Cambridge, UK, 10 August 2026 – Ignota Labs, the AI drug turnaround company, has announced the appointment of Dr Melanie Lee, PhD, CBE, Dr Peter Newham and Dr Angeliki Kotsianti to their Scientific Advisory Board. Bringing decades of experience in healthcare and drug discovery, the board will support the company as it continues to validate its unique approach to drug rescue, using AI to re-engineer failed drugs and accelerate the development of new and improved therapies.
Dr Jordan Lane, CSO of Ignota Labs, said: “We are pleased to welcome Dr’s Lee, Newham and Kotsianti to our Scientific Advisory Board. Their extensive experience shaping strategy in healthcare and drug discovery, will provide valuable guidance as we continue to build and prove our pipeline.”
Dr Lee is an experienced executive and non-executive director with a distinguished track record across the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors. She has served on the boards of FTSE 100 biotechnology companies, publicly listed organisations, and venture-backed businesses, including Lundbeck, Sanofi S.A., Celltech plc, and BTG plc. She is currently a Non-Executive Director and Chair of the R&D Committee for Bial, a privately held pharmaceutical company based in the Porto district of Portugal.
Dr Melanie Lee, said: “The smart use of AI to power and guide R&D to improve inefficiencies and strive for safe efficacious products will truly drive value in the very complex world of medicines discovery and development. This is one of the reasons why I am delighted to be joining Ignota Labs as the Chair of their Scientific Advisory Board.”
Dr Peter Newham is a senior drug safety scientist with more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development at AstraZeneca. Throughout his career, Peter has led and contributed to the application of innovative technologies to identify and mitigate safety risks, helping to optimise the safety profiles of novel medicines from early discovery through to clinical development.
Dr Peter Newham, said: “Throughout my career, I have seen many highly promising drug candidates fail because unexpected safety issues emerged during development. Those experiences have reinforced the importance of understanding the underlying biology and applying the right science to optimise a compound's safety profile. Ignota Labs’ approach of re-engineering failed drugs means that value (both financial and scientific) can be recaptured. I’m looking forward to their first assets reaching the clinic.”
Dr Angeliki Kotsianti is a senior medical and safety leader who spent two decades in clinical development and portfolio-wide benefit-risk assessment at Pfizer. She brings deep expertise in AI-driven approaches to clinical medicine and in determining whether medicines can be safely brought to, and kept available for, patients across global markets.
Dr Angeliki Kotsianti, said: “I am very enthusiastic about what Ignota Labs is building. Turning shelved clinical assets back into viable medicines is a powerful new frontier for our field, and the rigour with which the team has thought through the science, the platform, and the path forward is impressive. Having spent my career asking whether a molecule can be brought safely to patients, I’m excited to help answer that question in an entirely new way.”
Ignota Labs combines cheminformatics and bioinformatics in its AI platform, SAFEPATH, to identify and fix the root causes of toxicity, while optimising therapeutic effectiveness. Since announcing a seed raise of £5.5M in 2025, the company has in-licensed multiple drugs, doubled the size of its team, and entered into a collaboration with global healthcare company Sanofi.
About Ignota Labs
Ignota Labs rescues promising but failing drugs, bringing new life to abandoned projects and new hope to patients. More than half of all small molecule drugs that enter pre-clinical trials fail due to safety issues, amounting to over $400 billion of lost value every year and delaying life-saving treatments for patients. Our proprietary platform, SAFEPATH, uses cutting-edge deep learning to address these challenges by uncovering the mechanisms behind drug toxicity. Unlike traditional safety assessments that identify what went wrong, our AI platform SAFEPATH combines cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and multimodal data analysis to explain why and how safety issues occur, delivering actionable insights to refine or repurpose drug candidates. Ignota Labs is building a robust pipeline to bring safer drugs to market faster, partnering to develop and co-develop assets that might otherwise fail, and accelerating the delivery of vital therapies to patients in need. For more information, visit ignotalabs.ai.
