Jack Hoppin

Jack Hoppin does not fit the standard picture of a biotech chief executive. He came to cancer drug development through applied mathematics, not chemistry or the clinic, and he still talks about his company the way a mathematician talks about a good proof: elegant, precise, and honest about what it cannot yet solve.

Today he is co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Ratio Therapeutics, a Boston company that designs targeted radiopharmaceuticals. The idea is deceptively simple. Attach a radioactive isotope to a molecule that seeks out a specific marker on a tumor, deliver a dose of radiation directly to the cancer, and spare as much healthy tissue as possible. The hard part is the engineering, and that is where Hoppin's quantitative instincts show up. The company's name is itself a nod to the math.

Ratio works on two proprietary platforms. Trillium is a pharmacokinetic modulation system, a way of tuning how long a drug circulates and where it goes, which can be adjusted to bind to different antigen targets. Macropa is a chelator built to carry actinium-225, an alpha-emitting radionuclide that is among the more potent and sought-after isotopes in the field. Both are aimed at the same goal: getting the right compound, for the right target, into patients.

Hoppin is candid about how he sees the operation. "We're a small, nerdy company just discovering and developing molecules with a goal of getting compounds for different targets into patients," he has said. It is a modest description for a company that has drawn in some of the largest names in pharma.

That line captures his core thesis. Radiopharmaceuticals sit at an awkward intersection of disciplines that historically did not talk to each other. Chemists, radiochemists, nuclear physicists, biologists, pharmacologists, and dosimetrists all have to agree for a single compound to work. Hoppin's answer is to put them in one room and make them respect each other. As he puts it, a program is "only as good as the weakest disciplinarian within your group." It reads like a science lesson and a management philosophy at once.

Before Ratio, Hoppin spent more than a decade building Invicro, a molecular imaging and translational drug discovery company he co-founded in 2008. Its mission was to improve the role of imaging in drug development across therapeutic areas. In 2017 he and fellow shareholders sold a majority of Invicro to Konica Minolta, and he went on to serve as president of Konica Minolta Precision Medicine.

He could have stopped there. Instead he started over, teaming up again with longtime collaborator John Babich, a radiochemist who serves as Ratio's president and chief scientific officer. The two split the work along their strengths: Babich on the science of the molecules, Hoppin on strategy, capital, and the machinery of turning research into a company.

His training runs deep on the quantitative side. Hoppin holds a BA in mathematics from the College of the Holy Cross and a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona, and he continued as an Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Research Center Juelich in Germany. Earlier in his career he was vice president of imaging systems at Bioscan.

Radiation therapy is not new. As Hoppin points out, "It's not a novel concept to put a radioisotope into patients" - iodine-131 was used to treat thyroid conditions as far back as 1951. What has changed is precision. He credits a slow evolution rather than a single breakthrough: "There wasn't a clear-cut smoking gun that changed the market, but more an evolution of medicinal chemistry and biomarker technology to image these agents faster and more quantitatively."

Big pharma has noticed. Ratio signed a radiopharmaceutical collaboration with Novartis worth up to $745 million in potential milestones, and closed a $50 million Series B in early 2024 with Bristol Myers Squibb among the investors, alongside Schusterman, Duquesne, PagsGroup, and Cornell's Center for Technology Licensing. Hoppin sees the interest as self-reinforcing: "When a buyer like Novartis steps in and starts building infrastructure, and oncologists are willing to prescribe and treat directly with these drugs, it builds momentum."

His outlook is patient by design. "Some of these things can't be instantly solved," he has said, "but looking out a decade, there are going to be multiple approvals and really exciting times." In 2025 the company announced plans for a new radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Utah, a sign it is building for that longer horizon rather than a quick exit.