Meet Jonny Wray

Jonny is Chief Technology Officer at Nucleome Therapeutics, where he leads the development of computational technologies designed to uncover how the 3D genome contributes to disease. With more than 30 years of experience across software engineering, bioinformatics, computational biology, and drug discovery, he has built data-driven platforms at companies including e-therapeutics, Five Prime Therapeutics, and BD Clontech.

At Nucleome, Jonny is translating non-coding genome biology into drug discovery programs for complex disease. Over the past year, the company has reported retrospective validation showing that target-indication pairs selected using its data were associated with a 10-fold increase in clinical success rate, from 5 percent to 50 percent. It has also nominated its first development candidate, marking a shift from functional genomics technology company toward drug discovery company.

“I originally trained as an electronic engineer, and my first job was with Marconi Radar Systems, working on advanced radar platforms. So, yes, I think that person would be very surprised by my career in biotech and drug discovery. While my younger self may not have been able to predict that career path, it makes a lot of sense in the light of modern, data-driven approaches to drug discovery.”

“The biggest barrier to progress in drug discovery is the complexity of human biology. The key to fixing this is the identification of the causal drivers of human disease and using those drivers as the basis of target selection and drug discovery.”