Chris McNulty

An engineer's route to the biotech corner office

In December 2024, when Ring Therapeutics needed someone to steady the ship, it did not go looking outside its own walls. It turned to the person who already knew every number, every contract, and every risk on the books: its chief financial officer, Chris McNulty.

McNulty's path into that role is not the standard biotech-executive story. He did not arrive with a PhD in molecular biology or a postdoc in virology. He came in as an engineer. He earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT before adding an MBA from Harvard Business School. That combination - the technical grounding of an engineer and the financial fluency of a business-school graduate - has shaped the way he reads companies ever since.

He joined Ring Therapeutics in May 2023 as Chief Financial Officer and Head of Corporate Strategy. At the time, Ring's then-CEO Tuyen Ong framed the hire around capabilities the company badly needed. "Christopher brings new important capabilities in capital formation and business development to Ring at a critical time in our trajectory, and we are thrilled to welcome him in his dual role as CFO and Head of Corporate Strategy," Ong said.

What Ring is trying to do

Ring Therapeutics, based at 620 Memorial Drive in Cambridge, works on an unusual premise. Most gene therapies rely on viral vectors that the immune system eventually learns to recognize, which limits how often a patient can be dosed. Ring's approach centers on anelloviruses - commensal viruses that live in the human body without causing disease and that the immune system already tolerates. The idea is to engineer these viruses to carry genetic payloads, potentially opening the door to gene therapies that can be delivered more than once.

It is an ambitious, still-early scientific bet, and one that demands a leader who can hold together the twin pressures every platform biotech faces: the science needs time, and the science needs money. McNulty has spent his career at exactly that intersection.

A tour of Cambridge biotech

Before Ring, McNulty built a resume that reads like a map of the Massachusetts life-sciences cluster. He came to Ring from VBI Vaccines, where he served as CFO and Head of Business Development, leading the finance and business-development teams. Earlier, he held multiple executive roles at InVivo Therapeutics, including CFO, where he led finance efforts for more than $50 million in financing for a company focused on spinal-cord repair.

Further back, he was a Director and later Senior Director at Repligen Corporation, where he ran in-licensing and out-licensing activities. That work produced a licensing deal with Biomarin and involved partnerships with names like Novozymes and Pfizer. He also held director-level positions at Seventh Sense Biosystems, where he secured $3.3 million in funding, and at Genzyme Corporation, where he led two collaborations in the rare-genetic-disease space.

Across all of it, one throughline holds: McNulty has repeatedly been the person responsible for turning scientific promise into signed term sheets. By the company's own account, he has completed financing transactions valued at more than $300 million.

Stepping up

The move from CFO to interim CEO is a specific kind of promotion. It usually happens at an inflection point, when a board wants continuity and trusts someone who already understands the internal machinery of the company. For McNulty, the elevation in December 2024 - as Tuyen Ong shifted into an advisory role - placed him at the front of a company whose science is still proving itself and whose funding environment, like much of gene therapy, has grown tougher.

That is the quieter version of leadership. There is no dramatic outside hire, no splashy arrival. Instead there is an operator who learned the business from the inside, earned the trust of the people around him, and was ready when the moment came. For a platform company chasing something as difficult as redosable gene therapy, that kind of steady hand may matter as much as any single experiment.

The engineer's instinct

It is worth returning to where McNulty started. An electrical-engineering education teaches you to break a hard problem into parts, to understand how each piece behaves, and to reason about systems under constraint. A finance career teaches you what each of those pieces costs and how long the money will last. In a field where the science is genuinely novel and the runway is always finite, having a leader fluent in both languages is not a small thing. It is arguably the whole job.