We are discovering new therapeutics for cellular rejuvenation

This is a new frontier of biology

What if we could discover new therapeutics that remove toxic proteins from your cell, boost your immune system and replenish your cell’s energy stores?

Autophagy is a process of cellular renewal which occurs in all the cells of the body. Its role is to clear unwanted proteins, organelles and even invading bodies such as viruses and bacteria, cutting them up into building blocks which can be used by the cell to make new proteins. Autophagy occurs at a low level continuously but is boosted when we exercise or when we are hungry. And many studies have shown that boosting autophagy in model organisms significantly extends lifespan.

When we age, the ability of our cells to undergo autophagy reduces. And in many diseases, particularly ones which have a genetic basis, we see dysfunctional autophagy. In fact there is huge and compelling evidence from human genetics that many diseases are driven by autophagy dysfunction. Samsara’s mission is to discover new mechanisms which can restore autophagy, and at the same time new drugs which use these mechanisms for the treatment of genetically defined diseases.

Our people

Samsara has been created by Apollo Health Ventures, with academic founders who are world leaders in the fields of geroscience and cellular homeostasis. Samsara features a leadership team with vast experience in pharma, biotech and the science of aging, and a highly skilled scientific team based in our new labs in Oxford.

Management

Jens Eckstein, PhD

Chairman

Peter Hamley, PhD, MBA

Chief Scientific Officer

John K. Blackwood, PhD

Vice President, Biology

Warren Galloway, PhD

Vice President, Chemistry

Géraldine Farjot, PhD

Vice President, Translational Medicine

Scientific Team

Alkmini Kalousi, PhD

Nancy Malintan, PhD

Tsz Ting (Gigi) Chow, MSc

Jakub Stefaniak, PhD

James Taylor, PhD

Matthew G. Williamson, PhD

Natalia Pinzon

Prof. Oliver Kepp

INSERM – Scientific Co-Founder

Gabriela Vilema Enríquez, PhD

Ben Atkinson, PhD

Scientific Advisory Board

Prof. Guido Kroemer

Scientific Co-founder

Prof. Michael Schlossmacher MD

Prof. Susan Perlman, MD

Prof. Ed Tate

Prof. Christian Behl

We have major collaborations with INSERM and the University of Dundee, and we have established a cutting edge new laboratory in Oxford

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THE LYSOSEEKER™ PLATFORM
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Jens Eckstein, PhD

Chairman

Jens is Chairman of Samsara and Managing Partner of Apollo Ventures, an early stage life science investment fund investing in Europe and the US focused exclusively on breakthrough therapeutics arising from the study of the biology of aging. He has more than 15 years of venture capital experience in biopharma and 10 years of operational experience in drug discovery and development. Jens is a Kauffman Fellow and a mentor for life science entrepreneurs and start-up teams in the area of innovative life science and healthcare IT companies. Before joining Apollo Ventures and Samsara, Jens served as President of SR One for eight years. He is also co-founder and Managing Director of Action Potential Venture Capital (APVC). Previously, Jens was a General Partner at TVM Capital leading early-stage investments in Boston and was CEO and President of SelectX Pharmaceuticals. Before his investment career, Jens was leading research teams and pharma collaborations at Enanta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ENTA) and Mitotix.

Peter Hamley, PhD, MBA

Chief Scientific Officer

Peter is a recognized leader in drug discovery, having spent 15 years at Sanofi, most recently as Global Head of External Innovation, Drug Discovery in Business Development. Prior to this, he led global high throughput medicinal chemistry, natural product and antibody drug conjugate departments across Germany, France, and the US, and has contributed to the advancement of many projects into clinical development across several therapeutic areas. He started his career at AstraZeneca leading medicinal chemistry teams in the respiratory and inflammation disease areas. Prior to a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania, he obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and a BSc in Chemistry from Imperial College London. He holds an MBA from the University of Bath. Over his career in big pharma, he has been involved in hundreds of drug discovery projects, has executed external partnerships and has published numerous papers and patents including co-editing the textbook Small Molecule Medicinal Chemistry: Strategies and Technologies (Wiley).

