cell-therapy
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Ivan Dimov and the 48-Hour Problem
He began by building hammers and hunting for nails. At Stanford, Ivan Dimov reversed the method - then spent nearly a decade turning a delicate cell-sorting idea into an industrial system.
Andreas Bader Has Spent 25 Years Turning Biology Into Biotech
From microRNA to engineered T cells to mitochondrial targets, the Austrian biochemist keeps returning to the same hard problem: how to carry a promising mechanism across the unruly distance between a lab result and a real company.
Stan Wang Bet on an Organ Most People Forget. Then Came the $140 Million Deal.
A physician-scientist spent years turning the overlooked thymus into an engineering problem. His path from Akron to Cambridge, the NIH and Harvard ended in a deal - but the longer experiment is only beginning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Caralynn Nowinski Collens
Caralynn Nowinski Collens is a physician-turned-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Dimension Bio (formerly Dimension Inx), a Chicago biotechnology company building regenerative therapeutics that give the body a blueprint to heal itself. Its BioNidum platform fuses materials science, 3D-printing, and digital manufacturing to turn cells into implantable, tissue-like therapies. Before biotech, she spent eight years co-founding and running UI LABS, the innovation collaborative that launched MxD, the U.S. national hub for digital manufacturing. She trained as an M.D./MBA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been recognized on Crain's Forty Under Forty, Tech 50, and Notable Women in STEM lists.
Jack Milwid
Jack Milwid is a scientist-turned-company-builder who sits in the Office of the CEO at Lila Sciences, the Flagship Pioneering venture chasing 'scientific superintelligence' through autonomous AI-run laboratories. A materials engineer with a Harvard-MIT PhD, he has spent his career founding biotech companies from scratch - among them Sana Biotechnology, Neon Therapeutics, Cobalt Biomedicine and Kaleido Biosciences - and co-founded the investment firm Related Sciences. His trademark is turning early science into operating companies.
Michael Chiu
Michael Chiu is the CEO of Kytopen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech spun out of an MIT lab that builds the Flowfect platform - a non-viral, continuous-flow way to shuttle DNA, mRNA and CRISPR payloads into living cells at manufacturing scale. A mechanical engineer with a PhD and MBA from MIT, Chiu has spent his career turning laboratory hardware into shipped products, founding and selling companies in energy harvesting, healthcare, and bioprocessing before taking Kytopen's helm in August 2023 to push cell therapy manufacturing out of the bottleneck.
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.
Armon Sharei
Armon Sharei is the founder and CEO of Portal Biotechnologies, a cell-engineering platform company in Watertown, Massachusetts that builds devices to push genetic and molecular cargo into living cells without killing them. He earned a chemical engineering PhD at MIT, where he invented the membrane-squeezing CellSqueeze technique, then founded SQZ Biotechnologies, raised more than $300M, struck a billion-dollar Roche partnership, and took the company public on the NYSE in 2020 before being ousted and watching it liquidate in 2024. After a sabbatical spent drawing comics about immune cells, he returned with Portal, choosing this time to sell tools rather than develop drugs, and has built a network of 100+ customers including most of the top 10 global pharma companies plus an $8M DARPA contract.
Ryan Swoboda
Ryan Swoboda is the co-founder and CEO of NAVAN Technologies, a San Carlos, California biotech commercializing NanoStraw, a non-viral platform that pokes microscopic hollow tubes into living cells to deliver DNA, mRNA, and proteins without killing them. He spun the technology out of Stanford's Melosh Group in 2017 while finishing his graduate research, holds inventor status on early NanoStraw patents, and ran the company's NSF STTR Phase II grant before becoming CEO in 2019. A first-generation college graduate, he splits his energy between scaling a deep-tech delivery platform for cell and gene therapy and running science demos for low-income kids.
Alla Zamarayeva
Alla Zamarayeva is the co-founder and CEO of CellFE, a Bay Area biotech building a non-viral, microfluidics-based platform for engineering human cells. A UC Berkeley engineering PhD and former Goldwater Scholar, she spun a piece of academic research she stumbled onto during her doctorate into a company aiming to make cell therapies cheaper, gentler, and eventually available at the point of care. In 2023 she led CellFE to a $22 million Series A backed by M Ventures, and she is steering the company toward redefining how gene-edited cell therapies are manufactured.
Andrew Schiermeier
Andrew Schiermeier is the President and CEO of AvenCell Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dresden, Germany building switchable, universal CAR-T cell therapies for hard-to-treat cancers like acute myeloid leukemia. An engineer-turned-operator with a Harvard PhD in applied mathematics, he spent two decades across startups and global pharma - five years at CRISPR pioneer Intellia Therapeutics rising to COO, and a stint running Merck KGaA's oncology business across 60-plus countries - before taking AvenCell's helm in 2021 and leading its $112 million Series B in 2024.
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.
Han Lee
Han Lee, Ph.D., is co-CEO of Vibrant Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech building logic-gated, conditionally activated antibody prodrugs designed to switch on only inside diseased tissue. A Yale-trained geneticist with an MBA who can read a sequencing run and a term sheet with equal fluency, Lee spent 15 years as the finance and dealmaking engine behind cell-therapy companies - Arcellx, Neogene, and ImmPACT Bio - steering more than 75 transactions worth billions, including two startup exits to AstraZeneca and Lyell Immunopharma. In January 2026 he joined founder Larry Wang to scale Vibrant globally and push its lead masked T-cell engager, VIB305, into the clinic.
