cancer-immunotherapy
(23)
Sabah Oney
Sabah Oney is the president and CEO of Dispatch Bio, a Philadelphia- and San Francisco-based biotech engineering a universal treatment for solid tumors using CAR-T cell therapy. Born in Cyprus and in the U.S. since age 18, he holds a genetics degree from the University of Kansas, a PhD in genetics and genomics from Duke, and an MBA from Stanford. Across nearly two decades in biotech he helped scale Ariosa Diagnostics (acquired by Roche), took Alector public as its chief business officer, co-founded Vilya, and served as a venture partner at ARCH. Dispatch launched publicly in 2025 with $216 million behind its FLARE platform and CAR-T pioneer Carl June among its founders.
Lina Yao
Lina Yao is a pharmaceutical scientist and the founder of Teon Therapeutics, a Redwood City, California biotech developing first-in-class, orally administered small-molecule cancer drugs that target G-protein coupled receptors to reverse tumor-driven immune suppression. A molecular pharmacologist by training with an MD and PhD and more than two decades in drug discovery, she built her career at CV Therapeutics and Gilead Sciences before launching Teon in 2018. She led the company through an oversubscribed $30 million Series A in 2021 and into the clinic with two novel programs: TT-702, an adenosine A2B receptor antagonist, and TT-816, a cannabinoid CB2 receptor antagonist being studied in combination with Merck's KEYTRUDA.
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.
Briggs Morrison
Briggs Morrison is a medical oncologist turned biopharma leader who runs Crossbow Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building TCR-mimetic antibody drugs that aim T-cells at cancer targets once thought unreachable. Before Crossbow he ran late-stage R&D at the scale of an industry giant, serving as Chief Medical Officer and EVP of Global Medicines Development at AstraZeneca, and holding senior development roles at Pfizer and Merck across three decades. His fingerprints are on blockbuster cancer medicines including TAGRISSO and LYNPARZA. Today he splits his identity between operator and investor: CEO of Crossbow, Entrepreneur Partner at MPM BioImpact, and a fixture on biotech boards including chair of Arvinas.
Jacob Becraft
Jacob 'Jake' Becraft is the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, a Boston biotech building the first programmable platform for mRNA medicines. Trained as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he helped invent what he calls a 'programming language for mRNA' - genetic circuits that let a drug make decisions inside the body, switching on only where and when it should. Strand's lead candidate, a self-replicating mRNA that instructs tumors to produce their own IL-12, delivered early complete responses in a first-in-human trial. Becraft has raised more than $400 million to chase the idea that programming biology will be as transformative for medicine as software was for computing.
Li Sun
Li Sun is the founder and CEO of Shennon Biotechnologies, a San Francisco single-cell immunotherapy company that profiles millions of immune cells in hours to pinpoint the rare T cells and antibody targets that fight cancer. A physicist by training (PhD from Harvard's Weitz lab, M.Eng from MIT), she spent five years as a deep-tech venture investor at Bessemer and Foundation Capital before building the platform herself. Shennon emerged from stealth in March 2023 with a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
Luis Voloch
Luis Voloch is the co-founder and CEO of Jimini Health, a New York mental health startup that pairs licensed therapists with a clinically supervised AI assistant called Sage. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist who won the school's best-thesis prize, he previously co-founded and served as CTO of Immunai, the AI cancer-immunotherapy company that grew into a billion-dollar unicorn. He has taught entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is building toward what he calls a 'Genentech-like company in mental health, powered by AI.'
Adam Margolin
Adam Margolin is a computational biologist turned biotech founder who co-founded Flashpoint Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company engineering spherical-nucleic-acid nanomedicines that aim to turn weak cancer therapies into curative ones. After a 20-year academic career that took him from Wharton and Wall Street to running the #3-ranked genetics department in the country at Mount Sinai, and a stint as a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures, he teamed with Northwestern nanotech pioneer Chad Mirkin to build Flashpoint. He led the company as founding CEO through a $10M seed round before handing the chief executive role to biotech veteran Barry Labinger in 2025. His mission is deeply personal: his mother died of cancer when he was three.
