BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Silicon Therapeutics announced today that it has named Roger J. Pomerantz, MD, FACP, a current member of the Board of Directors, to Chairman and appointed Mark J. Gilbert, MD, to the Board of Directors.

"We are delighted to expand our relationship with Roger as Chairman of the Board of Directors and to welcome Mark to our Board, as we progress our projects toward the clinic,” said Lanny Sun, Silicon Therapeutics Co-founder and CEO. “Roger brings deep company building expertise that we will leverage as we broaden our pipeline and further shape our business strategy. Mark brings extensive clinical development experience in oncology that will help shape our clinical strategies to move our small molecule, innate immune oncology therapeutics into clinical development."

Over the course of his career, Dr. Pomerantz led the development of 12 infectious disease drugs that have been approved and launched worldwide, and established an outstanding track record in licensing and acquisitions. Following an academic career, most recently as an endowed, tenured Professor of Medicine, Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, and Chief of Infectious Diseases at Thomas Jefferson University and Medical School, he joined Johnson & Johnson’s Tibotec Pharmaceuticals unit as President. He subsequently moved to Merck, where he served as Global Head of the Infectious Diseases Franchise and Senior Vice President at Merck Research Labs, and Worldwide Head of Licensing and Acquisitions, Senior Vice President at Merck & Co. Following Merck, he become President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Seres Therapeutics, where he continues to serve as Chairman. He joined Contrafect in 2014 as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors and he currently serves as President, CEO and Chairman. He is also on several other boards including Intec Pharma, Inc. Dr. Pomerantz holds a BA in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He did his medical post-graduate training at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), where he did a subspecialty fellowship in Infectious Diseases. Dr. Pomerantz was also the Chief Resident at MGH. He is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. He did post-doctoral training at the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the laboratory of Dr. David Baltimore, in molecular retrovirology.

Dr. Gilbert joined Juno March 2014 as Chief Medical Officer and has led the clinical development of its pioneering CAR-T therapies Previously, Dr. Gilbert served as Vice President and Head Global Clinical Development, Therapeutic Area Oncology, at Bayer Schering Pharmaceuticals. Prior to Bayer Schering, he held several executive positions with Berlex Pharmaceuticals and its parent company Schering, AG, most recently as Vice President and Head of Global Medical Development Group, Oncology. Dr. Gilbert joined Berlex from Immunex, where his responsibilities included development and medical affairs for Leukine® and Mitoxantrone® in hematology, oncology, Crohn’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. Prior to his executive positions in biotech and oncology companies, Dr. Gilbert was a faculty member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington. Dr. Gilbert received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Iowa and his M.D. from the University of Iowa Medical School.

About Silicon Therapeutics

Silicon Therapeutics (“SiTX”) is a physics-driven drug discovery company focused on small molecule therapeutics for cancer that target innate immunity to “light the spark” within immunologically cold tumors. The company’s unique computational physics-based platform can accurately simulate the physical motion and properties of biological targets at atomistic resolution to reveal unique insights into the drug design process. The platform is cohesively integrated with a world-class wet lab including biophysics, chemistry, and biology to enable rapid hypothesis-driven data generation to advance drug discovery projects on targets that have traditionally been thought of as undruggable. The SiTX lead program is a small molecule STING agonist for systemic delivery in I/O that is slated to enter the clinic in mid-2020. The company’s headquarters and laboratories are in Boston, MA with additional operations in Suzhou, China.