biotech-entrepreneur
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Mark C. McKenna and the trouble with a happy ending
After Merck bought Prometheus Biosciences for $10.8 billion, Mark C. McKenna had time for the beach and golf. Then he brought the team back together - and started building again.
Lan Huang
Lan Huang is a chemist turned biotech entrepreneur and the Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of SEED Therapeutics, a New York clinical-stage company designing molecular glues that direct the cell's own disposal machinery to break down disease-driving proteins once considered undruggable. She earlier founded BeyondSpring Pharmaceuticals and took it public on NASDAQ. A UC Berkeley PhD who solved an early E3 ubiquitin ligase structure, she built SEED around targeted protein degradation with collaborators including Nobel laureate Avram Hershko, and secured partnerships with Eli Lilly and Eisai.
Rajiv Mahadevan
Rajiv Mahadevan is the co-founder and CEO of Attune Neurosciences, a San Francisco neurotechnology company building what it calls the world's first wearable, non-invasive ultrasound system for deep brain therapy. A UC Berkeley molecular biologist turned Stanford MBA, he spent two decades inside biotech and precision-medicine companies - 23andMe, Novo Nordisk, and his own venture Applied Immunology, which was acquired by Precision Medicine Group - before turning his attention to the skull. Attune's headband-shaped device aims low-intensity focused ultrasound at deep brain structures with MRI-guided precision, and it is backed by venture investors, the NIH, and the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Greg Verdine
Gregory L. Verdine is a Harvard-trained chemical biologist who coined the phrase 'drugging the undruggable' and built an empire around it. The Erving Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, he co-invented stapled peptides, pioneered the field of chemical biology, and founded or co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies - several of which reached the Nasdaq and three of which produced FDA-approved drugs. In July 2023 he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Venture Partner on the Bio + Health team, bringing his rare combination of deep scientific discovery, serial entrepreneurship, and capital deployment to one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms.