She helped launch a blockbuster drug. Now she is helping launch a new kind of organ - grown in pigs, edited dozens of times over, transplanted into living people.
Most people sell software, or sneakers, or a faster way to book a flight. Jennifer Bergheiser sells the idea that a pig farm can be a transplant supply chain. As Chief Business Officer of eGenesis, she leads corporate strategy and every part of portfolio and commercial development for a company whose product is, quite literally, biology rewritten - porcine organs edited dozens of times to be compatible with the human body and stripped of dormant retroviruses.
The stakes are not abstract. People die on the transplant waitlist because supply runs out before their number comes up. eGenesis exists to make supply stop being the reason. In 2024, that mission stopped being a slide deck: the company's gene-edited pig kidney was transplanted into a living patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, and by December the FDA had cleared a path toward a multi-patient trial. Bergheiser is the person translating that scientific shock into something a market, a regulator, and a balance sheet can hold.
What makes her the right translator is that she has stood on every side of the table. She has been the investor deciding whether a biotech deserves money. She has been the operator inside a pharma giant, shepherding a drug toward millions of patients. She has been the consultant brought in to tell founders the hard truth about whether their plan survives contact with reality. eGenesis got all three in one hire.
Role: Chief Business Officer, eGenesis
Based: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Beat: Strategy · portfolio · commercial development
Schools: Wharton (MBA) · Penn (Economics & History)
A clinical-stage biotech using multiplex gene editing and genome engineering to attack organ failure - betting that cross-species transplantation can end waitlist mortality.
Remove supply as the barrier, and the waitlist stops being a death sentence.— The eGenesis thesis Bergheiser carries into every room
Her resume is not a straight line. It is a loop that keeps returning to the same question: which ideas in biotech are real, and what would it take to get them to a patient? Here is how the loop ran.
At Domain Associates she decided which biotechs were worth a check. That trains a specific muscle: reading a company's story for the gap between the pitch and the truth.
Inside J&J, she helped carry Stelara through launch and lifecycle - the unglamorous, decisive work of getting a biologic to the people who need it.
At Genactis and hatch health she was hired to plan products and pressure-test strategy for other people's companies. Now she does it for one she believes in.
For years, xenotransplantation - moving organs across species - lived in the land of "promising." Then eGenesis's gene-edited pig kidney was transplanted into a living patient at Massachusetts General Hospital. The lab science became a human story with a name attached.
By the autumn, the company had raised a Series D, bringing its total funding to roughly $481 million. By December, the FDA had cleared a path to extend the approach into a multi-patient trial. The order matters: surgery, then capital, then regulation - each milestone making the next one credible.
This is the terrain a Chief Business Officer lives on. Not the gene edits themselves, but the architecture around them: how the platform is positioned, how the pipeline is sequenced, how a porcine organ becomes a product a health system can actually adopt.
Bergheiser joined a company at exactly the hinge point where biology becomes business. The science had proven it could work in a human. The job now is proving it can work at scale - and that is a strategy problem as much as a scientific one.