drug-hunter
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Dennis X. Hu and the problem of knowing enough
A chemist with a habit of helping other people learn turned his reading problem into Drug Hunter. The harder lesson was building a company that could pay for the explanation.
Dennis X. Hu
Dennis X. Hu is the founder and CEO of Drug Hunter, a subscription knowledge platform that distills the science behind new medicines for more than 200 R&D institutions, including most of the world's top pharma and biotech companies. A medicinal chemist by training, he led small-molecule teams at Genentech and the biotech RAPT Therapeutics (where he helped invent the Phase II oncology candidate tivumecirnon) before turning a side project into a fully remote company of 20+ employees that reaches millions of searches a year and runs entirely on subscription revenue.
Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks is the co-founder, President and CEO of Delphia Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech pioneering 'activation lethality' - a contrarian approach that kills cancer by overdriving the very oncogenes other drugs try to switch off. A two-decade cancer drug hunter who helped advance three FDA-approved medicines at Agios and led oncology drug discovery at Novartis, Marks built Delphia as an entrepreneur-in-residence at GV (Google Ventures), launching it in 2024 with a $67 million Series A.
Mathai Mammen
Mathai Mammen is the Chairman, CEO and President of Parabilis Medicines (formerly FogPharma), a Cambridge biotech going after cancer targets long written off as undruggable. A trained physician-chemist who co-founded Theravance out of grad school and later ran R&D at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, he has had a hand in the discovery or development of roughly 19 approved medicines. At Parabilis he is betting on Helicon peptides - engineered molecules that slip inside cells to hit protein-protein interfaces small molecules and antibodies cannot reach.