Stan Abel

Stan Abel runs a biotech company with nine employees and one job: get an oral pill called prosetin into the hands of people with ALS before the disease gets to them first. He didn't invent the molecule. He didn't found the company. He was hired in April 2022 to finish what a nonprofit and a Columbia University lab had already started building.

The company is ProJenX, headquartered in New York, and its origin story is unusual for biotech: it was created in collaboration between Medical Excellence Capital, the ALS research nonprofit Project ALS, and researchers at Columbia University who spent years figuring out why motor neurons die. Abel's title is President and CEO. His job description, in practice, is the same one he's had for two decades — raise the money, hit the milestones, get the drug through the FDA.

Prosetin is an oral, brain-penetrant inhibitor of MAP4K — a kinase that Columbia University researchers identified as a key driver of endoplasmic reticulum stress in motor neurons. ER stress shows up across both sporadic and familial forms of ALS. Block the kinase, the theory goes, and you slow the process that kills the neurons controlling movement and breathing.

ProJenX exists because of a partnership that predates Abel's arrival: Medical Excellence Capital, which seeded the company and later led its Series A; Project ALS, the nonprofit that funded patient-derived research when few others would; and Hynek Wichterle, the Columbia University professor whose lab pioneered methods for growing spinal cord neurons from stem cells to study motor neuron disease. Erin Fleming, ProJenX's co-founder and chief operating officer, came from Project ALS directly, where she ran research operations. Abel was brought in as the executive to carry that science into clinical trials and, eventually, to patients.