Francis X. Tavares, Ph.D.
Founder / CEO
Dr. Tavares has over 20 years of drug discovery and development experience in the pharmaceutical industry. During his tenure at GSK, he developed extensive expertise and experience in the field of osteoporosis and metabolic diseases. Dr. Tavares has proposed over 15 therapeutic metabolic targets encompassing areas such as metabolic diseases, inflammation, immunology, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases. These targets include proteases, kinases, and G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Dr. Tavares has led multidisciplinary teams in early and late-stage drug discovery efforts consisting of scientists from chemistry, biology, cheminformatics and ADME. He is a co-inventor on more than 30 patents and has over 35 research articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
While at ChemoGenics BioPharma, Dr. Tavares spearheaded the medicinal chemistry efforts that led to the development of commercial and clinical candidates through collaborative drug discovery efforts. Dr. Tavares invented Trilaciclib, a commercially marketed compound.. He discovered the best-in-class CDK4/6 compound Lerocliclib for breast cancer, which has completed Phase 3 clinical trials and is expected to gain FDA marketing approval shortly. Under his leadership, ChemoGenics BioPharma has expanded its research capabilities to include in vivo animal models, as well as bioanalytical studies that most other collaborators and partners of a similar size often lack. Dr. Tavares’s desire to re-imagine and accelerate the drug discovery process provides unique opportunities to client partners to reach their discovery and development goals from formulating the biological therapeutic model to a successful clinical candidate.