He spent two decades shipping blockbuster drugs. Then he went hunting for the slow burn underneath them all.
Inside a three-person shop in East Hanover, New Jersey, Gene Wang is engineering antibodies with two arms. One arm reaches for inflammation and turns the dial down. The other reaches for the immune system and wakes it up. The premise underneath both moves is unfashionably simple: the chronic, low-grade inflammation that accumulates as we age is not background noise. It is the storyline.
Immetas Therapeutics, the company he founded in October 2018, exists to act on that idea. The lab designs bispecific antibodies meant to regulate inflammation inside the tumor microenvironment and break the resistance that lets so many cancers shrug off checkpoint immunotherapy. The scientific term for the territory is inflammaging. Wang treats it as a drug-discovery map rather than a buzzword.
He did not arrive here by accident. Wang is a physician-scientist with an M.D. from Peking University Medical Center and a Ph.D. in immunobiology from Yale, where his thesis dug into how T lymphocytes receive their co-stimulation signals. That is the same immune machinery he now tries to retune in tumors. Before the founder title, he spent close to twenty years inside Merck, Abbott, GSK, and Novartis, learning how molecules become medicines.
The list of drugs he helped move from bench to bedside reads like a pharmacy aisle: Humira, the anti-inflammatory juggernaut; Gardasil, the HPV vaccine; Zolinza, an oncology agent; and Varubi, for chemotherapy-induced nausea. He led cross-functional teams, set development strategy, and steered first-in-class compounds from discovery to clinical proof-of-concept. Then he decided the most interesting target was one nobody owned outright.
In September 2020, Morningside Ventures wrote an $11 million Series A check - the firm's lone investment in the round - and Morningside managing director Dr. Lu Huang joined the board. The capital was modest by biotech standards and pointed: enough to narrow the bispecific work and interrogate the disease mechanism, not enough to chase everything. That discipline is the point.
The anti-TNF blockbuster that reshaped how autoimmune inflammation is treated. Wang worked the immunology side at Abbott, GSK, and Novartis.
A vaccine that prevents cancer rather than treating it - a rare feat in oncology, and one Wang helped carry through development.
An epigenetic oncology agent from his Merck oncology chapter, where the focus shifted from inflammation to tumors.
A supportive-care drug for chemotherapy-induced nausea - the unglamorous, patient-centered side of cancer care.
Conventional checkpoint inhibitors release the brakes on the immune system. They work - until the tumor microenvironment, thick with inflammation, learns to resist them. Immetas builds bispecific antibodies that try to outflank that resistance.
One binding arm dampens the inflammatory signaling that shields the tumor. The other re-engages anti-tumor immunity. The wager is that calming the wrong inflammation while waking the right immune cells does what a single-target drug cannot.
It is anchored in clinical evidence first - a deliberate inversion of the usual discovery order, meant to mitigate risk before a molecule ever reaches a patient.
Earns an M.D. at Peking University Medical Center, then a Ph.D. in immunobiology at Yale studying T lymphocyte co-stimulation, followed by residency at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Builds a drug-development career across Abbott, GSK, and Novartis in immunology and inflammation - then oncology at Merck.
Co-founds Immetas Therapeutics with Harvard geneticist David Sinclair to target inflammation pathways in aging.
Closes an $11M Series A led solely by Morningside Ventures; Dr. Lu Huang joins the board.
The Harvard geneticist famous for popularizing the science of aging. Pairing him with Wang put a longevity theorist next to a seasoned drug developer.
Managing director who led the Series A and joined the Immetas board - the investor closest to the science.
A physician-scientist lending clinical and translational weight to the company's immuno-oncology program.
He carries two doctorates - an M.D. and a Ph.D. in immunobiology - a clinician and a bench scientist in one resume.
His Yale thesis on T-cell co-stimulation maps onto the exact immune machinery Immetas now retunes inside tumors.
Immetas runs lean - roughly three employees - proving conviction matters more than headcount in early biotech.
The company's lead molecules are antibodies with two jobs at once: quiet the wrong inflammation, rally the right immunity.