Scott Peterson
Scott Peterson is the Chief Business Officer of T-Cypher Bio, an Oxford-based biotech building next-generation TCR therapeutics for solid tumors and autoimmune disease. A Harvard-trained PhD who started his career at the lab bench as a medicinal chemist at Merck, he crossed over to the deal side and spent two decades shaping pipelines and partnerships at Intarcia, Spero, and Dewpoint Therapeutics before taking the commercial helm at T-Cypher. He is the rare dealmaker who can read both a term sheet and a reaction mechanism.
Ken Drazan
Ken Drazan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio), a South San Francisco clinical-stage company building computationally designed, programmable T-cell therapies to attack solid tumors. A board-certified liver transplant surgeon turned operator and investor, he previously was President and Chief Business Officer of GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), founded the robotic surgery company Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), and co-founded the private equity firm Bertram Capital. At ArsenalBio he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and forged collaborations with Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech, betting that gene-edited 'integrated circuit' T cells - and an AI foundation model of the T cell - can turn cell therapy into something curative for cancers that have resisted it.
Michael Goldberg
Michael Goldberg is the founder and CEO of SURGE Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech pioneering intraoperative immunotherapy. His idea is deceptively simple: when a surgeon removes a solid tumor, don't leave the cavity empty - fill it with an injectable, biodegradable hydrogel that releases immune-activating medicine right where cancer is most likely to return. A trained chemist who earned a PhD at MIT under Robert Langer and did postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, Goldberg became a Harvard Medical School professor before leaving academia to translate his lab's discovery into the clinic. SURGE has raised roughly $58M, cleared an FDA IND, and completed Phase 1 dosing of its lead program ahead of a registrational trial in triple-negative breast cancer.
Robert Ross
Robert Ross is a medical oncologist turned biotech executive and the founding CEO of Clasp Therapeutics, a Baltimore-based clinical-stage immuno-oncology company building bispecific T cell engagers that target mutated cancer driver peptides presented by HLA with what the company calls absolute specificity. Launched in March 2024 with a $150 million Series A from Third Rock Ventures, Novo Holdings and Catalio Capital, Clasp is commercializing science from Johns Hopkins legends Bert Vogelstein and Drew Pardoll. Ross previously ran Surface Oncology through its acquisition by Coherus, led oncology at bluebird bio, and trained as a physician at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and UCSF.
Shafique Virani
Shafique Virani is a neurosurgeon-turned-biotech dealmaker who serves as Chief Business Officer of Noetik, an AI-native cancer therapeutics company in South San Francisco. He has spent two decades turning early-stage science into landmark partnerships, including one of the largest drug discovery deals ever struck at Recursion, and earlier built a neuroscience and rare-disease portfolio at Roche/Genentech that produced approved medicines like Risdiplam and Enspryng. At Noetik he is selling a new idea to pharma: not AI services, but licensable AI infrastructure for biology.
Tom Smart
Tom Smart is a biotech executive with a 25-year run of taking cancer companies from the lab bench to Wall Street and back again. He currently leads Actym Therapeutics, a cancer-immunotherapy company building bacteria-delivered gene therapies, after a career that ran through AnaptysBio, XOMA, Cell Genesys and Genetics Institute. He helped shepherd the PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor that became GSK's Jemperli, founded and sold an antifungal company, and is named in industry records as a CEO and board member at oncolytic-virus company Seneca Therapeutics. His specialty is the unglamorous middle: financings, partnerships, IPOs and acquisitions that decide whether a promising molecule ever reaches a patient.
Yang Liu
Yang Liu is a cancer immunologist turned serial biotech founder who chairs and runs OncoC4, the Rockville, Maryland company developing next-generation immune checkpoint antibodies. After decades as an endowed professor at NYU, Ohio State, Michigan, and beyond, he co-founded OncoImmune (acquired by Merck for $425M) and then OncoC4, whose lead anti-CTLA-4 antibody gotistobart is in late-stage development with BioNTech. He left full-time academia to take his own discoveries from the bench into patients.
Zhen Su
Zhen Su is the CEO of Marengo Therapeutics, a Cambridge biotech reprogramming T cells to wake up the immune system against cancer. A physician-scientist with nearly three decades in oncology, he ran a billion-dollar global cancer franchise at Merck KGaA, helped deliver eight regulatory approvals as CMO of EMD Serono, and now steers Marengo's STAR platform into the clinic on the back of a $2.8B Ipsen partnership.
