Michael G. Acker, Ph.D.

For more than 15 years, Dr. Mike Acker has been focused on the discovery and optimization of small molecule therapies to improve patients’ lives. At Delphia, Mike and his team drive protein science and structural biology, hit-finding and early assay development and collaborate with medicinal chemistry efforts to identify clinical candidate small molecule modulators of oncology disease targets to drive pathway activation and thwart tumor growth. The team seeks to bridge the gap between biochemical, biophysical, structural and genetic data to gain a better understanding of the complex mechanisms of oncology targets in cancer progression.

Prior to joining Delphia, Mike was an early employee of MOMA Therapeutics and as senior director, was responsible for building the biochemistry and biophysics team. Mike began his career in drug discovery at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, leading the biological chemistry group in oncology drug discovery, where he and his team contributed to multiple clinical stage drug discovery programs.

Mike is a classically trained enzymologist and biochemist and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, working with Dr. Jon R. Lorsch in the field of eukaryotic translation initiation. As a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow, Mike joined the lab of Dr. Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School, where he led the bioengineering of a bacterium for production of new natural product antibiotics to treat MRSA.