The Apheris product is used by some of the largest global life sciences organizations to collaborate on sensitive, proprietary data across teams, borders, and organizations.
Our customers unlock the value of complementary data and collaboratively train machine learning models on their distributed datasets to improve accuracy and generalizability to meet the precision required for industrial settings.
Meet our Founders
Robin Röhm
Co-Founder & CEO
Robin studied medicine, philosophy and mathematics and was trained in global banking at UBS. In one of his previous start-ups, he lost multiple customers as data couldn’t be centralized due to regulatory constraints. He is driving the vision, strategy, and culture of Apheris.
Michael Höh
Co-Founder & CTO
Michael has a PhD in physics and computer science. He was trained at BCG where he built digital solutions and AI applications for industrial clients. As CTO he leads our platform architecture and design, our engineering target picture, technical customer commitments and legal and contractual scoping.
Meet our Scientific Advisory Board
Our Scientific Advisory Board brings together leaders from academia, biotech, and pharma who have shaped the fields of drug discovery and computational science. With decades of combined experience in AI, molecular modeling, and building world-class research organizations, they guide our scientific strategy and help drive innovation across our work.
Dr. Woody Sherman
Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Psivant Therapeutics
Woody leads Psivant's efforts to integrate computational methods with wet lab experiments to design therapeutics for protein targets previously considered to be undruggable with oral small molecules. His specializations including protein structure prediction, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, de novo design, machine learning, and cheminformatics. He is the original architect of the QUAISAR platform and has over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Previously, he held senior scientific roles at Silicon Therapeutics, Roivant Sciences, and Schrödinger and holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT.
Dr. Richard Bickerton
Co-Founder, Exscientia
Richard co-founded Exscientia, where he helped build the company’s AI-first discovery platform, later acquired by Recursion. His background spans cheminformatics, large-scale ML systems, and data science. He brings experience in technology, biotech, and company building.
Dr. Andreas Bender
Professor of Machine Learning in Medicine, Khalifa University
Before his current role, Andreas was Professor of Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and held senior leadership positions at AstraZeneca and Nuvisan in digital life sciences, data science, and AI for clinical pharmacology and safety. He has also co-founded multiple biotech companies, including Healx and PharmEnable, and served as CITO at Pangea Bio, with several programs in clinical development. Andreas received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has worked across academia and industry, including roles at Novartis and Leiden University.
Dr. Mohammed AlQuraishi
Assistant Professor, Columbia University
His lab sits in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University. They develop AI models for protein structure and function prediction, as well as protein-ligand interaction. Mohammed holds degrees in biology, computer science, and mathematics, and a PhD in genetics from Stanford University. Mohammed's lab built OpenFold, the leading open-source protein structure prediction model, and is spearheading the creation of OpenFold 3, the leading open co-folding model.
Dr. Pamela Carroll
Former COO, Isomorphic Labs
Pam has held executive leadership roles in pharma and biotech, including in business development at Roivant, Johnson and Johnson; and scientific leadership positions in oncology at Roche and Merck. She is widely recognized for pioneering the integration of emerging technology platforms to accelerate the discovery and development of novel medicines.
Dr. Darren Green
Former Head of Cheminformatics, GSK and Honorary Professor of Chemistry, University College London
Darren brings more than three decades of experience in the application of advanced computational methods to drug discovery across multiple therapeutic areas. He has been a pioneer in applying federated learning to advance drug discovery ML models, e.g., as part of the MELLODDY project.
Dr. Joseph Lehár
Entrepreneur; former SVP R&D Strategy at Owkin.
Joseph has led computational biology and bioinformatics groups across major pharma and biotech, including senior roles at Owkin, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Google. His work spans collaborative R&D models, translational science, and the application of data-driven methods in large-scale discovery programs.
Events we're joining
Insights into the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network and ApherisFold for improving protein co-folding predictions
Federation roundtable with Eli Lilly TuneLabs, and Vertex. Robin will be joined by Hans Bitter (Head of Computational science at Takeda)
Prof. Dr. Darren Green and Dr. Lukas Pluska on "Federated Training of Multi-Task ADMET Models Across Distributed Pharmaceutical Data"
Panel discussion "Beyond the Model: Driving Cutting Edge Drug Discovery” - Robin Röhm (CEO and Co-Founder of Apheris)
AWS and Apheris partnership presentation alongside AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network overview and initial results
Our CEO and Co-Founder, Robin Röhm, speaks about the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network's successful Federated OpenFold3 Initiative, where 5 leading pharmaceutical companies collaboratively fine-tuned OpenFold3 on their proprietary data.
Our CEO and Co-Founder, Robin Röhm, presents initial results from the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network's Federated OpenFold3 Initiative
Dr. Prieto will take part in the keynote session to speak about the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network's Federated OpenFold3 Initiative
Our CEO and Co-Founder, Robin Röhm, will present learnings from the AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network's Federated OpenFold3 Intiative
Our culture is based upon our core values
Impact
We are driven by impact and strive for the impossible
Collaboration
Through collaboration, we create a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts
Responsibility
We are responsible together and commit to ownership
Humility
We have the humility and hunger to learn