Howard Davis
Howard Davis, Ph.D., is the CEO of Akamis Bio, a clinical-stage oncology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts building tumor gene therapies on its proprietary T-SIGn platform. A chemical engineer turned biomedical engineer, he spent two decades moving between Boston Consulting Group, Novartis, Biogen, Flagship Pioneering and Atlas Venture before taking the top job at the company once known as PsiOxus. His current mission: prove that an adenoviral therapy delivered through a vein - not a needle into the tumor - can reach metastatic cancer the body has hidden, and turn those tumors against themselves.
Kim Jaffe
Kim Jaffe, PhD, is Chief Business Officer at BlueSphere Bio, a Pittsburgh-based clinical-stage biotech building personalized T-cell receptor therapies for cancer using its TCXpress discovery platform. A bench scientist turned dealmaker, she trained in cell and molecular biology at Northwestern and Princeton, ran cell-line development and R&D at clinical-stage oncology companies, and now leads strategy, partnerships, and business development as the company pushes TCR T-cell candidates toward high-risk leukemias.
Rachel Humphrey
Rachel W. Humphrey, MD, is the founding CEO of Normunity, a Boston and New Haven biotech building a new class of cancer drugs called immune normalizers, drugs designed to free the immune system to attack tumors it normally ignores. Before Normunity she helped bring three blockbuster cancer therapies to patients: Yervoy at Bristol Myers Squibb, Imfinzi at AstraZeneca, and Nexavar at Bayer. She partnered with Yale immunology pioneer Lieping Chen to translate his discoveries at the cancer-immune interface into medicines, raising $65M to launch in 2022 and a $75M Series B in January 2025 to push lead program NRM-823 into the clinic.
Moriah Nachbaur
Moriah Katherine Nachbaur is the Chief Business Officer at Pheast Therapeutics, a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company in Redwood City, California, pioneering macrophage checkpoint inhibitors to teach the immune system to destroy cancer cells. Drawing on two decades of cross-functional biopharma experience - from lab benches at Genentech to executive boardrooms at Coherus BioSciences and her own consulting firm MKN Biotech - she brings a rare blend of scientific literacy, operational depth, and strategic vision to one of oncology's most promising new frontiers: the innate immune system's untapped power against solid tumors.
Roy Maute
Roy Maute is co-founder and CEO of Pheast Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Redwood City, CA, developing macrophage-targeted cancer immunotherapies. Trained at UC Berkeley, Columbia (PhD, Genetics), and Stanford (postdoc under Irving Weissman), Maute has built a career at the intersection of innate immunology and drug development. Before Pheast, he co-founded Ab Initio Biotherapeutics (acquired by Ligand in 2019) and led translational research at Forty Seven Inc. ahead of its $4.9B acquisition by Gilead in 2020. At Pheast, he is advancing PHST001, a novel anti-CD24 antibody that teaches macrophages to eat cancer cells, currently in Phase 1 clinical trials with FDA Fast Track Designation for ovarian cancer.
Scott Clarke
Scott Clarke is the CEO of CatalYm GmbH, a Munich-based biotech company developing visugromab, a monoclonal antibody targeting GDF-15 to reverse cancer immunotherapy resistance. With over 20 years in biopharmaceuticals - spanning Roche's global oncology partnering, BioMarin, Tizona Therapeutics, and Ambagon Therapeutics - Clarke joined CatalYm in January 2025 to lead the company's $319M-funded push through Phase 2b clinical trials, building on visugromab's striking Phase 1/2a results published in Nature showing durable responses lasting 28-32+ months in multiple solid tumor types.
Kevin Parker
Kevin Parker, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based oncology company using single-cell genomics and AI to map the tumor antigen landscape and build precision immunotherapies. A Harvard and Stanford alumnus who founded the company straight out of his PhD, Parker has raised $124M in total funding, struck a landmark collaboration with Gilead Sciences, received FDA IND approval for his lead drug CBI-1214, and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 colorectal cancer trial in early 2026 - all before most scientists finish a second postdoc.