About Avenzo

Founded in 2024 to solve one structural problem in oncology target identification

Avenzo was built in San Diego by oncologists and computational biologists who kept encountering the same gap: discovery teams making high-stakes target decisions from evidence that was months out of date, narrow in source coverage, or simply too scattered to synthesize before a portfolio review. The evidence was there. The infrastructure to surface it at decision time was not. We built that infrastructure.

Mission

Better evidence at the moment that determines everything downstream

Solid-tumor target selection sits at the beginning of a ten-to-fifteen year development chain. A target chosen on shallow evidence that holds up to early benchwork but fails in a more demanding model wastes years. Avenzo's position is that this problem is tractable: the evidence is available, scattered across thousands of papers and registries. What is missing is a structured way to aggregate and rank it consistently at the time of the decision.

We work exclusively on solid-tumor target identification, the earliest and highest-stakes decision point in oncology drug discovery. We are not a full-stack drug discovery platform. We do one thing: help discovery teams rank targets by the evidence that already exists, so more candidates that enter development have a genuine foundation under them.

Team

The team at Avenzo

Athena Countouriotis, Chief Executive Officer
Athena Countouriotis
Chief Executive Officer

Background spanning oncology clinical development and translational research. Has spent her career building programs that connect computational target identification to experimental validation, working across modality types including kinase inhibitors and antibody-drug conjugates at two prior oncology-focused biotechs before co-founding Avenzo.

Ravi Nair, Chief Technology Officer
Ravi Nair
Chief Technology Officer

Computational biologist and ML engineer specializing in large-scale biomedical literature analysis. Built evidence aggregation systems for target validation at a genomics platform company before joining Avenzo as a co-founder.

Naomi Stein, Chief Science Officer
Naomi Stein
Chief Science Officer

Background in solid tumor biology and computational target validation. Spent years leading target validation work at a solid-tumor focused oncology biotech, where target evidence quality directly shaped which programs received resource commitment, before co-founding Avenzo.

Location

Based in San Diego's Torrey Pines science corridor

Avenzo is based on Science Center Drive in the Torrey Pines district, within the dense oncology research concentration that runs from La Jolla to Sorrento Valley. We are independently funded and operating. Early-access engagement is fully remote; we work with discovery teams wherever their programs are based.

Address 10578 Science Center Drive
Suite 200
San Diego, CA 92121
Founded 2024

Work With Us

Get early access or reach out directly

We work with discovery teams at oncology biotechs and academic research centers. If your program involves solid-tumor target selection, we'd like to talk.