Leading Biotechnology Professional Brings 25+ Years of Experience to the Vancouver-Based Organization
Vancouver, BC – October 26, 2022 – Variational AI, developer of generative AI-based drug discovery platform for novel kinase inhibitors, today announced that it has added industry and scientific leader Jennifer Hamilton, Ph.D. as a company advisor. Hamilton joins current advisor Nancy Harrison, who brings more than 30 years of industry experience to Variational AI. The distinguished advisors will work to ensure that Variational AI’s generative AI platform strategy is informed by leading drug discovery and development industry expertise.
“We are thrilled to welcome Jennifer as an advisor,” said Handol Kim, co-founder and CEO of Variational AI. “Her expertise in the biotechnology industry has helped numerous Vancouver companies succeed globally and we look forward to utilizing her expertise to continue to grow in the Canadian biotech sector and beyond.”
Jennifer Hamilton, Ph.D., has worked with biotechnology companies, big pharma and venture capital funds. Most recently, she spent 11 years at Johnson & Johnson Innovation, as country lead responsible for search & evaluation and transactions in Canada. In that role, she scoured universities, incubators, and companies for technologies of interest to Johnson & Johnson and coordinated and monitored research collaborations and license agreements. Prior to that, she spent 15 years in venture capital with Nomura Phase4 Ventures and Rothschild Asset Management. Jennifer has a Ph.D. in experimental pathology from the University of British Columbia.
“It is an honour to join Variational AI in an advisory capacity,” said Hamilton. “The work being done by the machine learning scientists is differentiated and I look forward to working with the team to change drug discovery for the better.”
Variational AI uses generative machine learning to discover novel, next generation kinase inhibitors. The company’s discovery engine, Enki, is trained on a large number of kinases to rapidly generate novel and highly selective inhibitors across a broad range of kinase targets.
About Variational AI
Variational AI creates novel new molecules the world has never seen before to become medicines faster than ever leveraging the power of generative AI. Variational AI works with leading biopharmaceutical partners and is developing its own internal oncology pipeline. To learn more, visit variational.ai.