Marcel Frenkel, PhD

Co-founder and CEO

Marcel Frenkel PhD is a biochemist with a background in computational protein and drug design, immunology and cancer cell biology. After losing his mother to pancreatic cancer, Marcel’s desire and vision on how to change the prognosis of patients suffering from cancer and other deadly diseases has brought a team of amazing scientists, engineers, and biotech experts together and become Ten63’s mission.

Marcel was invited to enroll at the University of Notre Dame as a Hesburgh International Scholar. At Notre Dame, despite being an undergrad, he led the computational efforts around the characterization of the effects and phylogeny of mutations in NPC genes that cause Niemann-Pick disease type C. Later he conceived and lead a team of students towards the development of low cost, low maintenance quorum sensing based biosensors for the detection of cholera in under-privileged communities suffering from unsecure water supplies.

Marcel obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from the Donald lab at Duke University, where he focused on enhancing computational methods through novel algorithms, methods, and compounds to target undruggable targets like KRas and overcome drug resistance in cancer and other quickly evolving diseases. He also contributed towards the design of a vaccine that may be able to teach the immune system to outpace HIV, helped discover a novel mechanism of drug resistance, and collaborated with the NIH to design novel antibodies for the treatments of viral infections.

Outside of science Marcel was an international level athlete leading his home country of Brazil in multiple world fencing championships. At Notre Dame Marcel won a DIV 1 national championship with the Fighting Irish and was awarded the Dan Mulligan award for leadership and best W/L ratio.