biotech
(265)
Zlatko Jončev
Zlatko Jončev is the co-founder and CEO of b-12 (b12 Labs), a Y Combinator S25 startup building AI agents that plan and run chemical synthesis for pharma and biotech. A former national chemistry olympiad champion turned organic chemist, he earned a PhD in Basel, trained as a medicinal chemist at Roche, and did his postdoc in EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence, where he met co-founder Andres Bran. b-12 aims to shrink early-stage drug discovery from years to months by making molecules that are otherwise hard to make.
Tom Soloway
Tom Soloway is the Chief Executive Officer of T-knife Therapeutics, a transatlantic biotech developing T-cell receptor (TCR-T) therapies aimed at solid tumors. With more than 25 years across strategy, operations, corporate finance and venture capital, he has helped build and finance a string of life sciences companies including Transcept Pharmaceuticals, Ascendis Pharma and Audentes Therapeutics. He took the helm of T-knife in January 2021, positioning the Berlin- and San Francisco-based company to move its 'supercharged' TCR-T candidates into the clinic while staying lean and capital-efficient.
Cheng Zhang
Cheng Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Character Biosciences, a precision-medicine biotech that flips traditional drug discovery on its head by starting with patients instead of targets. Trained in mathematics and philosophy at Duke and shaped by years at UBS, Oliver Wyman, and Pfizer, Zhang built Character around a proprietary database of thousands of patients with age-related macular degeneration, combining genomics, longitudinal clinical data, retinal imaging, and machine learning to reclassify common diseases of aging into genetic subtypes. In 2025 the company raised an oversubscribed $93 million Series B to move its lead eye-disease candidates into the clinic.
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.
Ellen Reilly
Ellen Reilly is the Chief Executive Officer and a board member of Sware, a Boston-based software company building Res_Q, an AI-powered GxP validation platform for the life sciences industry. With roughly four decades in life sciences quality and IT, Reilly has worked at Roche, advised clients at PwC, and led the launch of DocuSign's Part 11 product before taking the helm at Sware in 2023. She frames her work as tackling 'validation debt' - the accumulated, unpaid cost of testing and compliance that slows how quickly pharmaceutical and biotech companies can adopt new software.
Filippo Petti
Filippo Petti is the Chief Executive Officer of Leucid Bio, a London-based clinical-stage biotech developing next-generation CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumours built on a proprietary lateral CAR platform spun out of two decades of King's College London research. Appointed CEO in July 2023, Petti pairs a bench-science start at OSI Pharmaceuticals with years on Wall Street as a healthcare investment banker and equity analyst, and a prior run leading Celyad Oncology as CEO and CFO. Under his watch, Leucid moved its lead asset LEU011 into the AERIAL Phase I/IIa trial, reporting early proof-of-concept in relapsed/refractory solid tumours in late 2025.
Iker Huerga
Iker Huerga is the CEO of Pathos AI, a New York- and Chicago-based biotech building what it calls the first true AI-enabled drug development platform for oncology. A data scientist by training with more than two decades at the intersection of machine learning and cancer research, he previously served as Chief Data Scientist for Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca and as an EVP at Tempus Labs, and founded three oncology companies with two successful exits. He took the helm at Pathos in May 2025, days before the company closed a $365 million Series D that valued it at roughly $1.6 billion, with a stated mission to get the right therapies to the right patients, sooner.
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.
Karen Chu
Karen Chu is the founder and CEO of HiRO (Harvest Integrated Research Organization), a boutique global contract research organization that bridges clinical trials between Asia, the US, and Europe. A PharmD who spent nearly two decades at Parexel running global clinical operations across 50-plus countries, she launched HiRO in 2020 to help Asian biotechs run trials abroad and Western firms run trials in Asia. Under her leadership the company has expanded through acquisitions including Courante Oncology in the US and PharmaSols in Australia and New Zealand, while positioning itself as global in reach but deliberately mid-sized in ambition.
Pierre-Antoine Mariage
Pierre-Antoine Mariage is the founder and CEO of Botalys, a Belgian agtech company that grows rare medicinal plants like Korean ginseng and Fjord Rhodiola indoors using a proprietary hydroponic technology, supplying ultra-pure botanical ingredients to the nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.
Matias Muchnick
Matias Muchnick is the Chilean co-founder and CEO of NotCo, a food-tech company that uses a proprietary AI system called Giuseppe to design plant-based versions of dairy and meat products. Founded in 2015, NotCo became Chile's first unicorn in 2021, formed a joint venture with Kraft Heinz, and counts Bezos Expeditions among its investors.
