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Alex Lugovskoy and the education of a company builder
Before co-founding Diagonal Therapeutics, Alex Lugovskoy spent two decades learning how scientific organizations work. His career runs through physics, protein engineering, and the less glamorous business of helping people do difficult things together.
Cody Tranbarger and the View from the Goal
Before he founded companies, Cody Tranbarger kept goal for Amherst. His route through finance and Harvard to Mithril Medicine puts an old question in a new setting: how do you build a team that holds together?
Adam Friedman
He took the name from the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation. Now Adam Friedman is betting a Boston biotech, and up to $1.9 billion in deals, on drugging the targets everyone else called impossible.
Eddine Saiah
Eddine Saiah, Ph.D., is the CEO and President of Stablix, a preclinical biotechnology company pioneering targeted protein stabilization (TPS) as a new class of small-molecule medicines. A medicinal chemist and drug hunter with more than 25 years of experience, he joined Stablix as Chief Scientific Officer in 2022 and moved into the chief executive role in 2025. His career spans big pharma research leadership at Pfizer and Wyeth, an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Atlas Venture, and CSO duties at Navitor Pharmaceuticals. He is a co-inventor and author on more than 120 patents and publications, and has helped advance more than a dozen small-molecule candidates into clinical trials.
Gerhard Koenig
Gerhard Koenig is the Chief Executive Officer of Augustine Therapeutics, a Belgian-Boston biotechnology company developing highly selective, brain-penetrant HDAC6 inhibitors for neuromuscular, neurodegenerative and cardiometabolic diseases. A neurobiologist by training with more than 30 years in drug development, he has led and co-founded multiple biotechs, including Arkuda Therapeutics, whose portfolio was acquired by Johnson & Johnson, and Quartet Medicine. He stepped up from Executive Chairman to CEO of Augustine in January 2025 as the company moved to enter the clinic, then helped close a large Series A to fund a proof-of-concept trial in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.
Joanne Smith-Farrell
Joanne Smith-Farrell is the President and CEO of Be Biopharma, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building a new class of medicines from engineered B cells - the body's own protein factories. A physicist by training who moved into drug development, she has spent more than 25 years leading teams tackling cancer and rare diseases, most notably building bluebird bio's 400-person oncology cell therapy business behind the CAR-T therapy Abecma. Since taking the helm at Be Bio in early 2021, she has steered the company through more than $350 million in funding as it works to turn B cells into durable, in vivo sources of therapeutic proteins.
Alexey Lugovskoy
Alexey 'Alex' Lugovskoy is the co-founder and CEO of Diagonal Therapeutics, a Watertown/Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building 'clustering' antibodies that switch cellular signaling back on rather than block it. A Harvard-trained biophysicist who left physics after deciding green leaves were more interesting than tau neutrinos, he spent two decades in antibody R&D at Biogen, Merrimack, Morphic, and Dragonfly before launching Diagonal in 2022. He has co-invented an FDA-approved cancer drug, authored more than 100 patents and papers, and edits the antibody journal mAbs. In January 2026 Diagonal closed an oversubscribed $125M Series B co-led by Sanofi Ventures and Janus Henderson to push its lead program, DIAG723, into human trials for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia.
Bernard Ravina
Bernard Ravina is a Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist who spent two decades treating people with dystonia before deciding the field needed a drug that did not yet exist. In 2025 he founded Vima Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is its CEO, advancing VIM0423, a once-daily oral therapy aimed at the dopamine-acetylcholine imbalance behind movement disorders. The company emerged from stealth with a $60 million Series A, later extended to $100 million, and dosed its first Phase 2 dystonia patient in March 2026.
Jonathan Montagu
Jonathan Montagu is the co-founder and CEO of HotSpot Therapeutics, a Boston biotech he started in 2017 to chase what the industry long called undruggable. His bet: target the 'natural hotspots' that evolution built into proteins to switch them on and off, and you can make small-molecule medicines with precision the old playbook couldn't reach. A chemist trained at Oxford, Scripps and Cancer Research UK with a Stanford MBA, he previously did the dealmaking that put Nimbus Therapeutics and Concert Pharmaceuticals on the map, including a $1B GSK transaction. Under him HotSpot has raised roughly $210M and pushed its Smart Allostery platform into the clinic, presenting first-in-human Phase 1 data on its CBL-B inhibitor HST-1011 at ESMO 2024.
Vishal Patel
Vishal Patel is the co-founder and CEO of Triveni Bio, a Watertown, Massachusetts biotech betting that genetics, not trial-and-error, should decide which antibodies reach patients with immune and inflammatory diseases. He stitched the company together from a two-startup merger, raised more than $200 million across Series A and B rounds, and pointed its lead programs at the skin enzymes behind atopic dermatitis. A Harvard PhD and MIT MBA who once helped draft healthcare legislation on Capitol Hill and still serves as a US Navy reservist, Patel runs a lab while keeping a foot in venture as an Atlas advisor.