CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Passkey Therapeutics has appointed Mandeep Kaur, M.D., MS, as chief medical officer as the company advances clinical studies of drug combinations identified by its computational genetics-based platform.
The Cambridge company said Kaur will lead its clinical and medical strategy as it moves a series of combinations discovered through its Locksmith platform into clinical studies across multiple therapeutic areas.
Kaur most recently served as senior vice president of global medical affairs and outcomes research for rare disease at Amgen following its acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics. In that role, she led global medical strategy across a broad portfolio. She has contributed to 19 product launches and supported multiple major biopharmaceutical transactions.
Passkey said Kaur will use her experience in biotech, clinical development and regulatory execution to support the company’s clinical strategy. She joins a leadership team that includes co-founders Bruce Beutel, Ph.D., the company’s CEO, and William Chen, Ph.D., its chief technology officer.
Passkey’s Locksmith platform integrates human genetics, biology and pharmacology to identify synergistic combinations of approved medicines. The company said the goal is to find drug combinations that can produce therapeutic effects not seen when the medicines are used individually.
The company is pursuing a broad clinical strategy intended to show that Locksmith’s predictions can translate into meaningful patient outcomes across therapeutic areas with high unmet need. Because the combinations involve approved drugs with established safety profiles, Passkey said it and its partners may be able to move more quickly into studies that test new treatment hypotheses in patients.
“There is vast untapped potential within existing approved medicines. Locksmith is purpose-built to enable biopharmaceutical partners to realize this potential by predicting emergent combinatorial pharmacology and mapping it to drugs in their own portfolios. With Mandeep’s leadership, our team is distinctly equipped to demonstrate that Locksmith enables a direct path to the clinic and rapidly identifies new treatment options for patients,” Beutel said.
“Patients with common chronic diseases often require more than a single therapeutic mechanism to achieve meaningful outcomes,” Kaur said. “Passkey’s Locksmith platform unlocks novel and synergistic combinations of well-characterized drugs, enabling us to move earlier into clinical assessment and significantly broaden the universe of potential treatment options for patients with high unmet needs. I’m pleased to join this team and to help translate Locksmith’s predictions into rigorous clinical proof and, ultimately, real-world impact.”
