Joanne Kotz

The chemist running a brain-deep bet

In June 2025, Joanne Kotz took the chief executive's chair at Atalanta Therapeutics, a Boston company with a single, audacious thesis: that you can switch off a disease-causing gene anywhere in the central nervous system and make the silence last.

Atalanta's tool is a molecule called divalent siRNA - di-siRNA for short. RNA interference has already produced approved drugs, but mostly for the liver, where delivery is comparatively easy. The brain and spinal cord have stayed stubbornly out of reach. Atalanta designed di-siRNA to spread broadly through neural tissue and keep working - durable, selective gene silencing across the very places medicine usually can't touch. Kotz arrived to carry that idea from laboratory promise toward patients.

She did not arrive as a caretaker. Her predecessor, Alicia Secor, stepped down in a planned transition, and Kotz joined the board the same day she took the title. Around her, the company reshuffled its bench: Douglas Pagán stepped up as chief financial and operating officer, and Bob D. Brown joined the scientific advisory board. The message was momentum, not maintenance.

"I'm thrilled to be joining Atalanta, which is pioneering the effort to bring RNAi therapies to patients living with devastating neurological diseases," she said on the day of her appointment. For a leader whose previous company chased a rare metabolic disorder, the move keeps her pointed at the diseases other people give up on.

Jnana: blank slate to billion

Before Atalanta there was Jnana. In January 2017 the company launched, and Kotz was there at the origin - a co-founder who helped formulate its initial scientific strategy and then ran its business and operations from day one. She became president that December and CEO in November 2018. The arc from founding scientist to chief executive happened inside the same building.

Jnana's science centered on solute carrier transporters, a vast and under-drugged family of proteins. The lead program, JNT-517, became a potential first-in-class oral treatment for phenylketonuria - PKU - an inherited metabolic disease that forces patients onto severe lifelong diets. The company pushed it into the clinic.

In August 2024, Otsuka Pharmaceutical agreed to acquire Jnana for roughly $800 million up front, with up to about $325 million more tied to development and regulatory milestones. The deal valued the company Kotz had helped will into existence at close to a billion dollars. It is the kind of outcome founders spend careers chasing and rarely catch.

A resume that loops back on itself

Most biotech CEOs come up through one lane. Kotz took several. She earned a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Florida - hard science and human systems in the same diploma drawer - then a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Her postdoctoral years split between Genentech in California and the Necker Children's Hospital in Paris.

Then she did something unusual for a bench scientist: she went to write about science instead of just doing it. At Nature Publishing Group she was a founding editor of Nature Chemical Biology, helping launch a journal at the seam between chemistry and biology and later serving as senior editor. She helped invent a publication before she helped invent a company.

From there came the Broad Institute, where she served as a director and built the partnerships that turn academic discovery into drug programs - including the Broad-Bayer oncology collaboration that produced multiple drug candidates. At the F-Prime Biomedical Research Initiative, F-Prime Capital's effort to crack neurodegenerative disease, she helped steer early-stage research toward therapies. Every stop taught a different muscle. The founder who launched Jnana already knew the science, the writing, the dealmaking, and the funding.

The culture, not just the compounds

When Jnana's board reflected on her leadership, the praise wasn't about a single molecule. Board member Dr. Amir Nashat noted she had "built a talented team and a collaborative, empowering culture." In an industry that often celebrates the hero scientist, Kotz's signature is the thing that outlasts any one experiment: the organization that can run the next one.

That instinct shows up in her board work too. She serves as a board member of the Chordoma Foundation, a patient-focused nonprofit attacking a rare bone cancer - more time spent on diseases that don't have crowded markets or easy answers.

It is a coherent through-line. Phenylketonuria. Chordoma. Now the intractable neurological diseases at Atalanta. The pattern isn't the disease area - it's the difficulty. Kotz keeps choosing the problems where the science is hardest and the patients have the fewest options.

Fluent in three languages of science

There is a reason her career reads like four careers stitched together. Drug discovery is a relay race run by people who often can't hear each other: the chemist who makes the molecule, the biologist who tests it, the investor who funds it, the writer who explains it. Kotz has stood at every one of those positions. She has run the experiment, edited the manuscript, structured the partnership, and pitched the round.

Consider the Nature Chemical Biology chapter on its own terms. A founding editor doesn't inherit a publication - she helps decide what it is for, what it will publish, and where a new field begins. Chemical biology in the early 2000s was exactly that kind of frontier, a discipline arguing for its own existence at the border of two older sciences. Spending those years deciding which work mattered is a strange and useful apprenticeship for someone who would later have to decide which programs a company should bet on.

Then the Broad Institute taught her the architecture of collaboration. Running the partnerships that connected academic discovery to industrial drug-making - the Broad-Bayer oncology alliance among them - is a job measured not in personal pipettes but in other people's progress. And the F-Prime Biomedical Research Initiative, funding early-stage neurodegeneration research, gave her the investor's vantage: how money finds science, and how science earns it.

By the time she co-founded Jnana, none of these were foreign tongues. She could speak to the medicinal chemist and the venture partner in the same afternoon and mean it in both rooms. That fluency is rare, and it is the unglamorous engine behind a billion-dollar outcome. A company is, after all, mostly translation - turning an idea into a team, a team into data, data into a deal.

Atalanta is the next translation. The science is elegant on a slide: a divalent molecule, gene silencing that travels and lasts. The work is turning that elegance into trials, regulators, manufacturing, and eventually a patient who never knew how close their disease came to staying untreatable. If her record means anything, Joanne Kotz took the job because that last step is the hard one. It usually is.