Management & Team

MANAGEMENT & TEAM

our management

Lucas Nivon

Chief Executive Officer

Lucas is trained in computational biophysics and protein engineering. Prior to Cyrus he was a Translational Investigator & Senior Fellow at the Baker lab at UW, developing small-molecule binding proteins and protein design algorithms. Lucas is the founder of PedalAnywhere, an online-only bicycle rental company. Lucas’ scientific work includes a patented computationally designed enzyme, an RNA-dynamics-modeling software toolkit (built during his Ph.D. with Eugene Shakhnovich and Xiaowei Zhuang at Harvard), and algorithm optimization for automation of computational protein design. Harvard A.B., Biochemical Sciences (summa cum laude and Goldwater Scholar) and Ph.D., Biophysics; Hertz Fellow.

Yifan Song

Chief Science Officer

Yifan has been at the forefront of computational protein modeling and biophysics in a variety of fields. Yifan was the lead developer on core Rosetta protein modeling functionality, and the project manager at CCNY for an electrostatics calculation software package, MCCE. He pioneered a number of technical refinements in protein structure energy evaluation currently used in Rosetta. Yifan is a leader in computational protein modeling, with experience ranging from ab initio protein structure prediction to crystallography to protein-protein interaction design and over 20 scientific publications in leading journals. He is a former Translational Investigator & Research Scientist at the Baker lab at the University of Washington. Yifan completed a B.S. in Physics at Fudan University and earned his Ph.D. in Physics at CCNY.

Mark Benjamin

President and EVP Business Development

Mark is a trained scientist and seasoned business development professional. Prior to joining Cyrus, Mark was Chief Business Officer at Q-State Biosciences, a Harvard University company focusing on neuroscience drug discovery. Mark served as CEO of Galenea, an MIT spin out from the lab of Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, which – through partnerships with Otsuka, CHDI, Novartis, Eisai and Janssen, worked on drug discovery for a number of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Prior to Galenea, he was Chief Business Officer at Nura, a company formed out of Nobel Laureate Linda Buck’s GPCR work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Mark spent some time in Geneva helping to build and eventually sell a Serono spin-out DNA-sequencing company – Manteia - the core of which forms part of the Illumina sequencing platform, and he was an early employee at Rosetta Inpharmatics – a gene expression profiling and microarray company founded by a Seattle-based team including Nobel laureate Lee Hartwell and systems biology pioneer, Lee Hood, where he headed up Business Development. He has a D.Sc. in Cancer Biology from Harvard University and a B.Sc. (First class, with honors) in Genetics from the University of London.

David Baker

Scientific Co-Founder & Advisor

David is a Professor at the University of Washington and an HHMI Investigator. David is the originator of the Rosetta software package and is responsible for numerous scientific breakthroughs and “firsts” in computational modeling of protein structures and design of novel proteins. Highlights include:
1) The first reliable prediction of small-protein 3D structures.
2) The design of the first fully de novo protein structure in a computer.
3) The design of the first protein-protein binding interactions in a computer
4) The creation of a specific ligand-binding protein by computational methods.
5) David has published over 330 peer-reviewed scientific papers, including over 20 in Science and Nature alone.

Sam DeLuca

Director of Engineering

Sam is both an accomplished scientific developer in molecular modeling with a specialty in Rosetta, as well as an experienced software engineer in cloud infrastructure for high throughput systems. Sam developed a version of the RosettaLigand small molecule docking algorithm suitable for high throughput screening while a graduate student in the Meiler lab at Vanderbilt. In addition to his scientific research, Sam was also a core contributor to RosettaCommons infrastructure. Prior to Cyrus, Sam worked at CloudLock (later acquired by Cisco), where he was a Senior software engineer who designed and implemented a high throughput system for analyzing large numbers of documents stored in the cloud. Sam completed a B.S. in Bioinformatics at Rensselaer Polytechnic University and a Ph.D. in chemical and physical biology at Vanderbilt University.

Erik Procko

Director of Discovery

Erik holds an Associate Professorship at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and is a pioneer in the use of Big Data mutagenesis to understand membrane proteins and engineer receptors. He was the first to computationally design a truly de novo protein with function - blockade of a viral oncogene associated with pediatric cancers - and apply deep mutational scanning to human GPCRs and transporters to guide modeling algorithms. He is an inventor on multiple patents and has been published in Cell, Nature, and Science. He is the former co-founder and CEO of Orthogonal Biologics, which merged with Cyrus Biotechnology in 2021. Erik graduated with a B.Sc. in Immunology from the University of Adelaide and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Harvard University.

Eric Tarcha

VP of Drug Discovery

Eric joined Cyrus in March of 2022 as Vice President of Drug Discovery. He is a seasoned
biotech drug hunter with over 20 years of experience in discovery research and translational
drug development, assembling and leading multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams to
advance first-in-class therapeutic candidates into the clinic. He has achieved key development
milestones in the fields of immuno-oncology, infectious disease, autoimmunity/inflammation,
and neuroscience, taking multiple early-stage therapeutics through preclinical development
and into early clinical studies. Prior to Cyrus, Eric was a founding scientist and held leadership positions at Kineta Inc., most recently as Executive Vice President of Research and Development responsible for leading discovery, non-clinical, CMC, regulatory and clinical R&D operations. Before Kineta, he was a scientist at Illumigen Biosciences leading efforts in assay development, in vitro and in vivo pharmacology, and CMC process development. Eric is a co-inventor and co-author on numerous patents and publications related to drug discovery, therapeutics formulation and manufacturing, vaccinology, pharmacology, and clinical development. Eric received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Medical Technology and Clinical Laboratory Sciences at Michigan State University and earned his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the Medical University of Ohio at Toledo.