antibody-drug-conjugates
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Steven Everett
Steven Everett is a biotechnology executive and cancer scientist who founded MaveriX Oncology in Palo Alto, California, where he serves as President and CEO. With a background rooted in more than two decades of cancer research at the University of Oxford, University of Dundee and UCSF, he has built his career around a single idea: making cancer drugs that switch on only inside tumors. At MaveriX he is developing conditionally activated small-molecule therapeutics that exploit hydroxylase biology in the tumor immune microenvironment, aiming to hit cancer hard while sparing healthy tissue.
Jesse Chen
Jesse Chen is the founder, president and CEO of Fortitude Biomedicines, a Waltham, Massachusetts biopharmaceutical company that launched in January 2026 with $13 million in seed financing. A serial biotech entrepreneur with an MIT PhD in biological chemistry, Chen previously co-founded TRIANA Biomedicines and Avilar Therapeutics, was the founding scientific hire at Kymera Therapeutics where he built its targeted protein degradation platform, and held discovery roles at Moderna and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. At Fortitude he is betting that molecular glue payloads, packaged into a platform he calls GLUE-DAC, can overcome the drug resistance that limits today's antibody-drug conjugates and extend them into autoimmune disease.
Laura E. Benjamin
Laura E. Benjamin is the CEO and President of Myris Therapeutics, a Pittsburgh-based biotech building ultra-high DAR antibody-drug conjugates that fuse polymer chemistry with cancer biologics. A molecular biologist by training, she has moved from Harvard pathology labs to Eli Lilly oncology leadership to two CEO chairs - most recently steering OncXerna through more than $100 million in clinical-stage financing before taking the helm at Myris in 2024.
Marco Lobba
Marco Lobba is a chemist turned CEO who co-founded CatenaBio (Catena Biosciences), a UC Berkeley spinout building a new way to staple proteins together. Trained in the labs of Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and chemist Matthew Francis, he turned a graduate-school enzyme trick into the CysTyr platform, where an engineered enzyme called Catenase forges a durable tyrosine-cysteine bond - the C-Y Bond - to assemble multi-payload conjugates that single-molecule chemistry could not. He was named to the San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40 in 2025.
Weston Kightlinger
Weston Kightlinger is the CEO and co-founder of Ridge Bio (Ridge Biotechnologies), a Palo Alto biotech that left stealth in September 2025 with $25 million in seed funding to design precision enzymes and targeted therapeutics by pairing machine learning with massive cell-free laboratory datasets. A Northwestern-trained scientist with a background in cell-free protein synthesis and protein glycosylation, he turned a decade of bench work into a company whose advisory board reads like a who's-who of chemical biology, including Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi.
Aditya Venugopal
Aditya Venugopal is the Chief Business Officer of Alentis Therapeutics, a clinical-stage Swiss biotech chasing first-in-class therapies aimed at claudin-1 for fibrosis and cancer. An immunologist turned dealmaker, he spent 15-plus years moving between the lab bench and the negotiating table: a Ph.D. in immunology from Weill Cornell, seven years in strategic life-science consulting, then senior roles at Intercept, VectivBio and Versanis Bio. He has a habit of being in the room when companies get acquired - VectivBio went to Ironwood, Versanis went to Eli Lilly - and he reunited with CEO Mark Pruzanski at Alentis after first partnering with him at Intercept.
Samuel Murphy
Samuel Murphy is co-founder and CEO of Salubris Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Gaithersburg, Maryland developing complex biologics for cardiovascular, oncology, and neurodegenerative disease. A Penn-trained virologist who did his postdoc in the lab that became Spark Therapeutics, he spent a decade in pharma strategy consulting and life-sciences investment banking before joining Salubris in 2017 and taking the CEO seat in 2020. His lead program, JK07, is the first clinical-stage selective ErbB4 agonist aimed at being a disease-modifying biologic for heart failure. He also runs international business development for the company's Chinese parent, Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals.
Mohit Rawat
Mohit Rawat is the Boston-based CEO of Myricx Bio, a UK-US biotech building a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate platform based on NMT inhibition to treat cancer. He arrived in September 2025 fresh off Fusion Pharmaceuticals' $2.4 billion sale to AstraZeneca, where he was President and Chief Business Officer. With a Harvard MBA, an MIT chemical engineering master's, and stints at Novartis, AbbVie and McKinsey, he is steering Myricx toward its first human clinical trials in 2026.
Sean McCarthy
Sean McCarthy is the chairman, president and CEO of CytomX Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharma in South San Francisco building 'Probody' conditionally activated antibodies that switch on inside the tumor and stay quiet everywhere else. An Oxford-trained cancer biologist turned operator, he has run CytomX since 2011, taking it from a venture-backed startup to a Nasdaq-listed company with partnerships across Bristol Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Amgen, Astellas, Moderna and Regeneron.