Jason DuquetteFounder, President and CEO

Jason graduated with a B.S. from the University of Chicago with General and Special Honors and while there worked on modified nucleosides under the instruction of Professor David G. He began his industrial career at Honeywell performing process research for pharmaceutical fine chemicals where he helped develop a practical synthesis of the starting material for raloxifene. From there he moved to Bayer Pharmaceuticals and supported late stage drug discovery efforts with early process research in a fast-paced environment. He enabled the transition of multiple preclinical candidates through non-GLP tox studies and among his numerous contributions identified a scalable enantioselective synthesis of a chiral intermediate for a Beta-3 agonist. In 2005, Jason relocated to California to work at Amgen in South San Francisco and focused on medicinal chemistry and enabling tox studies as needed. While there, he worked on drug targets including GPCRs, kinases, and protein-protein interactions. His synthetic targets have ranged from simple and flat polyaromatic kinase inhibitors to complex molecules with as many as six stereocenters. He is coauthor on 15 publications and presentations and coinventor on 12 patents.

Grace ChuangFounder, Vice-President and Director of International Business Development

Grace completed her undergraduate work at National Changhua University in Taiwan while synthesizing biomimetic metal complexes under the instruction of Professor Wen-Feng Liaw. She obtained her Ph.D. with Professor Iwao Ojima at SUNY in Stony Brook working on homogeneous catalysis, including catalytic asymmetric aminohydroxylation, hydroformylation in scCO2, and cyclocarbonylation. She joined the pharmaceutical industry at Bayer Pharmaceuticals and quickly became a highly productive medicinal chemist working on compounds for multiple nuclear hormone receptors, the Ghrelin receptor and a glucose-dependent insulin secretagogue program. Her work resulted in multiple patents and publications and the identification of a clinical candidate. From Bayer, Grace moved to Cytokinetics in South San Francisco where she is currently employed as a Principal Scientist. While there she has continued her career as a productive chemist and has been a key member of discovery teams that identified three additional clinical candidates, one of which has just entered Phase II clinical trials. She is coauthor and coinventor on over 33 publications and patents.