Zentalis Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing clinically differentiated small molecule therapeutics targeting fundamental biological pathways of cancers, today announced the promotion of co-founder Kevin Bunker, Ph.D., to Chief Scientific Officer. In this new role, Dr. Bunker will focus on leading Research and Development (R&D) in San Diego, advancing the preclinical pipeline and optimizing the Company’s Integrated Discovery Engine.

“We are extremely grateul for all of Kevin’s contributions across the Company in his service as COO,” said Kimberly Blackwell, M.D., Chief Executive Officer of Zentalis. “Kevin is an outstanding scientist and leader at Zentalis, and the Company’s achievements to date are due in large part to his dedication and passion for discovering promising oncology drugs targeting fundamental biological pathways of cancer.

Leveraging our extensive capabilities across cancer biology and medicinal chemistry, the Company’s Integrated Discovery approach, developed by our team under Kevin’s leadership, has already yielded multiple potentially best-in-class clinical candidates, including our Wee1 inhibitor, ZN-c3, and BCL-2 inhibitor, ZN-d5. We look forward to generating additional innovative candidates as we look to grow our investigational pipeline of potentially transformative oncology therapeutics.”

Dr. Bunker is a co-founder of Zentalis Pharmaceuticals and previously served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Company.