Marcos Milla, Ph.D
Synthorx announced the appointment of Marcos Milla, Ph.D. as senior vice president of research.
"Marcos is an innovative drug hunter with a broad expertise across multiple disease and research areas, which has led to inspired breakthrough discoveries and unprecedented success in lead series drug discovery," said Jay Lichter, Ph.D., chairman and interim president and CEO of Synthorx. "In addition to his drug discovery experience, Marcos is a collaborative leader that will help Synthorx identify the most impactful opportunities to discover and develop important new therapeutics with our expanded genetic alphabet technology."
Milla's expertise in drug discovery spans across the areas of autoimmunity and inflammation, neurosciences and pain, and immuno-oncology. He has held industry and academic appointments at GlaxoSmithKline, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Roche Palo Alto, Janssen Research & Development, and, most recently, Adaptive Biotechnologies.
He has previously directed efforts focusing on multiple intracellular and extracellular target classes, including cell surface and nuclear receptors, ion channels, kinases and proteinases. His work led to the discovery of a break-through series of small molecule modulators of cytokine-receptor interactions. He also explored novel ways of holistically reading pharmacological responses employing high content imaging and gene expression readouts.
Milla graduated with a B.S. degree from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru and a Ph.D. degree in cell and molecular biology from Saint Louis University. He did his postdoctoral training at MIT as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow, and at Duke University.