About Us
Our Story
We believe patients deserve better medicines. Our mission is to help biotech, venture capitalists and pharma improve their pipeline investments using human genetics.
Approximately 95% of drug development programs fail—most often because the drug’s target is not causal. We and others have recognized that human genetics is the most efficient way to reliably identify causal drug targets.
Drug development programs supported by human genetics are 2-4-fold more likely to reach the market. Because of this, large pharma often refuse to fund drug development programs unless they are strongly supported by human genetic evidence.
We are academics who have worked for 16 years generating, analyzing and critiquing human genetic evidence. We launched 5 Prime Sciences to provide these services to biotech, venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies.
To do so we are committed to standing on the forefront of advances in human genetics, bioinformatics, clinical medicine and AI to deliver better medicines to our patients.
Our Team
Brent Richards, MD, MSc
CEO and Founder
Brent is a Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics at McGill University and a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. He has trained in clinical medicine, human genetics, statistics and epidemiology and is a practicing Endocrinologist.
He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars.
He has worked extensively with drug development teams in industry to use human genetics to identify and validate drug targets. He was a member of GSK’s International Scientific Advisory Board for Human Genetics.
Vince Forgetta, PhD
Chief Information and Bioinformatics Officer
Vince has over 20 years of experience in genomics research and managing security aspects of high-performance computing solutions. He has developed polygenic prediction of osteoporosis and fracture in humans and predicted drug targets using human genomics. He has led large-scale international collaborations to publications in journals like Nature and Nature Genetics.
At 5 Prime Sciences, Vince is responsible for all bioinformatics pipelines, data and information security.
Kevin Heyries, PhD
Business Strategy Advisor
Sahir Bhatnagar, PhD
Director of Statistical Genetics
Siobhan Nolan Mangini
Financial Advisor
Matthew Tudball, PhD
Principal Statistical Geneticist
Matt completed his PhD in the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol on a Wellcome Trust studentship. His research focused on the development of novel causal and statistical inference methods with application to genetic epidemiology. During his PhD, he spent time at the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and completed industry internships in pharma and biotech.
At 5 Prime Sciences, Matt is responsible for designing and implementing statistical techniques for polygenic risk scores, Mendelian randomization and more.
Kelly Agnew, M.M.A
Senior Software Engineer
Kelly earned his Bachelors of Science in Physics as well as his Master of Management in Analytics from McGill University. He has worked as a Software Developer and Data Scientist for 6 years in the healthcare technology sector in Quebec.
Kelly’s main areas of professional focus have been platform engineering, automation, data integration, and sustainable software development. Kelly has been responsible for the secure management of clinical healthcare data belonging to Quebec patients, and has developed high performance pipelines to allow the secure transfer of healthcare data from hospital source systems directly to patients’ mobile devices.
At 5 Prime Sciences, Kelly works on the backend platform and CI/CD pipelines.
Marie Sadler, PhD
Statistical Geneticist
Marie obtained her PhD in Statistical Genetics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Her thesis focused on the integration of omics data and disease GWAS for drug target and drug response predictions. During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at Stanford University where she conducted research in pharmacogenetics using electronic health records.
At 5 Prime Sciences, Marie works on the identification of drug targets using statistical genetics methods such as Mendelian randomization.
Peter Kruczkiewicz, MSc
Software Engineer (Bioinformatics)
Peter earned his MSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Lethbridge where he developed bioinformatics tools for comparative genomics, in silico typing and molecular assay design for pathogenic bacteria using whole-genome sequence data. He has worked as a Bioinformatician and Software Developer for over a decade at the Government of Canada’s Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), focusing on bioinformatics tool and pipeline development, microbial genomics, genomic epidemiology and in silico molecular typing. At PHAC and CFIA, Peter developed widely used open-source bioinformatics tools such as SISTR for Salmonella typing and Nextflow pipelines to automate analysis of Illumina and Nanopore sequencing data for viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza A virus.
At 5 Prime Sciences, Peter is responsible for developing and integrating Nextflow pipelines.
Alec McKinlay, PhD
Statistical Geneticist
Alec undertook his PhD at the University of Bristol, MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, supported by a Cancer Research UK studentship. His research explored the associations between human genetics and the gut microbiome to evaluate the downstream implications for applied genetic epidemiology analysis. During his doctoral studies, Alec held visiting researcher and internship positions in both academia and industry, including a placement within the Machine Learning and Data Science Oncology unit at AstraZeneca.
At 5 Prime Sciences, Alec is developing and testing novel methods and executing client programs.
Kevin Liang, PhD
Bioinformatics Specialist
Kevin has worked extensively in the field of genetic epidemiology. His work focused on integrating population scale multi-omics datasets with different methods in genetic epidemiology to better understand disease pathophysiology with a focus on Type 2-Diabetes and Chronic Kidney Diseases (CKD). He’s formally trained as a bioinformatician with broad experience in software development, database management, and reproducible workflow development.
At 5 Prime, Kevin will provide support in data engineering, pipeline optimization, and integration of multi-omics datasets into the platform to improve scalability and robustness of our computational infrastructure.
Publications
Our scientists regularly publish in field-leading journals. Check out a selection of our findings:
Pledge 1%
At 5Prime Sciences, we are deeply committed to our social engagement initiatives, understanding that our responsibilities extend beyond our core business operations. With a strong belief in giving back to the community and supporting sustainable development, we proudly donate 1% of our profits to health or educational causes. This commitment reflects our dedication to making a positive impact on health and education, aligning with our core values of responsibility, sustainability, and community support. Through this endeavor, we aim to contribute to meaningful change and foster a brighter future for all.
Policies
At 5 Prime Sciences, we care about data security. To learn more, please read our Data Protection Policy. 5 Prime’s Privacy Officer is Vince Forgetta. Please reach out using the contact form and we will immediately come back to you.