Everyone in biotech is racing to destroy proteins. He runs the company that wants to save them.
There is a fashionable idea in biotech, and Tony Kingsley is running a company built on its opposite. The fashionable idea is targeted protein degradation: design a small molecule that grabs a disease-causing protein and marches it to the cell's shredder. Billions of dollars have chased it. Stablix, the New York company Kingsley has led since February 2022, does the mirror image. Its molecules find proteins that a disease is prematurely destroying and peel the destruction tag back off. Same machinery, run in reverse. The company calls this targeted protein stabilization, and if it works, it is a drug class that mostly did not exist when Kingsley took the job.
That is a large bet to make on a career that, until recently, was mostly about selling and steering rather than inventing. Kingsley is a commercial operator by training. He spent a decade at Biogen running global commercial as executive vice president, learning how a drug reaches the whole world. He was a partner at McKinsey before that. In between the strategy and the selling, he kept getting handed the top job at biotechs that needed one: The Medicines Company, TARIS Bio, Scholar Rock, and now Stablix.
He tends to arrive when a company is at an inflection point and leave once the inflection is past. TARIS sold to Johnson & Johnson at the end of 2019, and Kingsley moved on. His run at Scholar Rock lasted almost exactly one year. Read charitably, this is the resume of an operator who is good at the hard, ambiguous middle and less interested in the ribbon-cutting. In July 2025 the specialty pharma company Indivior added him to its board, which is what tends to happen to executives who have seen a lot of the field.
Targeted protein stabilization represents a whole new therapeutic platform technology with applications across a wide range of important diseases with high unmet need. Tony Kingsley, on joining Stablix
Cells tag unwanted proteins with a small marker called ubiquitin, which sends them off to be broken down. Sometimes disease turns that process up too high and destroys a protein the body needs. Stablix's molecules - it calls them RESTORACs - recruit an enzyme that strips the ubiquitin tag back off, so the protein survives and keeps working.
A needed protein is marked with ubiquitin and headed for destruction.
→A RESTORAC molecule grabs a deubiquitinase enzyme and brings it to the protein.
→The enzyme removes the ubiquitin tag - the destruction order is cancelled.
→Protein levels and activity rise back toward normal. That's the therapy.
TARGET AREAS // rare diseases · oncology · immunology
The consulting foundation. Strategy before he ran anything himself.
SVP and general manager of the gynecological surgical business at Hologic; earlier a division president in diagnostic products at Cytyc.
A decade running how one of the big biotechs sold its drugs around the world.
His first stint in the number-two operating seat of a public biopharma.
Led the bladder-cancer company through to its acquisition by Janssen / Johnson & Johnson at the end of 2019.
Arrived August 2020 at "an exciting inflection point." Departed almost exactly a year later.
Building targeted protein stabilization into a platform - and a category.
Independent non-executive director at the specialty pharma company.
"I am incredibly excited by the opportunities I see in Stablix's proprietary scientific approach."On becoming CEO of Stablix, 2022
"Scholar Rock is at an exciting inflection point, with great scientific strength and two product candidates in clinical development."On joining Scholar Rock, 2020
He shows up for the hard, ambiguous stretch of a company's life and hands off before the finish. TARIS to J&J. One year at Scholar Rock. The build is the point.
Ten years running Biogen's global commercial engine means he thinks about how a drug reaches patients, not only how it's discovered. Rare in a science-first founder crowd.
He chose the company doing the inverse of biotech's most crowded trade. Stabilization, not degradation. Adding protein, not removing it.
SOURCES // stablix.com · Business Wire · Scholar Rock IR · pharmaphorum · Indivior · PR Newswire
Tony Kingsley is a biopharmaceutical executive who runs Stablix, Inc., a New York biotech betting that you can treat disease by protecting proteins instead of destroying them. He took the CEO seat in February 2022 after a career of running one drug company after another - Scholar Rock, TARIS Bio, The Medicines Company - and heading global commercial at Biogen, with a McKinsey partnership and a stint in medical devices before that. In July 2025 he joined the board of Indivior. He holds a Dartmouth degree and a Harvard MBA.
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