Site Content

March 20, 2025 Akttyva Therapeutics has been busy since the beginning of the year hiring and reengaging with advisors and mentors. So we would like to welcome new team members:

1. Nathashali Ortiz, corporate accountant specializing in biotech companies of all stages;
2. Emma Crowley-Dolen,  Ph.D. who will lead assay development and compound screening efforts as Scientist;
3. Gayathri Nithianantan, M.S., who will work on assays, cell culture and compound screening as a Research Intern.

Separately, we would like to welcome members of our Scientific Advisory Board:

1. Natalia Denisova-Crivello, Ph.D., a neuroscientist with 30 years academic and industry experience in protein-lipid complexes and their biology; Natalia is joining the Scientific Advisory Board, were she will lead efforts on expansion of Akttyva pipeline and identifying government funding opportunities;
2. Przemyslaw (Sam) Piechota, Ph.D., computational toxicologist with 20 years experience in Unilever, Nestle and Johns Hopkins University
3. Yvonne Will, Ph.D., a toxicologist with over 20 years experience at Pfizer and J&J, pioneering NAM-based de-risking approaches at large pharmaceutical companies; Yvonne is joining the Scientific Advisory Board;
4. Jonathan Dunne, Chief AI Architect at IBM, who has been a MassChallenge mentor for Akttyva since 2021 and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board  advising the computational team.
   

December 19, 2025 Akttyva Therapeutics announces retirement of David Bowman, an interim CTO / CEO. David led the company as an effective CTO since September 2024, significantly contributing to building a high-performance computing cluster which now hosts Akttyva’s drug-discovery computational platform AIDE v.2. David and Dr. Malai Padavai, Lead Computational Scientist, built on the academic computational work of Dr. Bruno Villoutriex and  biological pathway knowledge of Dr. Usamah Kayyali.  Dr. Katya Tsaioun-Helin co-founded the company in 2020 with Drs. Kayyali and Villoutreix and is taking the role of the CEO to lead the company to the next stage.   

December 19, 2025 Akttyva Therapeutics announces AIDE 2.0, a new high-performance drug discovery platform built to target allosteric protein pockets—one of the most difficult and underexplored areas in drug discovery. The platform utilizes elements of HPC, Big Data, Generative AI with built-in customizable Advanced Primary Screening criteria (e.g., ADMET, best-in-class safety filters, target product profile features) at the scale of billions of compounds. The platform integrates drug-binding pockets prediction, large-scale docking and molecular dynamics simulation to confirm the hits.

November 1, 2024 Akttyva Therapeutics opened a new office and laboratory at 155 Arlington Street, Watertown, MA 02472 within Cambridge Scientific incubator. Moving into the greater Boston area allows the Company to have better access to the talent and become a part of the Cambridge / Boston biotech community. The space is located on the Charles River bike path and near Cambridge with all major universities and companies within minutes of the new Company headquarters. 

September 24, 2024 Akttyva Therapeutics is excited to announce that David Bowman, Ph.D., an experienced tech entrepreneur with the  30+ years experience in software and a history of successful product development in a wide range of industries joins Akttyva as an interim Chief Executive Officer. David will continue building the team and lead the company going forward. David's experience in start-ups, software products development, fund-raising and pioneering work in applying machine learning, neural networks and AI are a perfect fit for Akttyva. 

August 15, 2024 Akttyva Therapeutics was awarded a highly competitive National Science Foundation Phase 2 Award. The $1,000,000 funding serves as an independent government agency validation of the science behind Akttyva's programs and allows the Company to continue building its pipeline using the proprietary AI-powered drug-discovery platform AIDE360. 

 September 1, 2023 We are excited to announce that Dr. Yosef  Landesman has joined Akttyva's team as a Drug Discovery and Translational Research Advisor.  Dr. Landesman brings over 20 years of translational drug-discovery experience with taking drugs from discovery through all stages of development and to the market at Karyopharm and making crucial contributions as a Chef Scientific Officer at HC Biosciences and Alnylam. 

 December 14, 2021 Honored to announce a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to  further develop and commercialize our AIDE-360 platform that aims at facilitating the  rational design of therapeutics addressing vascular leak disorders. This highly competitive award is a demonstration of innovative nature and commercial potential, the two main criteria for NSF grant review. This grant will allow us to accelerate the 2nd generation AIDE-360 and develop the commercialization plan. More about the program: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2136307&HistoricalAwards=false

 November 17, 2021. Akttyva  Therapeutics won an IBM  prize for its AI drug-discovery program AIDE-360, which was used to discover the hits for the vascular leak program

 October 1, 2021. Akttyva  Therapeutics is a finalist of the highly selective 2021 MassChallenge  competition! We are honored to be one of only 45 companies out of 229  selected for the final round (out of over 3,000 original applications).  The winners of the final round will compete for $1M non-dilutive cash  prizes competition

https://readymag.com/MassChallenge/Finalists21/finalists/

April 1, 2021 Akttyva has established laboratories in Mansfield Bioincubator

January 10, 2021 Dr. Mario DiPaola, an experienced scientist and successful entrepreneur, joins Akttyva as Head of Research.