Phil Patten PhD was the founding CSO of Initial Therapeutics, an Apple Tree Partners (ATP) portfolio company, and now serves on Initial’s Scientific Advisory Board. Phil was a co-founder and Chief Scientific officer of DiCE Therapeutics, a publicly traded biotechnology company that used DNA-encoded libraries to discover and optimize oral inhibitors of challenging protein-protein interface targets and was subsequently acquired by Lilly.

Before joining DiCE, Phil was at Pioneer Hi-Bred, where he was a DuPont Fellow and managed teams that utilized directed evolution and synthetic biology in agriculture. Prior to that, he was senior vice president of Biology at Achaogen, where he led a team that discovered and brought forward the first clinical stage small molecule inhibitor of LpxC.

Phil started his industrial career at Maxygen, where he applied directed evolution to therapeutic proteins and led a team that discovered an evolved type I interferon that was advanced to clinical studies in collaboration with Roche. He is an inventor on more than 90 granted US patents and has served on multiple scientific advisory boards. He currently serves on the Biology and Bioengineering Chair’s Council at the California Institute of Technology (2018-present).

Phil earned a BS in biology from the California Institute of Technology, a PhD in biological sciences from Stanford University and completed postdoctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.