Mikael Svensson
Mikael Svensson is Chief Executive Officer of SaNOtize Research and Development Corp., the Vancouver-based company commercializing nitric oxide as an antimicrobial platform, most recently through its NOWONDER consumer nasal cleanser. A chemical engineer by training with more than two decades in medical device and pharmaceutical commercialization, he previously led the global launch of INOmax inhaled nitric oxide therapy and worldwide expansion work on Restylane, Naftin, Mederma and VagiVital.
Murat Tunaboylu
Murat Tunaboylu is the co-founder and CEO of Antiverse, a Cardiff- and Boston-based AI-native biologics company designing de novo antibodies for historically undruggable targets like GPCRs and ion channels. A software engineer who spent years automating gene synthesis at Thermo Fisher and building lab robots for cancer research before starting a company that uses generative models to design antibodies, he raised a $9.3M Series A in March 2026 and struck a research deal with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation the same week.
Nan Ji
Nan Ji is co-founder, president and CEO of PAQ Therapeutics, a Burlington, Massachusetts clinical-stage biotech pioneering autophagosome-tethering compounds (ATTECs) to degrade KRAS and other 'undruggable' disease drivers. A Harvard-trained organic chemist with 30+ patent applications, he spent seven years at Novartis, helped build Kymera Therapeutics from seed stage as VP of Chemistry, and launched PAQ in 2020 to hijack the body's natural cellular clean-up machinery for cancer and neurodegenerative disease.
Nikolina Lauc
Nikolina Lauc is co-founder and CEO of GlycanAge, a UK-based longevity diagnostics company built on two decades of glycobiology research from her father's laboratory in Zagreb. A serial entrepreneur since 18, she runs a business that translates a blood-based glycan test into a biological age readout, and she has become one of the more visible operators pushing preventive-health testing into the consumer market.
Paul Blanchfield
Paul Blanchfield is the CEO of Alpha-9 Oncology, a Boston-based clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company developing targeted alpha and beta therapies for cancer. He took the top job in November 2025 after running Lantheus as President, following earlier operator stints at Takeda and Shire and a five-year run at McKinsey.
Paul Eccles
Paul Eccles is a molecular biologist turned healthcare strategy consultant who leads Basis Health, the New York-based life sciences division of London-headquartered insight consultancy Basis Global. He joined Basis in September 2022 as Managing Partner after a career spanning Trinity Life Sciences, BluePrint Research Group, Cello Health, and Opinion Health, and has spent more than fifteen years advising pharma, biotech, and clinical incubators on commercialization, licensing, forecasting, and portfolio positioning.
Phil Vickers
Phil Vickers is President and CEO of Solu Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech building small-molecule 'chimeras' that ferry cytotoxic payloads to disease-driving cells. He arrived in September 2023 after runs at Faze Medicines and Northern Biologics, and R&D leadership at Shire, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Pfizer and Merck. In April 2025 he closed a $41M Series A with Eli Lilly, Pappas Capital and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of STX-0712 for CMML.
Phillip Maderia
Phillip Maderia is the Chief Executive Officer of PranaX, a Houston-based regenerative-medicine biotech developing stem cell-derived exosome products at the Levit Green campus in the Texas Medical Center. He joined in March 2025 after four years running Lonza's exosome manufacturing site in Lexington, Massachusetts - the facility Lonza bought from Codiak BioSciences in 2021, where Maderia had previously served as VP of Manufacturing Operations. He is a career biomanufacturing operator with roots at Sanofi Genzyme and LFB-USA and roughly three decades of scale-up experience.
Rich Small
Rich Small is the CEO of Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, the Cumberland, Rhode Island clinical-stage biotech that in March 2025 won FDA approval for ENCELTO, the first and only treatment for macular telangiectasia type 2 (MacTel). A CPA and Northeastern University graduate, he joined Neurotech as CFO in 2007 and took over the top job in 2016, guiding the company's encapsulated cell technology platform from experimental science to a commercial retinal implant.
J. Robert Coleman
J. Robert Coleman, PhD, MBA, is Chairman and CEO of HERVolution Therapeutics, a Copenhagen-based biotech developing immunotherapies that target human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) - the ancient viral DNA lodged in the dark genome that reawakens in cancer, aging, and neurodegeneration. A trained virologist, he co-founded Codagenix, where he built a synthetic-biology vaccine platform into a clinical-stage pipeline and raised nearly half a billion dollars before pivoting to HERVs in late 2023.
Sandy Mou
Sandy Mou, MD, is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Executive Director of CORXEL Pharmaceuticals, a New Jersey- and Shanghai-linked biotech developing an oral small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist for obesity and diabetes. A Fudan-trained clinician turned pharma executive with nearly three decades at GSK, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and MSD, she led MSD China's oncology unit into the country's top three within three years and later took Shanghai Allist public on the STAR Market before joining JIXING - now CORXEL - in early 2023.
