alzheimers
(8)
Dirk Soenksen
Dirk Soenksen is the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that treats the family caregiver as the unit of care for people living with dementia. An engineer by training, he first reshaped a corner of medicine by founding Aperio, the company that turned the glass microscope slide into a digital image and became the global leader in digital pathology before Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it in 2012. A coffee on his last day at Leica sent him into a second act: instead of imaging the brain, he set out to support the overwhelmed spouses and adult children caring for it.
Andrew Dervan
Andrew Dervan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cajal Neuroscience (Cajal Therapeutics), a Seattle biotech that launched in 2022 with $96 million to rethink how drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases are discovered. A Harvard-trained physician with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Yale, he spent years leading cell therapy and immuno-oncology business development at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb. Unusually for a biotech CEO, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington, evaluating people with adult-onset neurological conditions.
Joe Betts-LaCroix
Joe Betts-LaCroix is the co-founder and CEO of Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco longevity biotech on a mission to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. A scientist-turned-serial-entrepreneur who once held a Guinness World Record for building the world's smallest Windows PC, he now leads a company backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, valued at $1.8 billion in 2026, that has run an Alzheimer's clinical trial and co-developed a longevity-focused AI model with OpenAI. He came to biology by an unlikely route: a D-average high schooler who tinkered in shared houses, then earned straight A's, transferred to Harvard, and did research at MIT and Caltech before co-discovering principles of electron transfer in proteins.
Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Asa Abeliovich
Asa Abeliovich is a physician-scientist turned serial biotech founder who spent two decades at the lab bench at Columbia before deciding the only way to get his ideas into patients was to start companies. He co-founded Alector, founded and sold Prevail Therapeutics to Eli Lilly for about $1 billion, and now runs Leal Therapeutics, a Worcester startup chasing a contrarian idea: that fixing the brain's broken metabolism can treat everything from schizophrenia to ALS to Alzheimer's. Leal spent over two years in stealth before surfacing with a clinical-stage pipeline and roughly $114 million raised.
Dee Datta
Dee Datta, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Switch Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company pioneering conditionally activated siRNA (CASi) molecules to treat neurodegenerative diseases and other conditions with significant unmet need. With a PhD from Caltech, an MBA from Stanford, and a career spanning venture capital at The Column Group and Longitude Capital, corporate development at Forty Seven Inc., and the C-suite at XOMA, Datta brings rare scientific depth and dealmaking fluency to one of the most ambitious RNA medicine platforms in the field. Switch raised a $52 million Series A in March 2023 and in late 2024 named its first development candidate - CASi-APOE, a brain-targeted, liver-sparing RNAi therapy aimed at the 60% of Alzheimer's patients who carry the APOE4 gene variant.
Vishwanath Lingappa
Vishwanath Lingappa is the CEO and CTO of Prosetta Biosciences, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company he founded in 2003 after 22 years as a faculty member at UCSF. An MD-PhD with a doctorate from The Rockefeller University under Nobel laureate Gunter Blobel, Lingappa developed a proprietary Cell-Free Protein Synthesis System (CFPSS) drug discovery platform that targets transient multi-protein complexes - a class of drug targets largely ignored by traditional pharma. His company is pursuing small-molecule therapeutics across neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's), oncology, and infectious diseases (COVID-19, HIV, influenza), and won an ARPA-H Dash competition for a pan-cancer drug candidate. With over 157 publications and 12,800+ citations, Lingappa bridges rigorous academia with commercial biotech ambition.
George Netscher
George Netscher is the Founder and CEO of SafelyYou, a San Francisco-based AI company that uses computer vision to prevent falls and elevate dementia care across senior living communities. Netscher launched the company in 2015 as doctoral research at UC Berkeley's AI Research Lab, driven by his family's direct experience with Alzheimer's disease - his grandmother and aunt both had the condition, and his mother cared for them while working as a physician. SafelyYou's ambient sensor platform now serves nearly 1,000 senior living communities, has raised over $134 million in total funding including a $43 million Series C in 2025, and has been shown to reduce falls by 40% and fall-related ER visits by up to 80%. In May 2025, Netscher was elected to the Argentum Board of Directors, the leading national senior living industry association.