ai-drug-design
(5)
Serge Messerlian
Serge Messerlian is the Chairman and CEO of Creyon Bio, a San Diego biotech using AI to design oligonucleotide medicines. A life-science operator with more than 25 years across oncology, hematology, immunology and rare disease, he has led Teon Therapeutics as CEO, run Janssen Oncology as President at Johnson & Johnson, and held senior roles at Actelion, Baxalta and Baxter International. He joined Creyon first as an investor and board member through DCVC Bio, then stepped in as Executive Chairman and Acting CEO in fall 2024 and took the full CEO title in April 2025 as the company prepares to enter the clinic in 2026.
Nassim Usman
Nassim Usman is an organic chemist turned biotech operator who runs Totus Medicines, an Emeryville, California company using a DNA-encoded covalent library platform (OmniDEL) paired with machine learning to build small-molecule drugs against targets long considered undruggable. He took the CEO chair in December 2023 alongside a $66 million Series B, and its lead drug, TOS-358, is the first covalent PI3K-alpha inhibitor in the clinic. Over three decades he has moved from bench chemistry on RNA and ribozymes to the top jobs at Sirna Therapeutics, Catalyst Biosciences, and Principia Biopharma, plus a stint as a venture investor at Morgenthaler Ventures.
Timothy Craven
Timothy Craven is the co-founder and CEO of Insamo, a Berkeley-based biotech using machine learning, ultra high-throughput biology, and parallel chemistry to design membrane-permeable, orally available macrocyclic peptides with antibody-like binding. A computational chemist trained in the Nobel-winning lab of David Baker, Craven started Insamo from a grad-school concept with $20,000 of his own money and grew it into a Berkeley-Sydney team backed by a $12M seed from Playground Global, venBio, and Merck's MRL Ventures Fund. His pitch is blunt: turn $30,000 injectable biologics into pills.
Huafeng Xu
Huafeng Xu is the founder and CEO of Fathom Therapeutics (formerly AtomMap), a New York drug-design company that simulates protein motion at atomic resolution to design small molecules that work inside living cells. A computational chemist with 25+ years and 10,000+ citations, Xu spent 12 years at D. E. Shaw Research building the free-energy and molecular-dynamics methods now standard across pharma, then served as CTO of Silicon Therapeutics and Roivant Discovery before launching his own company. In April 2026 Fathom closed an oversubscribed $47M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures to scale its Microcosmos engine.
Mathai Mammen
Mathai Mammen is the Chairman, CEO and President of Parabilis Medicines (formerly FogPharma), a Cambridge biotech going after cancer targets long written off as undruggable. A trained physician-chemist who co-founded Theravance out of grad school and later ran R&D at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, he has had a hand in the discovery or development of roughly 19 approved medicines. At Parabilis he is betting on Helicon peptides - engineered molecules that slip inside cells to hit protein-protein interfaces small molecules and antibodies cannot reach.