John K. Blackwood, PhD

Head of Biology

John is an experienced and successful drug discoverer at leading biotechs, most recently at Kymab where he delivered key haematology biologic assets into development. He started his industry career at IONTAS where he led the discovery of several immuno-oncology assets and he previously held positions at the University of Cambridge and the Mitochondrial Research group at the University of Newcastle. John obtained his PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

Warren Galloway, PhD

Director of Medicinal Chemistry Warren Galloway is the Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Samsara Therapeutics. He is a Fellow Emeritus at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has 72 publications in chemistry and chemical biology, including in diversity-oriented synthesis. Dr. Galloway undertook his postdoc in the David Spring lab at Cambridge. He received his B.A., M.A., and PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Cambridge.

Geraldine Farjot, PhD

Géraldine brings a broad range of expertise needed to translate innovation to patients from bench to bedside, most recently as director of early drug development at Air Liquide Healthcare, where she demonstrated her ability to lead R&D in an open innovation environment, developing strong scientific relationships with preclinical and medical experts in the fields of neurology, respiratory and critical care, bringing assets to clinical stage with responsibilities ranged from conceptual discovery through toxicology to regulatory affairs, for products in development and approved. Previously, she spent more than a decade at Sanofi as project leader, where she successfully developed several compounds from early discovery up to early development in the field of metabolic diseases. After a postdoctoral position in cell signaling at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in London, she joined Immutep, during the very early years of this now successful French biotech company developing immunotherapies. She holds a PhD in molecular virology from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon and has authored many publications and patents.

Alkmini Kalousi, PhD

Alkmini is a major expert in target identification using CRISPR/Cas9 screening and was most recently at the Frankfurt CRISPR Screening Centre at Goethe University in Frankfurt, and previously at the IGBMC in Strasbourg. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Thessaly in Greece where she also completed her graduate studies.

Nancy Malintan, PhD

Nancy combines huge experience in neuroscience with automation and assay development, gained at AstraZeneca and previously at Synthace. Prior to her industry experience she worked at the Institute of Neurology and the Division of Medicine in UCL, after a postdoc at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. She obtained her PhD at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Australia and her graduate studies were in her native Malaysia.

Tsz Ting (Gigi) Chow, MSc

Gigi is a Research Assistant at Samsara Therapeutics. Gigi performs compound functional screening and bioinformatic analysis of the company lead series compounds and is helping to grow our biomarker capability. She obtained her MSc in Human Molecular Genetics at Imperial College London and BSc in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in her hometown. Between the two educations, she worked at the University of Hong Kong as a Research Assistant.

Jakub Stefaniak, PhD

Jakub is at the forefront of target id methods at Samsara, having obtained experience in proteomics and chemical biology during his PhD at the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford, which is where he obtained his degree and masters in Biochemistry.

James Taylor, PhD

James is an expert biochemist with detailed knowledge of protein chemistry and high-throughput assay development. After a PhD at the John Innes Institute during which he developed high-throughput assays, he undertook postdocs at the University of Bristol and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda USA developing capabilities to study DNA-binding proteins including TIRF microscopy. He refined his knowledge of high-throughput drug discovery and autophagy at Oxford University in the Drug Discovery Institute before joining Samsara.

Matthew G. Williamson, PhD

Matthew is providing Samsara with the most cutting-edge, physiologically and disease relevant neuronal cellular models. He develops assays in different neuronal cell populations derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from patients diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Funded by the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA), Matthew completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford, where he investigated the protective function of antioxidant proteins and their use as therapeutic targets in ALS. Following this, he undertook postdoctoral training in the Wade-Martins’ laboratory of molecular neurodegeneration. Working closely with industrial collaborators (Forma Therapeutics, Evotec, Celgene, Bristol Myers Squibb), his research investigated mitophagy dysfunction in PD. He also has a wealth of experience in high-content imaging, liquid handling and developing automated high-throughput cell-based assays.

Natalia Pinzon

Natalia is the Office Manager at Samsara. She has a first-class degree from the Grenoble Graduate School of Business in International Business & Management. After studying in France and the UK, she worked for several companies gaining experience in project management in different industries. Previously she coordinated UK and EU funded programmes that provided support and finance to start-ups and SMEs, including several in the health and biotech sector.

