Our people
Deep Apple Therapeutics was created by Apple Tree Partners (ATP), a leading life sciences venture capital firm. ATP specializes in creating, incubating, and growing biotherapeutics companies around novel technological platforms to translate exciting emerging scientific discoveries. ATP founded Deep Apple with scientific founders whose respective areas of expertise each lend core capabilities and insights to the company.
Founders
Brian Shoichet, PhD and John Irwin, PhD (UCSF)
Brian Shoichet, PhD, and John Irwin, PhD, professors at the School of Pharmacy at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), are pioneers of large-library docking for drug discovery, which they have successfully applied to multiple targets, especially GPCRs. Drs. Shoichet and Irwin have helped to enumerate libraries of over 60 billion synthesizable compounds (available via the ZINC database) and have demonstrated how screening subsets of this library by structure-based docking can lead to potent ligands, with activities often in the nanomolar range. This technology forms the basis of Deep Apple’s molecular docking approach and its ability to create proprietary virtual libraries on a project-specific basis.
Georgios Skiniotis, PhD (Stanford)
Georgios Skiniotis, PhD, Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology and of Structural Biology at Stanford University, is a world-renowned structural biologist that has been pushing the frontiers of electron cryo-microscopy (cryoEM) to study challenging biological systems with particular focus on signaling mechanisms and pharmacology of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The Skiniotis lab at Stanford has developed a sophisticated cryoEM platform that serves as the foundational imaging capability for Deep Apple’s discovery engine. The platform is not only tuned to capture high resolution structures but also dynamics of GPCRs, including key intermediate structural states that may be missed in empirical high-throughput screening yet can be most relevant to disease state biology for drug discovery.
