Nimbus Therapeutics is making Scott Edmondson, Ph.D., its new senior vice president and head of chemistry.
Edmondson comes from being director and head of Boston oncology chemistry at AstraZeneca, where he oversaw recruiting, management and strategic direction for a team of more than 30 chemists. Before this, he spent a mammoth 18 years over at U.S. Big Pharma Merck.
Now, he turns to the much smaller Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Nimbus. The virtual biotech uses an in silico and computational chemistry platform to build novel small molecules. It has several discovery partnerships with Big Pharma and biotech companies, including Gilead and its out-licensed nonalcoholic steatohepatitis drug.
Edmondson will now help run Nimbus’ R&D, which includes four new programs it’s been working on that could lead to treatments for metabolic disorders, cancer and autoimmune diseases. These include CTPS1, an enzyme that plays a role in immune activation, and AMPKβ2, which regulates metabolic homeostasis in many tissues. The other two, WRN and Cbl-b, are both immuno-oncology targets. All four are difficult to drug.
Nimbus will spend the next year pushing those programs forward with the goal of landing on development candidates. It’s also working on an IND for its HPK1 inhibitor as well as taking its Tyk2 program into a phase 2b study in 2021, the company recently told Fierce Biotech.
“We’re delighted to welcome Scott to Nimbus at such an exciting period of growth for the company,” said Peter Tummino, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Nimbus. “Scott’s extensive experience at building and leading world-class chemistry teams will be incredibly valuable as we progress our discovery efforts and lay the groundwork for our next generation of important small molecule therapeutics.”
“I’m excited to join this exceptional team of drug hunters,” added Edmondson. “Nimbus’ unique position at the nexus of structural biology, computational chemistry and molecular sciences has driven the company’s long history of successes, and I’m eager to help lead the discovery efforts that will shape the company’s promising future pipeline.”
