Phil Patten

Phil Patten is chief scientific officer of ATP portfolio company Initial Therapeutics and an entrepreneur in residence at ATP, building on a career leading scientific innovation and discovery. Phil was a 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. S011806, an oral inhibitor of IL-17A discovered at DiCE, is currently in clinical testing. 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 served on the Biology and Bioengineering Chair’s Council at the California Institute of Technology from 2018-2020.

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.