Tahoe Therapeutics today announced the appointments of Wayne Spevak, Ph.D. as Vice President of Chemistry and Ben Powell, Ph.D. as Vice President of Drug Discovery, strengthening the company’s ability to translate AI-native biological insight into new medicines.

Spevak is a medicinal chemist with nearly 30 years of experience in small-molecule discovery and development. Over his career, he has contributed to and led the development of 13 novel clinical compounds, including two first-in-class FDA-approved therapies, vemurafenib (BRAF) and pexidartinib (CSF1R). He previously served as Senior Vice President of Chemistry at Terremoto Biosciences and spent nearly two decades at Plexxikon.

Powell brings 20+ years leading discovery and translational biology programs in oncology and precision medicine at Plexxikon and Kinnate Biopharma. His teams have contributed to 17 IND applications and two approved therapies; three programs remain in advanced clinical trials with one additional expected approval this year, for bezuclastinib.

“Wayne and Ben have repeatedly shown how rigorous, creative science can turn into medicines that help patients,” said Johnny Yu, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Tahoe Therapeutics. “Their experience in discovery and development, combined with Tahoe’s foundational datasets and models, strengthens our ability to translate biological insight into new medicines.”

“Tahoe’s platform creates hypotheses that connect directly to clinical decisions. This is exactly the bridge most startups struggle to build. It’s a chance to combine deep biological insight with disciplined medicinal chemistry and do it faster,” said Wayne Spevak, Ph.D., Vice President of Chemistry.

“The next era of discovery will come from modeling cell biology at scale and linking those insights to therapeutic design and smarter trial strategy. I’m excited to build Tahoe’s therapeutics engine and turn those insights into best-in-class medicines,” said Ben Powell, Ph.D., Vice President of Drug Discovery.

Tahoe’s foundation models learn from single-cell and multimodal data to reveal mechanisms underlying disease and response, informing both novel target discovery and differentiated program strategies.

The appointments mark a key step in Tahoe’s growth following a series of scientific and technical milestones, including the release of Tahoe-100M, the single-cell dataset that dwarfed the scale and quality of previously available data; Tahoe-x1, a 3-billion-parameter foundation model for cell biology; and a $30 million Series A raise to expand its single-cell datasets for virtual cell modeling and drug discovery.

About Tahoe Therapeutics

Tahoe Therapeutics is building AI-powered models of the human cell to design better drugs for more patients. Its technology platform generates large-scale, perturbative single-cell datasets that enable a new generation of biological foundation models. Based in South San Francisco, Tahoe was founded by a team of scientists and technologists advancing the frontiers of drug discovery, genomics, and machine learning.

Learn more at tahoebio.ai.

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“Wayne and Ben have repeatedly shown how rigorous, creative science can turn into medicines that help patients,” said Johnny Yu, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Tahoe Therapeutics.