CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Passkey Therapeutics has appointed Mandeep Kaur, MD, MS, as chief medical officer as the Cambridge company prepares to move drug combinations identified by its computational genetics platform into clinical studies across multiple therapeutic areas.
Kaur will lead Passkey’s clinical and medical strategy as the company works to validate its Locksmith platform, which is designed to identify synergistic combinations of approved drugs that could create therapeutic effects not seen when the medicines are used individually.
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 her experience in biotech, clinical development and regulatory execution will support the company’s effort to advance Locksmith-identified drug combinations into patient studies.
The company’s leadership team includes co-founders Bruce Beutel, Ph.D., who serves as chief executive officer, and William Chen, Ph.D., who serves as chief technology officer.
Passkey’s Locksmith platform combines human genetics, biology and pharmacology to identify combinations of already approved medicines that may produce new therapeutic effects when used together. Because the combinations involve medicines with established safety profiles, the company said it and its partners may be able to move more quickly into clinical studies to test new treatment hypotheses.
“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.”
