Team

Simon Mallal and his team discovered the association between HLA-B*57:01 and abacavir hypersensitivity in 2002, then led the international effort that made pre-treatment screening standard of care. It remains one of the few pharmacogenetic tests to have changed prescribing worldwide. His work spans HLA-restricted T cell immunology, drug hypersensitivity, and viral adaptation to immune pressure in HIV and hepatitis C. He directs the Tennessee Center for AIDS Research, the Center for Translational Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and Vanderbilt Technologies for Advanced Genomics, and is a principal author of the Keystone Epitope Theory.

Amir Asiaee builds the computational pipeline behind the company’s discovery work: cross-reactivity search across viral and human proteomes, HLA-restricted binding prediction, and the statistical machinery that separates candidate triplets from background. His methodological research is in causal inference and statistical learning for high-dimensional biological data, connecting molecular measurements to interpretable mechanisms in genomics and immunology.