Prof. Oliver Kepp

Oliver Kepp is Assistant Professor at University of Paris Descartes and Gustave Roussy Cancer Institute. Dr. Kep established the BioCELL screening platform, a state-of-the-art phenotypic screening facility and among the most sophisticated of its kind in Europe. Dr. Kepp has focused on systems biology approaches to immunogenic cell death, with expertise in automation and high throughput screening, automated bioimaging, and assay development for cell biological approaches. Previously, he was a Max Planck postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology (Berlin, Germany); EMBO long term fellow at the INSERM research unit U848 at Gustave Roussy Cancer Center (Villejuif, France).

Gabriela Vilema Enríquez, PhD

After completing her undergraduate programme in Biotechnology engineering in Quito, Ecuador, Gabriela moved to the Sorbonne University, Paris for her Master’s in Cellular and Molecular Biology. She then joined the University of Oxford where she obtained a PhD studying the epigenetic mechanisms behind the silencing of the frataxin gene in Friedreich’s Ataxia. She stayed in the Richard Wade-Martins’ group for her postdoc where she developed her Ataxia findings in more relevant cells models such as iPSC-derived sensory neurons. She joins Samsara Therapeutics to strengthen the disease modelling team and work utilising iPSCs to derive several neuronal types, a key step in our drug discovery pipeline.

Ben Atkinson, PhD

Ben is a medicinal chemist with a wide range of drug discovery experience from project initiation through HTS and hit workup as well as late-stage pre-clinical development. He attained his Ph.D. from University of Bath under Prof. Jonathan M. J. Williams on metal catalysed acyl transfer reactions, followed by a Research Fellow in the Translational Research Office’s Drug Discovery Group at UCL. He joined from Alzheimer’s Research UK UCL Drug Discovery Institute where he worked on their neurodegeneration portfolio of both phenotypic and target-based projects

Prof. Guido Kroemer

Scientific Co-Founder

Guido Kroemer MD, PhD is Professor at the University of Paris Descartes and Inserm. Dr. Kroemer is a prominent researcher in the fields of autophagy and cancer biology. He is best known for the discovery that the permeabilization of mitochondrial membranes constitutes a decisive step in programmed cell death. Kroemer has explored the fine mechanisms of mitochondrial cell death control, the molecular pathways that explain the inhibition of cell death in cancer cells, upstream of or at the level of mitochondria, and the mechanisms that make cancer cell death immunogenic. In recent years, he has worked on the link between cellular stress and autophagy, as well as the stimulation of autophagy for improving health span and lifespan in model organisms. His work has had far reaching implications for the comprehension, detection and therapeutic manipulation of cellular demise. He has published some 1100 papers in leading journals, with an h-index of 217. He is one of the 10 most cited life scientists in the world. Dr. Kroemer was founding editor-in-chief of Cell Death & Disease and is a member of EMBO. His MD and PhD are from the University of Innsbruck, and has a second PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Prof. Michael Schlossmacher MD

Michael Schlossmacher MD is Professor in Neurology at the University of Ottawa in Canada. After his medical education in Vienna and postgraduate studies on Alzheimer’s disease at Harvard University, he pursued clinical training at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Since 2000, he has focused his research activities on Parkinson’s disease, first at the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Since 2006, he has been based at the University of Ottawa, where he co-directs the Parkinson’s Research Consortium. In 2012, he was named the Bhargava Research Chair in Neurodegeneration at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute; in 2015, he was appointed director of its Neuroscience Program.

Prof. Susan Perlman MD

Susan Perlman MD, PhD is Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Director of the Ataxia and Neurogenetics Clinical Trials Programs. Prof Perlman is a well-known neuro-geneticist and clinical pioneer in ataxia who sits on the Medical-Research Advisory Board of the National Ataxia Foundation. Perlman received her BS in Biochemistry from Cornell University and MD from SUNY, Stony Brook. She did her Residency in Neurology at UCLA, followed by a Muscular Dystrophy Association Fellowship in Neurology also at UCLA. In 2008, she received the Sherman M Mellinkoff Faculty Award, considered the highest faculty distinction at the David Geffen School of Medicine.

