New company brand identity and Chief Scientific Officer appointment reflect long-term focus on developing small molecule therapeutics that regulate conformation of challenging drug targets

 

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – May 27, 2020 – Biodesy Inc. today announced that it has changed its corporate name to BlueLight Therapeutics Inc., effective May 20, 2020, and appointed drug discovery expert Mark Gallop, PhD, as Chief Scientific Officer. The new brand identity aligns with the company’s long-term strategic focus on applying its proprietary, structure-driven platform to develop small molecule therapeutics against challenging drug targets to treat a wide range of serious diseases.

 

BlueLight’s structure-function-based approach leverages its proven second harmonic generation (SHG) technology for sensitive and dynamic measurement of conformational changes in biomolecules. The company’s real-time, high-throughput platform bridges target-based and phenotypic screening methods to discover progressable chemical matter missed by traditional strategies. BlueLight focuses on conformationally regulated, difficult-to-drug proteins key to disease progression to build a sustainable pipeline, initially focusing on oncology.

 

“The launch of BlueLight Therapeutics marks the start of a new and exciting step in the evolution of our business,” said Ariel G. Notcovich, Chief Executive Officer, BlueLight Therapeutics. “We are excited to welcome Mark Gallop to our management team. He brings deep drug development expertise and a clear vision that has enabled us to transform our existing technology into an integrated discovery platform that overcomes challenges with traditional screening approaches. I’m confident that we have the team and technology in place to develop new medicines for challenging targets.”

 

Dr. Gallop is also an Executive-in-Residence at 5AM Ventures and has served on Biodesy’s Board of Directors since 2018. He will be responsible for driving BlueLight’s drug discovery and development efforts and brings more than three decades of scientific leadership and experience advancing drugs to the clinic. Previously, he was the scientific leader and/or co-founder of three innovative drug discovery companies, Rubedo Life Sciences Inc., Nurix Inc. and XenoPort Inc. Dr. Gallop is an inventor on more than 100 issued or pending US and PCT patents and the author of more than 60 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals.

 

“Over the past six years, Ariel and the Biodesy team have developed a powerful biophysical technology to enable identification of structure-modulating compounds,” said Dr. Gallop. “The company’s recent advances in using its SHG technology as the basis for high-throughput screening will enable us to identify differentiated starting points for drug discovery programs that conventional methodologies would have overlooked. In my role as a Biodesy Board Director, I’ve had the opportunity to observe first-hand the ability of their SHG platform to determine conformational changes in biomolecular targets. I’m excited to now join the BlueLight Therapeutics team and help build an internal pipeline of therapeutic programs where structural perturbation of the therapeutic target drives functionally important outcomes and provides clinically meaningful benefits to patients.”

 

About BlueLight Therapeutics

BlueLight Therapeutics is a biotechnology company that uses a novel structure-function-based approach to develop new therapeutic molecules against challenging drug targets to treat a wide range of serious diseases. The company leverages its proprietary second harmonic generation (SHG) platform to measure structural changes of biomolecules in real time and with high throughput. This unique discovery paradigm offers significant advantages compared to traditional strategies and enables scientists to directly identify small molecules that induce functionally relevant structural changes in difficult-to-drug targets. The company’s investors include 5AM Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, and Alexandria Venture Investments. BlueLight Therapeutics is located in South San Francisco, California. For more information, please visit www.bluelighttx.com.

 

 

BlueLight Therapeutics is a trademark of BlueLight Therapeutics, Inc. All other brands may be trademarks of their respective holders.