We’re happy to share that Rashik Aryal, MSc is the latest addition to the Bind Research family!
Rashik joins us as Research Assistant, bringing a genuinely multidisciplinary background, from clinical diagnostics to genetic engineering to early-stage protein research.
Rashik will be supporting Bind across protein expression and characterisation workflows, while also helping us develop rigorous, scalable lab operations. Both fundamental to Bind’s success!
Welcome, Rashik — we’re really glad to have you on board.
We’re delighted to welcome Mark Murcko, Ph.D. to the Board of Bind Research and our Lead Scientific Advisor.
Mark joins Tom Kalil, who was recently appointed Interim Chair of the Board. Tom is CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy, an organisation that has already played a vital role in Bind’s establishment.
Mark brings to Bind a deep understanding of what it takes to build the scientific infrastructure, the intellectual frameworks, and the culture needed to turn ambitious biological hypotheses into medicines that reach patients.
Mark is a pioneer in the application of cutting-edge technologies to drug design and has directly contributed to ten marketed medicines spanning glaucoma, HIV, HCV, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. Whilst CTO and SAB Chair at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, he co-invented the company’s three marketed HIV protease and HCV protease inhibitors, and he championed the early CF programme that has so far produced five transformative drugs. Before Vertex, his work at Merck on Trusopt produced the first drug in history to emerge from a structure-based design programme, a landmark moment for the field.
More recently, Mark is a founder, board member, and was the founding CSO at Relay Therapeutics, a company that has pushed the boundaries of what structural and biophysical insight can achieve in drug discovery. In addition, he was the founding CSO and is a board member at Dewpoint Therapeutics, the world’s leading company dedicated to developing therapies that engage cellular condensates. Mark holds a senior lectureship in Biological Engineering at MIT and is a co-inventor on over 50 patents and author of more than 90 scientific papers (H-index 62), as well as having served on numerous other scientific advisory boards and boards of directors, including a decade with Schrödinger advising on their computational drug discovery platform and strategy.
We are enormously grateful to have his experience, his rigour, and his vision alongside us as we build. Welcome to the Bind Board of Directors, Mark!
We’re delighted to welcome three new members in 2026.
Dr Hannah Kiely-Collins joins as Senior Scientist, Chemoproteomics. A chemical biologist specialising in chemoproteomics and proximity-inducing modalities, Hannah previously worked at the Francis Crick Institute on translational projects spanning oncology, schizophrenia, and inflammatory bowel disease. At Bind, she will establish a chemoproteomics platform for IDP ligand discovery in native biological systems.
Dr Pijush Chakraborty joins as Senior Scientist, Magnetic Resonance. A structural biologist and biophysicist with deep expertise in protein aggregation, Pijush brings detailed mechanistic insight into dynamic assemblies involving tau and α-synuclein, and will build pipelines to study IDP–small molecule interactions.
Dr Laura Fletcher joins as Director of Strategic Partnerships and part of the leadership team. A life sciences commercialisation expert with over 25 years’ experience in biotech partnerships, licensing, and venture creation, Laura was previously at Deep Science Ventures and Cancer Research UK, and will lead commercial and non-profit partnerships to advance our mission.
Welcome to the team, Hannah, Pijush and Laura!
We’re delighted to announce the appointment of Tom Kalil as our Interim Board Chair in late 2025.
Throughout his career, Tom has been a champion for strengthening investment in the science and technology. His unique blend of government experience, private-sector insight, and philanthropic leadership makes him ideally positioned to guide Bind Research through this critical establishment phase.
Tom’s career includes serving as Deputy Director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama and as Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the US National Economic Council. Most recently, Tom was Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, before founding Renaissance Philanthropy in May 2024, where he now serves as CEO.
We are particularly grateful to Renaissance Philanthropy; under Tom’s leadership it has already played a vital role in Bind Research’s establishment. Their early and substantial support enabled us to secure facilities, build our team, and launch our research programme.
Tom’s appointment deepens this collaborative relationship, ensuring that Bind Research benefits from strategic guidance informed by both scientific ambition and philanthropic vision.
We are building out our board in with additional key appointments in 2026 that will broaden expertise across science, commercialisation, intellectual property, and finance.
Bind just published it’s first newsletter, summarising all the exciting things happening in the last few months. You can find it here.
We have welcomed a further four new team members this last month into pivotal roles for Bind.
