autoimmune-disease
(13)
Adam Townsend
He spent two decades launching other people's medicines. Now he is running a biotech built to delete the antibodies that make patients sick - and taking the top job for the first time.
Daniel Getts
Daniel Getts, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of CREATE Medicines (formerly Myeloid Therapeutics), a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building RNA-based in vivo immune programming therapies that reprogram T cells, NK cells and myeloid cells directly inside the body. An immunologist trained at the University of Sydney with an MBA from Western Michigan, he previously founded Cour Pharmaceuticals and served as VP of Research at TCR2 Therapeutics. He has more than 45 peer-reviewed publications, multiple issued patents, and a track record of large pharma partnerships, including Takeda's $420M licensing deal for TIMP-GLIA. In May 2026 CREATE closed a $122 million Series B to advance its in vivo CAR pipeline across autoimmune disease and oncology.
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.
Adam Freund
Adam Freund is the founder and CEO of Arda Therapeutics, a San Carlos biotech built on a simple, contrarian bet: many chronic diseases are caused by specific cells gone wrong, so the cure is to find and delete those cells while leaving healthy tissue intact. A molecular biologist with a Berkeley PhD and a Stanford postdoc, he spent seven years at Google-backed Calico Life Sciences, where he helped grow the company from roughly 15 to 200-plus people and started its most advanced anti-aging therapeutic program. In late 2021 he left to start Arda as a solo founder with a deck and a thesis, and by October 2024 had raised a $43M Series A led by a16z Bio + Health. His tools are single-cell sequencing to map disease cell-by-cell and antibodies to do the deleting.
Andy Walker
Andy Walker is a chemical engineer turned biotech operator who co-founded GentiBio, a Cambridge-based company engineering regulatory T cells (EngTregs) to functionally cure autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. He started as the company's CTO, moved through President and COO, and became President and CEO in 2024. Before GentiBio he ran manufacturing for cell and protein therapeutics at Juno Therapeutics and led Jewel Biotherapeutics. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley and a BS from the University of Washington.
Dan Baker
Dan Baker is a physician-scientist turned biotech founder who spent two decades at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen division helping bring immunology blockbusters Remicade, Simponi and Stelara to patients, before launching Brisbane-based Kira Biotech in 2019 as its founding CEO. Kira is developing KB312, a first-in-class antibody designed to selectively retrain the immune system rather than broadly suppress it, aimed at autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and type 1 diabetes. A rheumatologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years, Baker also advises drug-development organisations and serves as a healthcare venture partner.
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.
Kim Seth
Kim Seth, Ph.D., is the founding President & CEO of Nilo Therapeutics, a New York biotech that launched in October 2025 with a $101 million Series A to build medicines that talk to the immune system through the brain. A Harvard-trained neurobiologist turned dealmaker, he spent 25-plus years moving between Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, and Repare Therapeutics - where he helped take a precision-oncology startup from pre-Series A to IPO - before betting his own career on the strange idea that the vagus nerve might be the most underused drug target in autoimmune disease.
Lisa Olson
Lisa M. Olson, Ph.D., is a biopharmaceutical research leader who became CEO of Milan-based clinical-stage biotech Enthera Pharmaceuticals in January 2024, after years on its board and as chair of its Scientific Advisory Board. Across two decades in immunology drug discovery - 15 years at AbbVie/Abbott where she helped advance 15 molecules into the clinic including Rinvoq, plus roles at Pfizer and as Chief Scientific Officer of Magenta Therapeutics - she has built a career turning biology into medicine. At Enthera she is steering the clinical development of Ent001, a first-in-class antibody targeting the IGFBP3/TMEM219 pathway for inflammatory bowel disease and type 1 diabetes.
Mohan Purushothaman
Mohan Purushothaman is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Progentec Diagnostics, an Oklahoma City company building blood tests and digital tools that aim to predict autoimmune disease flares before they happen. He came to diagnostics by an unusual route: a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. focused on pharmaceutical pricing, a Harvard research fellowship, five years inside Roche, and a pricing-software practice he built and sold to Alliance Life Sciences. In 2014 he turned that commercial instinct toward lupus, partnering with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and in 2020 raised a $5M Series A led by Plains Venture Partners to bring the aiSLE DX flare-prediction platform and the LupusCorner patient community to market.
Ganesh Kaundinya
Ganesh Kaundinya is President and CEO of GlycoEra, a Swiss-US biotech building extracellular protein degraders to treat autoimmune disease. An MIT-trained chemical engineer, he co-founded Momenta Pharmaceuticals and helped grow it from a sugar-sequencing concept into a public company with FDA-approved products, later acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $6.5 billion. At GlycoEra he raised an oversubscribed $130 million Series B in 2025 to push a precision IgG4 degrader toward the clinic.
Dinesh V. Patel
Dinesh V. Patel, Ph.D. is the President and CEO of Protagonist Therapeutics (NASDAQ: PTGX), a Newark, California-based biopharmaceutical company he has led since December 2008. With over 38 years spanning medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, venture capital co-founding, and three CEO stints, Patel has guided Protagonist from a peptide-platform startup to a company with its first FDA-approved drug - ICOTYDE (icotrokinra), approved March 2026 as the world's first targeted oral peptide for moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, partnered with Johnson & Johnson.
Sofia Touami
Sofia Touami, Ph.D., is the Chief Business Officer of Lycia Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotech pioneering lysosomal targeting chimeras (LYTACs) - a platform invented by Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi to degrade disease-causing extracellular proteins. A trained organic chemist who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford and did postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute, Touami has built a career as one of biotech's sharpest dealmakers, having orchestrated major transactions including Frontier Medicines' landmark global collaboration with AbbVie before joining Lycia in July 2023. She helped close Lycia's oversubscribed $106.6 million Series C in May 2024, positioning the company to bring its LYTAC-based autoimmune therapies into clinical trials.