Exscientia plc (Nasdaq: EXAI) has the appointed Michael Krams, M.D., as its Chief Quantitative Medicine Officer, to lead clinical development strategy for Exscientia’s portfolio of investigational medicines.
In this newly created role, Dr. Krams will Exscientia’s drug discovery platform utilises patient-based translational models and AI-driven molecule design to optimise drug candidates for specific patient populations. As part of these efforts, Dr. Krams will drive work to improve trial design and patient selection within clinical trials to maximise clinical success and patient benefit, Exscientia said in its press release.
“We want to be as innovative in the clinic as we have been in drug discovery. Mike is a proven innovator and strategic leader at the vanguard of bringing a quantitative science approach to clinical development. He has been a thought leader in the field for more than 20 years, implementing model-informed drug development, increasing the use of biomarkers to enable adaptive trials, and finding better ways to enrich trials for patient selection,” said Andrew Hopkins, DPhil., Exscientia’s founder and CEO. “Focusing our clinical trials on the people that are most likely to benefit from them has the potential to not only improve clinical success rates, but it also advances our mission of putting patients at the centre of creating new medicines.”
Dr. Krams joins Exscientia’s executive leadership team, reporting to Andrew Hopkins, and will be based at Exscientia’s precision medicine centre in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Krams most recently led the Quantitative Sciences group at Janssen R&D, bringing together approximately 500 statisticians, pharmacologists and modellers to enable efficient decision-making in various aspects of drug development. Earlier in his career, he was Vice President of Adaptive Trials and Applied Program Strategies at Wyeth. Dr. Krams holds an M.D. from the University of Munich.
“I’m pleased to join Exscientia, a mission-driven company harnessing artificial intelligence to transform drug discovery and development to make better medicines for patients. In many ways, the work I’ve driven throughout my career is a good match to Exscientia’s goal – asking how conventional, sequential approaches to clinical development can be further improved, aiming for truly patient-driven medicine development. Discovery and clinical strategies need to be closely connected through biomarker strategies and Exscientia’s precision medicine platform has the potential to achieve just that,” said Mike Krams, M.D., Chief Quantitative Medicine Officer for Exscientia.