29 November 2018 - - US-based start up Kronos Bio, Inc. has appointed Philip Gutry as its chief business officer, the company said.

In this newly created role, Philip will drive the company's business development, corporate strategy and alliance management to expand clinical opportunities and propel pipeline expansion.

Gutry joined Kronos from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, where he served as executive director of business development and was responsible for driving the immuno-oncology business development strategy and collaborating with R and D to guide clinical development strategy.

He was previously a principal at MPM Capital where he led company formation and venture investments in oncology companies, and managed MPM's Janssen and Astellas partnerships.

Prior to MPM, Gutry was associate director of corporate development at Gilead Sciences where he focused on mergers and acquisitions and licensing in oncology, respiratory, liver and infectious disease.

Gutry also served as a principal at Riverside Partners, a life sciences focused private equity firm.

The foundation of Kronos was built on over a decade of research into high-throughput screening strategies for chemical modulators of transcription factors and other recalcitrant targets in oncology.

By combining small molecule microarrays with extensive know-how in biological assay development, Kronos' technology platform enables high-throughput screens of chemical libraries against target proteins in a more physiologically relevant context.

Kronos's platform has demonstrated its potential to identify compounds that bind or interfere at nanomolar potency with target protein activity directly, disrupt protein-protein or protein-DNA interactions, or indirectly modulate target protein activity by binding to co-factors or other protein complex members.

This approach is ideally suited for rapid discovery of unique ligands that can be utilized in the generation of novel modulators or degraders of historically challenging targets such as transcription factors.

Kronos Bio is focused on the research and development of first-in-class therapies that modulate historically recalcitrant cancer targets.