Empath Biosciences

Company Website: https://www.empathbio.com/

Michael R. Savona, MD

Dr. Savona holds the Beverly and George Rawlings Directorship in Hematology Research and serves as Professor of Internal Medicine and Cancer Biology. He is a clinician-physician-scientist specializing in bone marrow malignancies and an international leader in the development of novel therapies for these patients. He has led the development and approval of several novel therapies, serving as the lead investigator for New Drug Applications (NDA) to the FDA. Dr. Savona founded the MDS/MPN International Working Group in 2012 and leads the first international platform study of novel therapies in MDS/MPN overlap syndromes: ABNLMARRO.

Dr. Savona’s interest in developing new therapies for hematologic malignancies and understanding how diseases arise and how best to prevent them from occurring led to key discoveries in mitochondrial metabolism in cancer cells. In collaboration with Vanderbilt medicinal chemists, he developed and licensed a series of early inhibitors of MCL1 to Boehringer Pharmaceuticals. His interest in how leukemia cells use energy differently than normal cells led to the functional development of a series of novel inhibitors of oxidative phosphorylation, currently in preclinical development with Empath Biosciences (www.empathbio.com), a company he co-founded in 2022 with natural product chemist Brian Bachmann. He has been involved in biomedical research for over 25 years and has published over 200 manuscripts. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Clinical Scholar.

Dr. Savona obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Davidson College and his medical degree from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He completed post-graduate clinical and research training at the University of California and the University of Michigan.

 Brian O. Bachmann, PhD

Brian O. Bachmann is the Stevenson Endowed Chair and Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt University Department of Chemistry. As principal investigator of the Vanderbilt Laboratory for Biosynthetic Studies, his research is concerned with the biosynthesis and discovery of natural and unnatural products, and their application to understanding and manipulating biological systems ranging from microbial ecologies to human biology.

Prior to Vanderbilt, Brian was Director of Chemistry at Ecopia Bioscience, where he helped build the first ‘genome mining’ program for natural product discovery. Brian completed his doctoral studies in Chemistry at The Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of Professor Craig A. Townsend, where he discovered and characterized beta-lactam synthetase, and his Master of Science at Southern Methodist University, working with Professor John D. Buynak on the chemical synthesis of mechanism-based inhibitors of beta-lactamase. Brian’s interest in biosynthesis was sparked by an impactful undergraduate research experience in the laboratory of Tomas Hudlicky on the biocatalytically enabled synthesis of inositols.