Scott Requadt
Scott Requadt is the founding CEO of Prolium Bioscience, a New York-based biotech that emerged from stealth in March 2026 with a $50M Series A from RTW and a Phase 1/2-ready CD20xCD3 bispecific T-cell engager, PRO-203, in-licensed from KeyMed Biosciences and InnoCare Pharma for severe autoimmune disease. A lawyer-turned-investor-turned-operator, Requadt spent a decade at Clarus Ventures (later Blackstone Life Sciences) as Managing Director, ran Talaris Therapeutics as CEO from 2018 through its 2023 wind-down, and now sits on the board of ESSA Pharmaceuticals. He trained at McGill, Toronto Law, and Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar), started his career as an M&A attorney at Davis Polk, and has spent the intervening twenty years turning that unusual pedigree into biotech deals.
Server Ertem
Server Ertem is the founder and CEO of Sanavia Oncology, a New York biotech developing antibody drug conjugates, T-cell engagers, and CAR-T therapies aimed at the roughly 80% of cancer patients whose tumors escape today's treatments. He built the company after a PhD in cancer cell biology at Weill Cornell, a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and a Runway Startup Postdoc fellowship at Cornell Tech - stitching high-throughput cell biology, super-resolution microscopy, and machine learning into a platform designed to find cancer-specific epitopes on validated targets with atomic-level precision.
Sharon Cunningham
Sharon Cunningham is the CEO and co-founder of Shorla Oncology, a specialty pharmaceutical company she launched in 2018 with Orlaith Ryan out of Clonmel, Ireland, focused on reformulating oncology drugs for women's, orphan, and pediatric cancers. A PwC-trained chartered accountant with an MBA from UCD Smurfit, she relocated from Waterford to Boston in 2021 to lead Shorla's U.S. commercialization, which now includes four FDA-approved products. She was named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland 2024 (with Ryan) and represented Ireland at the EY World Entrepreneur competition in 2025.
Shengfang Jin
Shengfang Jin is a co-founder and the President and CEO of Ensem Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech developing small-molecule cancer drugs by targeting protein pockets that only exist while the protein is in motion. Under Jin, Ensem built its Kinetic Ensemble platform, took its first CDK2 inhibitor into the clinic, and its ETX-636 breast cancer program earned FDA Fast Track designation. She trained at Tufts and Harvard, spent years at Agios helping deliver first-in-class cancer metabolism drugs, and then ran discovery biology at Editas before starting Ensem.
Shlomi Madar
Shlomi Madar is the CEO of SpotitEarly, an Englewood, New Jersey biotech developing a non-invasive, breath-based multi-cancer screening test that pairs trained scent-detection dogs with a deep-learning platform. He holds a PhD in cancer research from the Weizmann Institute of Science and has spent more than fifteen years in life sciences and healthcare, previously serving as VP of Strategic Alliances at OncoHost and working on the Weizmann Institute's innovation arm. In May 2025 SpotitEarly closed a $20.3M Series A behind clinical results the company reports at roughly 94% sensitivity and specificity across four cancer types.
Stan Abel
Stan Abel is President and CEO of ProJenX, a clinical-stage biotech spun out of Columbia University research and Project ALS, racing to get its lead drug prosetin - an oral MAP4K inhibitor - into ALS patients after two decades of laboratory work and a $15 million Series A.
Stewart Campbell
A. Stewart Campbell, PhD, is the CEO of Vertero Therapeutics, the Woburn, Massachusetts biotech formerly known as Axial Therapeutics. A medicinal chemist by training with more than 30 years in drug discovery, he runs a company built on an unusual bet: that the road to treating Parkinson's disease starts in the gut, not the brain. Campbell joined in 2017, took the top job in February 2021, engineered the 2025 rebrand from Axial to Vertero, and is steering the lead candidate VT-5006, a gut-selective small molecule, into its first clinical trials. He is a co-inventor on more than 20 patent families, including the foundational patents behind the approved graft-versus-host disease drug Rezurock.
Syed T. Husain
Syed T. Husain is the Chairman and CEO of Made Scientific, a Princeton, New Jersey cell therapy contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) that he relaunched in 2025 out of the former BioCentriq. Backed by GC Corporation, the company runs a 60,000-square-foot GMP facility built to move autologous and allogeneic cell therapies from clinical batches to commercial supply. A chemical engineer by training who started on the manufacturing floor at Wyeth and Pfizer, Husain spent more than two decades in CDMO leadership at Lonza, Alcami, Emergent BioSolutions, and Resilience before taking the top job. He named the rebranded company MADE for Manufacturing and Development Excellence.