About Us

Sirenas was founded in 2012 to accelerate the discovery of new medicines from nature, with emphasis on marine environments. Our multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, engineers, data scientists, machine learning experts, and business professionals has developed a highly efficient and productive chemical discovery engine to rapidly uncover and understand nature’s prolific chemistry and its potential biomedical impact.

Working with local communities, the team has sustainably and ethically built one of the largest and most unique collections of marine organisms and plants from diverse ecosystems and geographies.  Using novel chemical extraction methods and computational technology, Sirenas built the largest repository of data connecting the previously uncharted chemistry of marine organisms to applications in human health and has made several discoveries that could one day become highly impactful medicines.

Meet the Team

  • Eduardo Esquenazi, PhD

    Eduardo Esquenazi, PhD

    Founder & CEO

  • Phil Baran, PhD

    Phil Baran, PhD

    Co-Founder

  • Jake Beverage, PharmD

    Jake Beverage, PharmD

    Co-Founder

  • E. Paige Stout, PhD

    Scientific Director, Discovery Chemistry

  • Benjamin Cravatt, PhD

    Benjamin Cravatt, PhD

    Scientific Advisor

  • Pieter Dorrestein, PhD

    Pieter Dorrestein, PhD

    Scientific Advisor

  • Michael Howell, PhD

    Michael Howell, PhD

    Scientific Advisor

  • William Gerwick, PhD

    William Gerwick, PhD

    Scientific Advisor

  • Christopher Walsh, PhD

    Christopher Walsh, PhD

    In Memoriam, Scientific Advisor

The Secret Language of Life | TEDxUCSD

In this talk, Founder Eduardo Esquenazi shares the story of his cancer diagnosis as a graduate student at UCSD, and how this transformed his dream in life. He discusses how microbiomes can help produce life-saving drugs, and how they are tied to our planet.