Ilise Lombardo is the CEO of Noema Pharma, a Basel-based clinical-stage biotech advancing treatments for central nervous system disorders. A Yale-trained psychiatrist with a Cambridge M.Phil and a Brown degree, she spent two decades in clinical practice and academia before co-founding Arvelle Therapeutics, which sold to Angelini Pharma for roughly $1 billion in 2021. She now steers Noema's pipeline of Phase 2 programs targeting Tourette syndrome, trigeminal neuralgia, tuberous sclerosis seizures and menopause-related CNS symptoms.
Tom Large is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals, a Waltham, Massachusetts startup hunting for the next generation of medicines for brain disorders. A neurobiologist by training, he spent two decades inside big pharma - leading neuroscience research at Eli Lilly and running preclinical research and translational medicine at Sunovion - before launching Blue Oak in 2016 to chase drugs with genuinely new mechanisms for bipolar depression, schizophrenia and treatment-resistant depression. His teams pioneered a target-agnostic approach to CNS drug discovery, and he later partnered with AI specialist Exscientia to design 'bispecific' small molecules that hit two targets at once.
Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals is a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2016 to discover the next generation of drugs for brain disorders. Led by neurobiologist and former Eli Lilly and Sunovion executive Tom Large, the company designs novel, CNS-focused 'privileged chemotypes' and pairs them with systems-neurobiology behavioral assays and AI to hunt first-in-class small molecules for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and treatment-resistant depression. Its work runs through partnerships with phenotypic-screening firm PsychoGenics and AI drug-design company Exscientia.
Leal Therapeutics is a Worcester, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2021 by repeat CNS entrepreneur Asa Abeliovich, the scientist behind Prevail Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly). Leal builds first-in-class neuro-metabolic medicines on a single idea: many brain diseases share a broken metabolism, and correcting those imbalances can treat conditions from schizophrenia to ALS. Backed by roughly $114M in total funding, its pipeline includes LTX-001, a brain-penetrant oral glutaminase inhibitor in the clinic, and LTX-002, an antisense oligonucleotide for ALS.