Dr Wendy Bushell has joined us as Director of Operations, bringing more than 15 years of leadership experience in UK and global biotech. We are excited by what Wendy will bring to Bind, with her deep expertise in scaling teams, establishing labs, and building the culture and systems that drive growth. Alex Messam has joined the team as Financial Controller, bringing with him excellent skills in financial reporting and developing finance systems and processes fit for a rapidly growing R&D team. Our laboratory team has expanded, with Anaïs Naretto joining the Biophysics team as Senior Scientist. Anaïs is an expert in producing challenging proteins and running the full suite of assays to test their interactions with small molecules. Growing again, Ananth Kumar has also joined our Biophysics team as Senior Scientist, bringing deep expertise in protein–RNA interactions and the production of challenging protein complexes.
We’re excited to have them on board as we continue to grow and push the boundaries of drug discovery.
Bind has taken up a lease for 2,746 sq. ft of state-of-the-art lab and office space at the Apex Building, Tribeca. In the words of our CEO, Gabi Heller, “We’re excited to be joining the vibrant LBIC community at the Apex. This space offers the flexibility and infrastructure we need to build a world-class not-for-profit research organisation. For a mission like ours, namely transforming drug discovery for disordered proteins, it’s crucial to be embedded in an environment that fosters collaboration, innovation, and scientific excellence.”
Located in one of London’s most vibrant innovation hubs, our new home positions us at the heart of the UK’s thriving life sciences ecosystem, with excellent connectivity and access to world-class talent. The LBIC space offers us the specialized laboratory infrastructure needed to develop our high-throughput measurement platform and to house our growing team of world-class scientists and technologists.
Over the last 3 months we are delighted to have welcomed five stellar new members of the team to Bind.
Dr Jasmine (Jaz) Cornish joined as Head of Protein and Drug Discovery, bringing deep expertise in disordered proteins and drug discovery. We’re excited for her to lead and shape our screening strategy. James Eaton came aboard as Scientist, Magnetic Resonance, adding essential method development skills to the team. His expertise in NMR will help push the throughput boundaries for this critical approach. Dr Sharna-kay Daley joined as Delivery Manager, bringing a sharp organisational mindset and scientific acumen to align execution with innovation as we scale. Most recently, Sören von Bülow joined as a Computational Scientist. Stephanie Pritchard has joined us as our EA & Office Manager, bringing nearly a decade of administrative experience supporting senior leaders across legal, not-for-profit, and corporate sectors. Sören is an expert in coarse-grained simulations of intrinsically disordered proteins and brings a wealth of expertise in computational modelling. We’re excited to continue to grow with such exceptional talent driving our mission forward to make disordered proteins druggable.
It’s been an exciting week at Bind Research! We’re thrilled to welcome three exceptional people to the team. Dr Acely Garza-Garcia, an expert biochemist formerly at the Francis Crick Institute, joins us as Senior Scientist, Biochemistry and Biophysics. Her expertise will be instrumental in building our dataset and advancing our platform. Dr Candide Champion a talented computational chemist who recently completed his PhD at ETH Zurich, joins us as a Scientific Software Engineer. His deep knowledge of molecular modelling and software development is a fantastic addition to our capabilities. Sam Patterson is a bright undergraduate student at Duke University who is visiting Bind for the summer to learn about proteins, drug discovery, and startups. Welcome, Acely, Candide, and Sam! We’re so glad to have you on board!
Earlier this week, we announced the launch of Bind Research, a new not-for-profit organisation dedicated to delivering tools and datasets to make disordered proteins druggable.
We are extremely grateful for the financial backing from the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Eric Schmidt, and other partners. You can read more about them here.
Although our public launch is new, Bind has been in the making for well over 2 years. During that time, we have been fortunate to have an incredibly strong foundation of supporters and scientific collaborators and have spoken with hundreds of people. While future posts will spotlight our scientific partners and collaborations in greater detail, today we want to recognise some key players who helped us behind the scenes build our organisation from the very beginning.
Bind Research began as a bold idea. Early conversations—especially with Sam Rodriques and Erika Alden DeBenedictis—made it clear that if we wanted to place tools and datasets in the public domain and collaborate effectively with both academic disordered protein researchers and the biotech/drug discovery communities, the Focused Research Organisation (FRO) model was a perfect fit.1
We are also thankful for the valuable feedback from Convergent Research—particularly Adam Marblestone—who has pioneered and championed the FRO model in the United States. Additionally, our huge thanks go to the team at Renaissance Philanthropy—especially Tom Kalil, Ronit Kanwar, and Jasnam Sidhu—for helping us reach potential funders and adapt the FRO model to the UK for the first time.
Bind would also not have been possible without the dynamic and well-connected team at Deep Science Ventures—especially Laura Fletcher, Dominic Falcao, and Mark Hammond—who helped incubate Bind Research for over a year before our formal incorporation. This support was essential to help us find our footing.
In the coming months, we plan to share details about Bind’s organisational structure in case others find it useful. If you are interested in starting an FRO in the UK, be sure to check out the new partnership between Convergent Research and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).