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By Jon Hu, CEO and Cofounder of Pepper Bio  Pepper Bio, the world’s first transomics drug discovery company, announced the addition of Simon Fricker, Ph.D., as chief development officer. Previously, Dr. Fricker served three years as vice president of research and development at Phio Pharmaceuticals, a publicly-traded clinical-stage biotechnology company, and eight years as a distinguished scientific fellow at Genzyme/Sanofi. In his new role at Pepper, Dr. Fricker will support the…

Jon Hu Forbes Councils Member Artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated nearly every industry, but the pharmaceutical industry could arguably benefit from AI the most. According to the results of a study performed by Insider Intelligence, AI has the potential to curb drug discovery costs for pharma companies by nearly 70%. It can do this by making accurate, more nuanced predictions about a disease or drug. However, if the data feeding into…

Jon Hu Forbes Councils Member Everyone likes to point fingers at big pharma. They’ll point to how much money it takes to develop a single drug (up to $2.8 billion on average)—or point to how a drug caused severe, long-term side effects that result in it coming off the market—ultimately throwing that money down the drain. But ironically, they’re missing the point. The problem isn’t the cost; the cost is an effect…

The drug discovery firm will work with the Dean Felsher laboratory, using the company's transomics platform to discover therapies for untreatable cancers. Researchers at Stanford University's Dean Felsher laboratory have announced plans to collaborate with drug discovery company Pepper Bio in an effort to identify therapeutic targets for untreatable lymphatic and liver cancers. With the help of Pepper Bio's platform on phosphoproteomics, the collaborators reportedly aim to identify and validate…

There’s a clear pain point when it comes to drug discovery: Depending on which study you cite, creating an approved drug costs anywhere from $985 million to $2.6 billion. And R&D returns have rebounded to only about 2.5% in 2020, up from a low of 1.6% in 2019. Not to mention the fact that drugs that fail in clinical trials don’t actually help people who need new treatments. With a…