Meet Super Evolution driver Roger Perlmutter: President and CEO of Eikon Therapeutics
Innovation Endeavors was founded on the thesis of the Super Evolution: that technological advances across data, computation, and engineering would converge and translate into significant, fast changes for the world. We’ve seen this firsthand.
But more importantly, this era of innovation is made possible by people: changemakers working to revolutionize computing infrastructure, engineering biology, climate, intelligent software, and the physical economy. This Super Evolution Leader series highlights the stories of these innovators and gives you a glimpse into how these entrepreneurs bring their work to light, what lessons they’ve learned along the way, and how they hope to change our world.
We hope their candid insights are helpful for anyone tackling meaningful problems and that their stories leave you feeling inspired.
It’s hard to find someone more academically primed for success than the Chairman, President, and CEO of Eikon Therapeutics, Roger Perlmutter. Before he assumed leadership roles at breakthrough therapeutics companies, Dr. Perlmutter was a professor in the Departments of Immunology, Biochemistry, and Medicine at the University of Washington and also served as Chairman of its Department of Immunology, where he was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
His 35 years of academia and industry experience (he was previously Executive Vice President of Merck & Co. and President of Merck Research Laboratories, where he supervised the discovery and development of numerous lifesaving medicines, including KEYTRUDA™, and prior to that, spent 12 years serving as Executive Vice President and head of R&D at Amgen) made him the natural choice for the CEO role at Eikon Therapeutics. His passion for the work is palpable and makes him an especially exciting Super Evolution interview subject.
Meet Super Evolution driver Roger Perlmutter: President and CEO of Eikon Therapeutics
“Using super-resolution microscopy, we can do something called single molecule tracking, which is to say we can put a fluorescent probe on any individual protein molecule — and proteins are quite small — calculate where that fluorescent probe is, and visualize individual proteins inside living cells with a precision of ten billionths of a meter,” said Roger.
In other words, Eikon Therapeutics uses high-performance computing, advanced engineering, and data analytics to improve the process of drug discovery and analyze single-molecule protein behavior (through super-resolution microscopy) in living cells. The therapeutic platform was developed by Eikon Therapeutics co-founder Eric Betzig, for which he shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Additionally, the Eikon robotic systems permit exquisitely precise measurement of the dynamic behavior of individual protein molecules in living cells — on a massive scale.
And, like most tech companies, the proof is in the data.
“Our largest team at Eikon Therapeutics is software engineering because we produce so much data. We can analyze about a million cells a day, and we can see about 10,000 or more individual proteins in each cell. And because we take these videos over a long period of time, we produce a huge amount of data. During a typical day in our laboratories, we produce about 100 terabytes of data. By the end of the year, we’ll be producing about a petabyte of data a day, which is a ridiculous amount,” said Roger.
Eikon Therapeutics is in a unique position. It’s able to identify targets no one else can see through its technology and the instruments they have developed to support its work. They are a true engineering biology company — data-driven while remaining focused on a biology-driven mission.
“The foremost goal of Eikon Therapeutics is the discovery and development of important new medicines. And we believe that we can both identify targets for drugs and also identify drugs for targets that others know about but haven’t yet been able to approach. And that’s the largest single source of value that we can provide to society,” said Roger.
“Having had the privilege of developing, well, really more than 100 registered therapeutics, I can tell you that the impact is quite profound, whether that’s the development of a drug to treat postmenopausal osteoporosis or a drug that treats rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory conditions,” said Roger.
Watch the video to learn more about Roger’s journey from academic to business leader, what he hopes to accomplish at Eikon Therapeutics, and why exactly Eikon’s work is so revolutionary.
