ILICOGENIX
A Chemical Biology Company
90% of drugs entering clinical trials never reach patients
1
What if failure rates could be reduced from 90% to 10%?
1. Dowden & Munro, Nat Rev Drug Discovery (2019)
Clinical trial outcome is the most consequential and expensive failure point in drug development. Some programs fail because of biology, but most fail because early decisions around targets, modality and approach severely limit any plan B. At Silicogenix, we are solving this problem by introducing a new development paradigm that almost guarantees program success by increasing shots on goal at every stage of development, including clinical testing...
A Massively Parallel Drug Development Model Anchored In Flexibility & Choice
Many Molecules, Many Targets, Many Cures
TM
Silicogenix is restructuring development around a massively parallel, many-to-many model, evaluating multiple targets, binding pockets (including orthosteric and allosteric sites), and therapeutic modalities in parallel. This approach shifts failure upstream — making it faster, cheaper, and more informative — while preserving only the highest-probability programs for downstream investment.
Enabled By A Proprietary Tech Stack
And the world's most advanced discovery chemistry engine - CADDE
Helping Extend The Approach Even To Clinical Trials
Our pipeline
SGX is currently developing small molecule and peptide inhibitors against multiple targets in Ewing Sarcoma (EwS). Dr. Noah Federman, Glaser Chair of Pediatric Sarcomas, serves as an advisor and KOL. We are expanding to other rare oncology indications as each step in our workflow is validated.
Full new release here
A BIG thank you to our partners
Startup Programs
What's new at SGX
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December 2025: Silicogenix is now part of Microsoft for Startups! WOOHOOO!
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September, 2025: Dr. Noah Federman, Glaser Chair of Pediatric Sarcomas, joins Silicogenix as an Advisor and Key Opinion Leader (KOL) for the Ewing Sarcoma program
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June 10, 2025: We are extremely proud to announce our partnership with Bioduro (see announcement towards the top of this webpage). Many thanks to the Bioduro team.
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SGX establishes a Technical Advisory Panel (TAB) with Subbu Iyer, Karan Syal, Tim Sears and Vishv Jeet as members help guide deep dives into computational and engineering tool development (March 2025)
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Tim Sears, Karan Syal and Alok Singhania to join SGX as Advisors starting March 2025!
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SGX debuts its first CADDE-designed "lead-series" with known precursors from a CRO Jan 3, 2025! Getting ready for our first pre-clinical program in CLL!
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SGX welcomes 3 new engineers starting November 1, 2024! Welcome aboard Juan, JD, Paulina!
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SGX held its first strategy offsite on September 11, 2024 at VC Nest in Palo Alto! Many thanks to Lochan Alagh for making the space available.
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SGX welcomes Ryan Flynn, Ph.D. (Harvard, Savant Ventures) to the team as Strategic Advisor
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SGX welcomes Kevin Lynch, Ph.D. (ex CBO Recursion, Notable; ex VP Abbott, Abbvie, Vir) to the team.
Our Story
Do you really need millions of dollars worth of computational infrastructure to demonstrate the power of AI for drug development?
We don't think so....
Could we take a small but extremely talented team, clever scientific thinking, off-the-shelf components and some chutzpah to legitimately harness the power of AI for drug discovery?
We show we absolutely can: with a very small team, two off-the-shelf servers that cost less than what you would spend on a vacation, and a number of novel computational chemistry tools and frameworks, we have built small molecules that are drug like, biologically active, inhibit in a dose-dependent-fashion and are chemically novel. Our entire process from molecule design to activity validation takes only about 3 months. In fact, with just pre-seed funding, we are getting ready to put molecules into pre-clinical development. THAT IS THE TRUE POWER OF AI!
Our Vision
Many Molecules, Many Targets, Many Cures
TM
Very often in Pharma, scientists scramble to identify the one key protein that will be bring about disease cure or remission. But every disease is a breakdown in process, with many players (proteins, pathways) involved that become dysfunctional. At SGX, we see and treat disease as a process, with the possibility of many points of intervention, rather than chasing a single key. To this end, the SGX team is attempting a big feat- making the entire human proteome druggable, so we can effectively target not just a single protein but entire pathways as well, in various ways including combinations. Many molecules for many targets, leading to many cures!
Team
Shailesh Date, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & CEO
CEO, LRC Systems
Assoc. Adj. Professor, UCSF
Comp. Bio, Biophysics, Inf. Diseases
Jose Jaramillo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & CTO
Sr. Scientist & Head of High Perf. Computing Research Ctr, LRC
Prof. of Computer Engineering, UTP
Former Fulbright Fellow (@Purdue)
Photonics, Quantum Computing
Dan Serna, MS
Sr. Engineer
AI
Jose Duarte
Engineer & TechOps Manager
Math, AI, Autonomous agents
Paulina Escobar
Chemist
Computational Chemistry
Juan Aguirre
Engineer
AI, Databases
Surabhi Rathore, Ph.D.
Scientist
Structural Biology
Engie Arias
Intern
Bioinformatics
Scientific Advisory Board (SAB)
Andrew Calabrese, Ph.D.
Member, SAB
Founding CSO, Animol Discovery;
Founder Revagenix
Ex. Pfizer, Celegene, AgriMetis
Lee Swem, Ph.D.
Member, SAB
CDO @ Kanvas Bio
Ex CSO FedBio & Achaogen,
Ex. Genentech
Subramanian Iyer, Ph.D.
Member, SAB
Member, TAB
SVP of AI, QXO
Ex Head of AI @Target
Ex. Goldman Sachs, Google
Technical Advisory Board (TAB)
Tim Sears, Ph.D.
Member, TAB
Head of Software Applications, Groq
Ex. Target, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers
Karan Syal, Ph.D.
Member, TAB
Head, AI Partnerships, Reveal Health
Founder & CEO, iVIzz (exited)
Ex. Genentech
Vishv Jeet, Ph.D.
Member, TAB
Quantitative Trading Specialist
Founder, Mindtapp.app
Ex VP Research, PGIM
Ex. Assoc. Dir, MSCI Private Capital
Business Development
Kevin Lynch, Ph.D.
Strategic Advisor
Ex CBO Recursion, Notable
Ex VP Abbvie, Vir
Ryan Flynn, M.D. Ph.D.
Strategic Advisor
Asst. Professor, Harvard
Savantus Ventures (not as investor)
Alok Singhania
Partner Gridscape
Ex. CEO/Co-Founder/President Blindfish, Mobifusion, Info Objects
Josh Siedenfeld, JD
Legal Counsel
Cooley
Dana White, MBA
Finance Director
Engineroom
(Note: SGX appointment not through Engineroom)
Other Advisors
Nilesh Rajadhyax, MBA
COO Medquest,
Ex. CEO GEDC,
Ex. McKinsey
Vibhav Garg, MS
Pinterest; Ex Twitter,
Facebook (Meta)
Zack Abbott, Ph.D.
CEO, Zbiotics
Neil Cohen, MBA
Hexagon Federal
Don Oppenheim, MBA
COO (Retired), Meyers Nave;
Partner (Retired), Altman Weil
Get in touch!
Mailing Address
655 Oak Grove Ave. #1417
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Office
1336 N Carolan Ave #206
Burlingame, CA 94010
Phone
(415) 570-9067
Please send an email to business-manager (at our domain)
The Magicians!
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