About Empress

A revolution in small molecule
drug discovery

Empress makes the discovery of effective, easy-to-take, value-driven medicines more productive with a platform that finds starting points for drugs inside the human body.

What if the solution to better drugs was not in front of us, but inside of us?

The discovery of biologic drugs based on proteins, information molecules, and cells has proven that inside the human body exists a rich source of bioactive molecules that can reliably inform drug products, drug targets, and biomarkers. Yet to date, drug discovery has largely overlooked the millions of unique chemical reactions, with billions more unique chemistries involved, that take place inside each of us to maintain health.

What’s more, small molecule drugs make ideal medicines, yet conventional R&D is a lengthy, risky process. What if we could reliably and predictably generate drug candidates that are more likely to succeed at a fraction of the time and cost? 

Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2020, Empress has built a proprietary product platform, called Chemilogics, to canvass the untapped universe within the human body of chemistry encoded in DNA and pioneer a new paradigm in small molecule drug discovery with tremendous potential value to patients and society.

Leadership

Jason Park, PhD

CEO and Co-founder

Murray McKinnon, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer

Sabrina Yang, PhD

Chief Innovation Officer

Boris Hayete, PhD

SVP, Computational Biology

Joe Kelleher, PhD

SVP, Biology

Dawn Thompson, PhD

SVP, Head of Platform Development

Kevin Kreutter, PhD

VP, Drug Discovery

Founding Team

Noubar Afeyan, PhD

Founder and CEO, Flagship Pioneering

Doug Cole, MD

Managing Partner, Flagship Pioneering

John Mendlein, PhD

Executive Partner, Flagship Pioneering

Jason Park, PhD

CEO and Cofounder, Empress

Operating Partner, Flagship Pioneering

Sabrina Yang, PhD

Chief Innovation Officer, Empress

Principal, Flagship Pioneering

Empress News

Who We Are

We are entrepreneurial scientists and creative optimists working together to create better medicines for patients faster.

At Empress, we ask big questions in pursuit of novel solutions. We operate at the intersection of the latest advances in genomics, synthetic biology, and AI/ML with the expectation that these disciplines, harnessed by our ingenuity, hold the answers to finding effective medicines at a fraction of time and cost. The implications of our work will be profound, the journeys to get there, exhilarating.

Together, we are using the chemistry inside each of us to make medicines for all of us.

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