bms
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Joel Barrish
Joel Barrish is the President and CEO of Avilar Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company pioneering extracellular protein degradation. A medicinal chemist by training with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Barrish spent 28 years at Bristol Myers Squibb rising to VP and Global Head of Discovery Chemistry, co-inventing blockbuster drugs including SPRYCEL (dasatinib) for leukemia. After stints as CSO at Achillion Pharmaceuticals and co-founder/President at Jnana Therapeutics, he founded Avilar in 2019 to build the ATAC and MTAC platforms - bifunctional molecules that hijack the body's own cellular recycling machinery to degrade disease-causing proteins outside the cell, a class of targets previously undruggable. Avilar has raised $75 million in total seed financing.
Anthony Stratakos
Anthony 'Tony' Stratakos is the co-founder and CEO of Element Energy, a West Menlo Park, California-based company pioneering adaptive battery management systems (BMS) that extend battery lifetimes by up to 50% and enable second-life repurposing of retired EV batteries for grid storage. A PhD electrical engineer from UC Berkeley, he previously co-founded Volterra Semiconductor in 1996 - a fabless power management IC company that went public in 2004 and was acquired by Maxim Integrated, where he rose to CTO before starting Element Energy in 2019. With $181.9M in total funding raised and a commissioned 53 MWh second-life battery storage project in Texas, Stratakos is building the infrastructure to make battery recycling obsolete.