BERKELEY, Calif., March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kimia Therapeutics, Inc. (Kimia), a biotechnology company generating a chemical atlas for treating human disease, today announced the appointment of Imran S. Haque, Ph.D., to the role of chief technology officer. Dr. Haque, who was most recently senior vice president of AI and digital sciences at Recursion, will lead development of Kimia’s ATLAS (AcTive Learning with Automated Synthesis and screening) technology platform and will join Kimia’s executive team.
Dr. Haque brings to Kimia nearly 20 years of experience at the interface among chemistry, biology, and machine learning. At Recursion, he built and led the data science and machine learning team that spanned platform development through therapeutic discovery to transform how drugs can be discovered using high-dimensional biological data and AI, and was technical lead for Recursion’s M&A and partnering efforts (including partnerships with Roche/Genentech, Tempus, and Helix; and its acquisitions of Cyclica, Valence Discovery, and Exscientia).
“Kimia’s ATLAS technology addresses the key challenges I have observed in advancing both small molecule drug discovery and the development of true chemistry ‘foundation models’. The combination of both chemical diversity and rapid turnaround enables the ATLAS platform to go both ‘broad’ and ‘deep’, and uniquely among its peers, it is built on a technology, Chemotype Evolution, that has already delivered both marketed drugs and high-value molecules in the clinic,” said Dr. Haque. “I am thrilled to partner with the expert team at Kimia to integrate scaled physical exploration with artificial intelligence to empower ATLAS and thus Kimia to bring better therapies to patients more rapidly.”
“Imran brings a unique combination of expertise in building machine learning teams and technologies for chemistry, biology and genome editing, with applications in new target- and drug-discovery,” said Stig K. Hansen, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Kimia. “We are excited to welcome Imran to the team and look forward to the transformative impact he will have in building Kimia into a leading AI/ML enabled drug discovery and development organization.”
Kimia was launched in January 2023 as a spin-out of Carmot Therapeutics as an opportunity to leverage Carmot’s Chemotype Evolution technology (to which Kimia has a license outside the metabolic field) to build a next-generation therapeutics discovery platform, ATLAS, integrating high-throughput chemistry, machine learning, and genome editing. ATLAS is powered by a high-throughput, nanoliter-scale chemistry platform providing Kimia with instant access to billions of drug-like compounds for both discovery and machine learning training purposes. Kimia is today advancing a pipeline of therapeutic candidates in cancer and immunology.
“We believe the future of techbio will be defined by the synthesis of high-speed experimentation and scaled computation,” said Adam Goulburn, Founder and Managing Partner at Dimension. “I believe Imran’s unique machine learning and AI expertise in the context of experimental chemistry and biology systems makes him the ideal CTO to realize the vision that led us to partner with The Column Group to spin-out Kimia, to supercharge the company’s already prolific and productive drug discovery platform, and to complement Kimia’s proven team and technology.”
Prior to leading Recursion’s work in applying machine learning to biology and chemistry, Dr. Haque served as the first chief scientific officer at Freenome, leading the development of machine-learning-guided diagnostics for the early detection of cancer based on plasma multi-omics; and in roles of increasing responsibility at Counsyl (acquired by Myriad Genetics), pioneering the application of next-generation sequencing and computational methods to scale screening for Mendelian genetic disorders. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where in his thesis work he developed some of the first applications of GPU technology to scale machine learning in chemistry for drug discovery under the supervision of Drs. Vijay Pande and Daphne Koller, and his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He is the author of over 35 peer-reviewed articles, including in venues such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and Nature Genetics, and over 30 patents and patent applications.
About Kimia Therapeutics
Kimia is a drug discovery company applying high throughput precision chemistry in combination with genome editing and machine learning to identify druggable sites at key nodes of intervention in human disease.
Kimia is building a next-generation therapeutics discovery platform called ATLAS that combines AcTive Learning with Automated Synthesis and screening. ATLAS is powered by a high-throughput, nanoliter-scale chemistry platform that provides Kimia with instant access to billions of drug-like compounds.
Machine learning and computational chemistry are core components of ATLAS, utilizing chemical synthesis data and assay readouts to drive new compound design, synthesis, and screening in a continuous learning loop. Kimia is using ATLAS in combination with genome editing to interrogate biological pathways, uncover new targets, and to identify novel drugs for the treatment of cancer and immunological disorders.
For more information, visit the Kimia Therapeutics website (https://kimiatx.com).
Kimia Contact
Stig K. Hansen
Founder and CEO
info@kimiatx.com
Kimia Media Contact
media@kimiatx.com
