biology
Dr. Spurrier is EVQLV’s head of engineering and an expert in computational structural biology His expertise is in designing proteins and protein interfaces and leveraging software engineering principles to scale those efforts. At EVQLV, Dr. Spurrier is responsible for implementing large scale molecular antibody designing tools to optimize antibody-antigen interfaces within a scalable, high-performance cloud infrastructure. His past research has focused on de novo designs of HIV-1 immunogens (NYU, NIH/NIAID/NCI), and building scalable workflows to process vast amounts of related immunogenic data. Dr. Spurrier holds a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from New York University’s School of Medicine as well as two master’s degrees in Biochemistry and Biomechanical Engineering.
Eugenio Bacallao
Data Management
Gino is a native of South Florida and a graduate of Florida International University with an MBA in International Business. He has been at the intersection of tech and manufacturing for over 20 years, and he brings strong operational and data skills vital for growth.
Jeff Snell
Machine Learning
Dr. Snell is EVQLV's Head of Research and an expert in computational biology, medicine, and machine learning. He has implemented a number of deep learning models from sequence to structure that enable the EVQLV platform to infer biological processes previously not available in silico. Previously he was a founding member and built the core technology at a medical AI startup, Rad AI, that is used by 20% of radiologists in the US. Dr. Snell holds an MD from Indiana University School of Medicine and is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology under the former head of the National Cancer Institute, Ned Sharpless.
Advisors
Simeon Simeonov
Board Member
Sim is an entrepreneur, investor and startup mentor. He is the founding CTO of Swoop and IPM.ai, startups that use privacy-preserving AI to improve patient outcomes and marketing effectiveness in life sciences and healthcare. Sim was an EIR at General Catalyst Partners and technology partner at Polaris Partners where he helped start five companies the firms invested in, three of which have already been acquired.
Borys Shor
Advisor
Dr. Shor has 15 years of experience in leading oncology discovery programs and external R&D partnerships at large pharmas (Wyeth, Pfizer) and biotech companies, with specific focus on preclinical discovery and development of biologics, small molecule kinase inhibitors and nanoparticles. He is a founder and the CEO of Manhattan BioSolutions Inc. and also serves as a BioEntrepreneur-In-Residence with the New York State Biotechnology Center. Att Pfizer, Dr. Shor led cross-functional oncology research teams to develop novel antibody-drug conjugates and supported Biological License Application (BLA) filing for Inotuzumab, which was approved for the treatment of leukemia in 2017. Prior to that, Dr. Shor served as a project team leader at the department of Oncology Discovery at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, managing the discovery and characterization of novel mTOR/PI3K kinase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer. Dr Shor earned an M.S. degree in molecular genetics from St. Petersburg State University, a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center and performed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Inflammation Research team at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D prior to joining Wyeth.
Roland Dunbrack
Advisor
Roland received his PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University and now heads the Dunbrack Lab at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Roland’s research is concentrated on statistical structural bioinformatics, the development of methods for structure prediction of proteins and protein complexes, and the application of these methods to problems in cancer biology.
Ron Lennox
Advisor
Dr. Lennox has been an active investor and entrepreneur in early stage life science companies for over twenty five years. He has served on the boards of over eighteen companies and has been involved in the founding of seven companies, six of which were successful. He was founding CEO of Protometrix, Inc. (acquired by Life Technologies, Inc.), and also of CGI Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He holds a B.Sc. in Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow, a PhD in Cell Biology from Oxford University and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Slater Victoroff
Advisor
Slater Victoroff is the Founder and CTO of indico data solutions, an Enterprise AI solution for unstructured content with an emphasis on text and NLP. He has been building machine learning solutions for startups, governments, and Fortune 100 companies for the past 5 years and is a frequent speaker at AI conferences.
Victor Greiff
Advisor
Victor Greiff is an Associate Professor at the University of Oslo (Department of Immunology) since January 2018. His group develops machine learning, computational and experimental tools for analyzing antibody and T-cell repertoires. He received his Ph.D. at Humboldt-University Berlin in 2012 and conducted his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Sai T. Reddy (ETH Zürich, Switzerland). He is currently a member of the AIRR-C Communications Sub-committee (since 2018) and the current chair of AIRR-C Executive Sub-committee.
