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Scientific Advisory Board

Blazing a New Path in Medicine

Nurix is committed to bringing novel, first-in-class therapies to patients without adequate treatment options. Our small molecule drugs are designed to modulate protein levels in cells as a new therapeutic approach for cancer.

Nurix was founded by a team of internationally renowned experts in the fields of E3 ubiquitin ligase regulation and structure. Since its incorporation, Nurix has built a seasoned team of leaders with wide-ranging backgrounds in small molecule drug development and cancer therapy. Through its leadership in Targeted Protein Modulation and its powerful proprietary DELigase platform, Nurix has attracted industry-leading partners, including its current drug discovery collaborations with Gilead Sciences, Sanofi, and Pfizer.

Arthur Weiss, M.D., Ph.D., is a pioneer in cell biology and signal transduction. Dr. Weiss is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Ephraim P. Engleman Distinguished Professor, University of California San Francisco. He has previously served as the President of the American Association of Immunologists. He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Weiss received his B.A. at the Johns Hopkins University and his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago School of Medicine. He did postdoctoral training at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research and his clinical training in internal medicine and rheumatology at UCSF.

Michael Rapé, Ph.D., is a leader in the biology of ubiquitin-dependent cell cycle progression and carcinogenesis. He is a Howard Hughes Investigator and a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He started his own lab at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 2006, where he has developed novel screening tools to identify the ubiquitylation enzymes that are important for cell division and differentiation and pair them with the proteins they target. Prior to that, he completed his postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Marc Kirschner. In recognition of his creativity and productivity, Dr. Rapé was named a Pew Scholar and received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2007. He has also won prestigious fellowships from the Human Frontier Science Program and the European Molecular Biology Organization. Dr. Rapé studied Biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth in Germany and received his Ph.D. at the MPI in Martinsried, Germany in the lab of Stefan Jentsch.

John Kuriyan, Ph.D., is an expert in the structural dynamics of ubiquitin ligases and other signaling complexes. Dr. Kuriyan is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he served as Assistant Professor and then Professor at Rockefeller University for 14 years. Dr. Kuriyan serves as a member of the Advisory Board at Carmot Therapeutics Inc. and is a Senior Editor at eLife, a new enterprise in high profile and open access scientific publishing. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which awarded him the 2005 Richard Lounsbery Award. He holds a B.S. in chemistry from Juniata College, Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ronald Levy, M.D., has served as a member of Nurix’s Medical Advisory Board since 2023.  Dr. Levy is the Robert K. Summy and Helen K. Summy Professor of Medicine and Director of the Lymphoma Program at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also the Associate Director of Translational Science for the Stanford Cancer Institute. For more than 25 years, Dr. Levy’s research has focused on monoclonal antibodies and the study of malignant lymphoma, currently using the tools of immunology and molecular biology to develop a better understanding of the initiation and progression of the malignant process. He was the first to successfully treat cancer with a monoclonal antibody, and went on to help develop rituximab, the first FDA-approved antibody for the treatment of lymphoma. Dr. Levy holds an A.B. in Biochemistry from Harvard University and an M.D. from Stanford University.

Roy Baynes, MB.Bch., M.Med., Ph.D.,  has served as a member of Nurix’s Medical Advisory Board since 2023.   Dr. Baynes currently serves as Chief Medical Officer at Eikon Therapeutics, Inc. Dr. Baynes previously served as Chief Medical Officer at Merck & Co.,  where he was responsible for the development of the entire clinical portfolio in Merck Research Laboratories, and was the architect of the development strategy for dozens of important new medicines including pembrolizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody used in cancer immunotherapy that treats some 17 different tumor types as well as two histology agnostic indications. Earlier in his career, Dr. Baynes served as Vice President of Global Development and head of the hematology/oncology development team at Amgen, Inc., as Senior Vice President of Oncology, Inflammation and Respiratory Therapeutics at Gilead Sciences, Inc., and as Professor of Medicine at University of Kansas Medical Center and Wayne State University in Detroit as well as holding the Charles Martin endowed chair of Cancer Research at Wayne State University. Dr. Baynes holds an MB.BCh. (Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery), an M.Med. (specialist registration in Internal Medicine), and a Ph.D. from the University of Witwatersrand.