Lucas Nivon

Lucas Nivon is trained in computational biophysics and aims to accelerate and transform the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical industries through computation. At Cyrus Biotechnology the team is creating new protein-based drugs in their own labs aiming to use Cyrus’s software to rapidly solve pressing medical needs. Cyrus focuses on biologics derived from natural proteins, where they can improve efficacy, safety and manufacturability to bring entirely new drugs to market or improve on first generation biologics. Internal programs include a broad-spectrum COVID therapeutic, rheumatology biologic, rare disease biologics, and others in infectious disease. Cyrus partners include Janssen, Selecta, Feng Zhang's group at the Broad institute, the University of Illinois and other industry partners in biologics. Lucas received a PhD at Harvard working with Eugene Shakhnovich and Xiaowei Zhuang with funding from the Hertz fellowship and was a postdoc with David Baker at University of Washington with NSF funding. Lucas is broadly interested in the application of highly innovative scientific software to create new drugs, new diagnostics, industrially useful new biotechnological tools for biological research, materials and energy applications. At Cyrus he focuses exclusively on biologics drug discovery. He believes that software-based biological engineering and protein engineering will transform multiple sectors of the economy over the coming decades.