chemical-biology
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Alex Federation
Alex Federation is the co-founder and CEO of Talus Bio, a Seattle biotech building drugs for transcription factors, the gene-control proteins long written off as 'undruggable.' A Harvard-trained chemical biologist who studied under Jay Bradner, he invented the MARMOT platform to measure and modulate the regulome inside living cells, pairing functional proteomics with AI models trained on tens of millions of compound-target interactions. He teamed with proteomics scientist Lindsay Pino in 2020, went through Y Combinator, and has raised roughly $24.7M to chase first-in-class medicines for targets like Brachyury, AR-V7, and STAT3.
Dennis X. Hu
Dennis X. Hu is the founder and CEO of Drug Hunter, a subscription knowledge platform that distills the science behind new medicines for more than 200 R&D institutions, including most of the world's top pharma and biotech companies. A medicinal chemist by training, he led small-molecule teams at Genentech and the biotech RAPT Therapeutics (where he helped invent the Phase II oncology candidate tivumecirnon) before turning a side project into a fully remote company of 20+ employees that reaches millions of searches a year and runs entirely on subscription revenue.
Cheri Ackerman Araromi
Cheri Ackerman Araromi is the cofounder and CEO of Concerto Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that reads the social lives of microbes the way a producer reads a band. Using kChip, a droplet screening platform she helped build during her postdoc at the Broad Institute, Concerto tests how thousands of microbial combinations interact and assembles the winning ensembles into products for skin health, agriculture, and beyond. A Hertz Fellow with a Berkeley PhD in chemical biology, she frames the future of medicine as building healthy ecosystems rather than killing bad cells with toxins.
Michael Foley
Michael Foley is a medicinal chemist turned serial biotech founder who is now CEO and co-founder of Excelsior Sciences, a New York company building 'chemistry that machines can do.' His proprietary 'smart blocc' building blocks let robots and AI run iterative carbon-carbon bond formation in a closed loop, aiming to collapse the wall between drug discovery and manufacturing. Foley has founded multiple biotechs, ran the Broad Institute's Chemical Biology Platform, and was founding CEO of the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute. Excelsior launched with $95 million in 2025.
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.