The People of OyaGen
Dr. Ryan P. Bennett, Chief Scientific Officer and Laboratory Director
The Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and Lab Director at OyaGen Dr. Ryan Bennett has been a leader in assay development for high throughput screening (HTS), downstream target validation and late stage preclinical drug development. Both his graduate and professional research experience has been focused on viral host defense enabling him to develop novel HTS assays for screening new HIV/AIDS and Ebola therapeutics. This experience has given him extensive background knowledge on HTS, and preclinical development for viral infections and host defense.Ryan also has extensive experience developing assays for elucidating mechanism of action (MOA) for drug targets. Since becoming Lab Manager in 2009 he has had multiple senior scientists and technicians under his direct supervision and has overseen the development and execution of the multiple primary screens against OyaGen’s in-house ~25K compound library, the NCI open repository library and one primary screen against a 110K compound library transferred to OyaGen from Sanford Burnham Prebys along with secondary screens and functional endpoint analyses. With his promotion to CSO in 2014 and in his continued role as Lab Director he manages the day-to-day operations of all projects and staff within OyaGen along with our contract research organizations (CROs) for developing assays on targets in the anti-HIV Vif and A3G pathway as well as targets for Ebola and SARS-CoV-2. In his 15+ years at OyaGen he has gained extensive assay development experience constructing and optimizing various primary, secondary and counter screens to validate multiple lead compounds in hit-to-lead development. These activities have enabled him to lead the interactions with CROs for HTS of 100K to 300K compound libraries along with downstream viral and toxicity tests. In his leadership role for preclinical development, he coordinates third party CROs in next gen sequencing, medicinal chemistry, live virus studies, ADMET, PK and animal efficacy testing for lead-to-candidate development towards IND-enabling studies for the FDA. He has served as point person in our research agreements with scientists from government and pharma partners. He also is responsible for analyzing and organizing data for presentations at scientific meetings, for manuscripts and for investors.