Prof. Ed Tate

Ed Tate PhD is Professor of Chemical Biology, Imperial College London and Satellite Group Leader, The Francis Crick Institute. Prof Tate is a leader in chemical biology and target identification techniques and his group has made numerous contributions to the understanding of molecular interactions. Following his PhD at the University of Cambridge he worked at Ecole Polytechnique and the Pasteur Institute (Paris), before moving to Imperial College London where he was appointed Professor of Chemical Biology in 2014. He has received multiple awards, most recently the 2020 RSC Corday Morgan Prize and 2019 Sir David Cooksey Translation Prize, and sits on the editorial advisory boards of several prestigious chemical biology journals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Chemistry and Biology, and Director of the Imperial Centre for Drug Discovery Science.

Prof. Christian Behl

Christian Behl PhD obtained his PhD in Neurobiology from the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg. Following post-doctoral research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, he became the Head of the Pathobiochemistry Department of the Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) in Mainz. He has chaired the Institute for Physiological Chemistry and Pathobiochemistry, and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Neurosciences (IFZN). Since 2010, he has been the Director of the Institute of Pathobiochemistry of the University Medical Centre (of the JGU) Mainz. Among other honours, he received the Binder Innovation Award of the German Society for Cell Biology (DGZ). Prof Behl’s research interests are in the study of aging cells, neurodegeneration, protein homeostasis and autophagy.

We are discovering new therapeutics for cellular rejuvenation

What if we could discover new therapeutics that remove toxic proteins from your cell, boost your immune system and replenish your cell’s energy stores?

Our people

Management

Jens Eckstein, PhD

Peter Hamley, PhD, MBA

John K. Blackwood, PhD

Warren Galloway, PhD

Géraldine Farjot, PhD

Scientific Team

Alkmini Kalousi, PhD

Nancy Malintan, PhD

Tsz Ting (Gigi) Chow, MSc

Jakub Stefaniak, PhD

James Taylor, PhD

Matthew G. Williamson, PhD

Natalia Pinzon

Prof. Oliver Kepp

Gabriela Vilema Enríquez, PhD

Ben Atkinson, PhD

Scientific Advisory Board

Prof. Guido Kroemer

Prof. Michael Schlossmacher MD

Prof. Susan Perlman, MD

Prof. Ed Tate

Prof. Christian Behl

We have major collaborations with INSERM and the University of Dundee, and we have established a cutting edge new laboratory in Oxford

THE LYSOSEEKER™ PLATFORMRARE MONOGENIC DISEASENEURODEGENERATIONOUR PIPELINE

ABOUT US INSIGHTS CAREERS CONTACT

THE LYSOSEEKER™ PLATFORMRARE MONOGENIC DISEASENEURODEGENERATIONOUR PIPELINE

ABOUT US INSIGHTS CAREERS CONTACT

Jens Eckstein, PhD

Peter Hamley, PhD, MBA

John K. Blackwood, PhD

Warren Galloway, PhD

Geraldine Farjot, PhD

Alkmini Kalousi, PhD

Nancy Malintan, PhD

Tsz Ting (Gigi) Chow, MSc

Jakub Stefaniak, PhD

James Taylor, PhD

Matthew G. Williamson, PhD

Natalia Pinzon

Prof. Oliver Kepp

Gabriela Vilema Enríquez, PhD

Ben Atkinson, PhD

Prof. Guido Kroemer

Prof. Michael Schlossmacher MD

Prof. Susan Perlman MD

Prof. Ed Tate

Prof. Christian Behl

THE LYSOSEEKER™ PLATFORM
RARE MONOGENIC DISEASE
NEURODEGENERATION
OUR PIPELINE

ABOUT US
INSIGHTS
CAREERS
CONTACT

THE LYSOSEEKER™ PLATFORM
RARE MONOGENIC DISEASE
NEURODEGENERATION
OUR PIPELINE

ABOUT US
INSIGHTS
CAREERS
CONTACT