A New Kind of Drug Discovery Starts Here
Long before the company existed, they were asking a bold question:
What if cells could tell us the medicines they need?
Their work helped define a new paradigm of drug discovery leveraging cells as natural biosensors – living systems that sense, interpret and respond to stress, such as those resulting from oxygen deprivation or drug exposure. This idea has gained global recognition, including two Nobel Prizes awarded for discoveries in cellular sensing in 2019 and 2021. Soley was founded to carry that vision forward into a new era of drug discovery, where biology leads, and cells guide the way.
Our journey from foundational research to clinic-ready programs:
1998 – 2003
Dr. Kurosh Ameri pioneers research into how cells sense and discriminate between hypoxia (low levels of oxygen) and anoxia (lack of oxygen) to determine their fate, helping define the field of tumor anoxia. This foundational research would later underpin key advances in cellular sensing.
2007
Anoxia is recognized as a common stressor across diseases, revealing biological parallels between cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, and other conditions.
2010
Dr. Yerem Yeghiazarians and Dr. Kurosh Ameri begin their bold interdisciplinary collaboration at UCSF, combining expertise in cardiology, stem cells, and cancer biology to explore how cells interpret and respond to stress.
2011 – 2020
Over nearly a decade, the multidisciplinary team builds and validates a platform to interpret cellular stress responses in real time and observe how cells sense drugs and determine their fate. Their work results in platform validation and early proof-of-concept data. More than 100 publications and proprietary insights lay the foundation for Soley.
2020
Soley Therapeutics is founded with a powerful and differentiated biology-first platform, accelerated with automation and AI, to translate the cell’s signals into therapeutics that modulate cell fate for drug discovery.
2021
Soley demonstrates that its CL-SAR™ platform can capture and interpret phenotypic responses of cells after exposure to drugs, confirming that cells can be used as powerful sensors to guide drug discovery. During this time, two Nobel Prizes were awarded to investigators for their breakthrough work in cellular sensing, reinforcing the vision behind Soley’s founding. Importantly, different cells sense and respond to their environments differently allowing selectivity in drug discovery.
2022
Soley’s end-to-end fully integrated and automated discovery engine is operational. Company rapidly and cost effectively discovers several patentable chemical series each with novel MOA and grounded in cell-sensing insight.
2023
Soley rapidly grows the oncology pipeline with numerous novel first-in-class drugs and expands beyond oncology. New proof-of-concept data in neurodegeneration, obesity and metabolic diseases, and hair regeneration underscore the platform’s ability to discover drugs by mapping stress-response pathways across diverse disease contexts.
2024
A partnership with Oracle brings unprecedented cloud infrastructure and access to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to power AI/ML applications in Soley’s platform. The team begins scaling SoleyMaps™ and SoleyGPT™ to accelerate compound evaluation and molecular design.
2025
Soley nominates first development candidate and prepares to take its first-in-class drugs with novel MOAs into the clinic. Rapidly growing portfolio of numerous novel oncology assets and discovers novel therapies in several non-oncology indications.
Select Publications
The foundational research of Dr. Yerem Yeghiazarians and Dr. Kurosh Ameri, spanning cardiology, stem cells, cancer biology, and cellular stress, has led to numerous peer-reviewed publications and patents. This body of work not only validated the scientific underpinnings of Soley’s platform, but also shaped the intellectual framework that drives the company’s discovery approach today.