Jason Cole
Jason F. Cole is the founding CEO and board member of Zag Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that launched in October 2025 with $80 million to develop thymus-targeted medicines for autoimmune diseases, starting with Type 1 diabetes. A lawyer by training with a J.D. from Columbia and an A.B. in Government from Dartmouth, Cole has spent more than two decades in biotech operations and finance. At bluebird bio he helped grow the company from roughly 100 to 1,200 employees, raised over $3.7 billion in equity financings, and helped deliver multiple first-in-class gene and cell therapies to patients. He most recently led SalioGen Therapeutics as CEO and Board Chair, and serves as Vice Chair of the MassBio board.
John Lu
Shi-Jiang (John) Lu is a stem cell scientist and the founder, President and CEO of HebeCell Corp, a Natick, Massachusetts biotech building off-the-shelf cancer-killing immune cells from pluripotent stem cells. He spent two decades in regenerative medicine, was a top-ranked inventor in the global stem cell patent landscape, and led research at Advanced Cell Technology before that company was absorbed by Astellas. At HebeCell he pioneered a 3D, feeder-free bioreactor process for growing iPSC-derived natural killer (NK) and CAR-NK cells at industrial scale - aiming to make potent immune therapies as standardized and reproducible as a manufactured product.
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.
Koji Tanabe
Koji Tanabe is the founder and CEO of I Peace, Inc., a Palo Alto and Kyoto biotech building an automated platform to mass-manufacture clinical-grade induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). He earned his PhD in the Kyoto University lab of Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka and was a co-author of the landmark paper that first reported the creation of human iPS cells. After postdoctoral work at Stanford, he founded I Peace in 2015 with the goal of giving every person access to their own stem cells for therapy and longevity.
Kumar Srinivasan
Kumar Srinivasan is the President and CEO of Wugen, a St. Louis clinical-stage biotech building off-the-shelf memory NK and CAR-T cell therapies for cancer. A chemist turned dealmaker, he spent 25+ years in pharma and biotech business development, most notably engineering the partnering strategy at Turning Point Therapeutics that culminated in its $4.1 billion acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb. Since taking Wugen's helm in March 2023, he has steered its lead programs WU-CART-007 and WU-NK-101 into pivotal and early clinical trials.
Marc Lajoie
Marc Lajoie is a protein designer turned biotech CEO. He co-founded Outpace Bio in 2021 in Seattle, where he is chief executive, building engineered cell therapies that aim to bring the kind of cures seen in blood cancers to the solid tumors that make up the vast majority of cancer cases. Trained in George Church's genome-engineering lab at Harvard and David Baker's Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, Lajoie helped pioneer the design of proteins with moving parts - molecules that compute, switch, and make decisions inside living cells. Outpace raised a $144M oversubscribed Series B in 2024 to push its AI-powered, protein-designed therapies toward the clinic.
Ngoc Thai
Ngoc L. Thai, MD, PhD is a transplant surgeon turned biotech founder who built one of the world's largest pancreas programs before chasing a hunch from a cup of his uncle's tea. As founder, co-CEO and CMO of Pittsburgh-based Imagine Pharma, he is developing IMG-1, a polypeptide first isolated from a Vietnamese tea plant, into therapies that coax insulin-producing islet cells to multiply and regenerate. The company raised a $32.5M Series A in October 2023 to advance IMG-1 across oral delivery, therapeutics, and regenerative medicine platforms aimed at type 1 diabetes, wound healing, and other underserved conditions.
Ron Cohen
Ron Cohen, M.D., is a biotech entrepreneur with a 30-year record of building companies that ship medicines for the nervous system. He founded Acorda Therapeutics in 1995 from his apartment and grew it into a public company that brought multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's therapies to market. After Acorda's sale to Merz in 2024, he evaluated roughly two dozen startups before taking the CEO seat at Oryon Cell Therapies in March 2026, a Belmont, Massachusetts company developing autologous neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's. He is a past Chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO).
Vincent Ling
Vincent Ling is the Chief Business Officer of Morphocell Technologies, a Laval-based regenerative medicine company building iPSC-derived engineered tissues to treat severe organ dysfunction, starting with liver disease. A biotech and pharma veteran of three decades, he spent 12 years at Takeda's Center for External Innovation, where he identified and backed the Kariko-Weissman mRNA platform out of the University of Pennsylvania - the science that became the first COVID mRNA vaccines and earned the 2023 Nobel Prize. He has held leadership roles at Genetics Institute, Adnexus Therapeutics, and Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, and advises the Gates Foundation and academic institutions.
Yuanyuan Xu
Yuanyuan Xu is a structural biologist turned biotech founder who left the protein-crystallography bench at Tsinghua and Yale to build Cure Genetics (克睿基因), a Suzhou clinical-stage company chasing cell and gene therapies for solid tumors and genetic disease. She founded it in 2016, raised a $60M Series B in 2021, and bets on two homegrown platforms: an invariant-natural-killer-T cell therapy (AIMS CAR-NKT) and a directed-evolution engine for new AAV capsids (VELP).
Alec Nielsen
Alec Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Asimov, a Boston synthetic biology company building computer-aided design tools for living cells. His MIT PhD work in the Voigt Lab produced Cello, a programming language that compiles plain-text logic instructions into thousands of DNA letters. Asimov turned that academic breakthrough into a commercial platform for designing and manufacturing biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DARPA, and a $175M Series B led by CPP Investments.