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.
Philip Kantoff is a medical oncologist who spent three decades shaping how the world treats prostate cancer, then walked away from running medicine at one of the country's largest cancer hospitals to start a company. As co-founder and CEO of Convergent Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is developing CONV01-alpha, an alpha-emitting radioantibody that hunts down prostate tumor cells and irradiates them at close range. He has published more than 500 papers, been cited over 85,000 times, mentored a generation of oncology leaders, and at an age when most peers retire, raised $90 million in Series A funding to bring a new class of cancer therapy into the clinic.