drug-discovery
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Sotirios Karathanasis Learned a New Language. Then He Went Looking for Nature’s.
A Greek chemistry student arrived in America with little English and a dictionary. His journey through Harvard and three pharmaceutical giants now meets its most curious problem: teaching machines to read the chemistry that living things have spent eons writing.
Joe Rokicki Builds Where Science Refuses to Stay in Its Lane
An electrical engineer wandered into biology and never accepted its departmental borders. At Enveda, Joe Rokicki turned that restlessness into a method for building the tools that let nature's chemistry speak.
Paul Davie Has Spent Four Decades Selling the Future of Chemistry
He began when molecular modeling was a specialist trade, took one revealing detour into database security, and returned to help make digital chemistry a global business.
Pek Lum Keeps Asking Biology Better Questions
Before AI became biotech's favorite phrase, Pek Lum was teaching computers to notice what biology hides in plain sight. At Auransa, that long apprenticeship has become a patient-first method for finding the signal inside human complexity.
David van Dijk Taught AI to Read Cells. Now He Wants It to Predict What Biology Does Next
A Yale computer scientist turned gene lists into sentences, then carried the idea from an academic lab into a startup. The bet behind CellType is plain enough to say and difficult enough to occupy a career: biology can become a language machines learn to predict.
Viswa Colluru Is Building a Search Engine for Nature’s Unread Chemistry
The founder of Enveda turned an old question - what has nature already invented? - into a new kind of drug-discovery company, built across Boulder and Hyderabad and designed to keep learning around the clock.
Keith Murphy Keeps Asking Biology to Speak for Itself
After helping build the first commercial chapter of 3D bioprinting, the chemical engineer returned to the stubborn question underneath it all: can a small piece of human tissue make a better decision than a celebrated animal model?
Pilgrim Jackson Is Teaching Cancer Drugs to Find Their People
After 13 years inside Celgene, the biochemist left to chase a stubborn question: what if a drug fails because its trial never found the patients whose proteins say yes?
Yongqi Deng Spent 20 Years Finding Molecules. Then He Built a Company Around the Search.
After two decades inside Schering-Plough and Merck, the medicinal chemist returned to China to turn a mass-spectrometry screening idea into Keythera - and a six-program drug pipeline.
Nobu Ueki Is Looking for Cancer's Off Switch
The Chicago scientist built a career around a stubborn question: can a drug wait until a cancer cell gives it permission to act? His answer spans two molecular locks, one active US patent, and a startup betting on the peculiar weakness of cells in transit.
Andreas Goutopoulos Raised $75.5M for a Company That Was, on Paper, Just Him
He led chemistry at a big pharma for a decade, then walked out to build a radiopharma startup with no executive team and a single conviction: make the molecules stick.
Jieyi Wang’s Long Bet on Antibodies That Need a Second Signal
After 22 years inside Abbott and AbbVie, the antibody scientist started Lyvgen around a precise design problem: how to make immune activation depend on where - and with what - an antibody binds.
Michael Farmer Built the Companies Around the Science
Across defense systems, diagnostics startups and a San Francisco drug-discovery company, Michael Farmer made a career of turning technical possibility into an operating business.
Li-Fen Lee Is Building a Biotech Around What the Immune System Misses
After two decades inside immunology labs and drug-discovery groups, Li-Fen Lee founded Apeximmune to search for the immune system’s overlooked brakes - then turn those discoveries into antibody medicines.
Kareem Barghouti Is Mapping Nature’s Hidden Chemistry
After learning to scale systems at Google, the Pragma Bio co-founder turned toward a harder map: the mostly unread chemistry made by living systems. His next chapter at Enveda puts that long-running idea inside a larger machine for translating nature into new molecules.
Adam Friedman
He took the name from the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation. Now Adam Friedman is betting a Boston biotech, and up to $1.9 billion in deals, on drugging the targets everyone else called impossible.
Zlatko Jončev
Zlatko Jončev is the co-founder and CEO of b-12 (b12 Labs), a Y Combinator S25 startup building AI agents that plan and run chemical synthesis for pharma and biotech. A former national chemistry olympiad champion turned organic chemist, he earned a PhD in Basel, trained as a medicinal chemist at Roche, and did his postdoc in EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence, where he met co-founder Andres Bran. b-12 aims to shrink early-stage drug discovery from years to months by making molecules that are otherwise hard to make.
Sofie Qiao
Sofie Qiao, Ph.D. is a chemist-turned-biotech-founder who has built a career at the intersection of hard science and dealmaking. Trained in organic chemistry at Harvard and MIT, she founded LEAD Therapeutics (acquired by BioMarin in 2010, source of the PARP inhibitor Talazoparib now sold by Pfizer), ran WuXi Ventures, and then founded and led Vivace Therapeutics from 2015 to 2026, raising more than $100 million to advance first-in-class small molecules targeting the Hippo/YAP-TEAD pathway in cancer. She now leads Virtuoso Therapeutics, another company she founded.
Steven Everett
Steven Everett is a biotechnology executive and cancer scientist who founded MaveriX Oncology in Palo Alto, California, where he serves as President and CEO. With a background rooted in more than two decades of cancer research at the University of Oxford, University of Dundee and UCSF, he has built his career around a single idea: making cancer drugs that switch on only inside tumors. At MaveriX he is developing conditionally activated small-molecule therapeutics that exploit hydroxylase biology in the tumor immune microenvironment, aiming to hit cancer hard while sparing healthy tissue.
Tina Boville
Tina Boville is the co-founder and CEO of Aralez Bio, a Berkeley-based biotechnology company using directed evolution to make noncanonical amino acids - the building blocks behind a growing share of modern medicines. A biochemist trained at the University of Colorado and Caltech, where she worked in Nobel laureate Frances Arnold's lab, Boville turned an engineered enzyme platform into a company that can produce over 100 amino acids in single-step reactions, cutting manufacturing waste by up to 99%. She has been named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, is an Activate Fellow, and in 2024 raised a $12 million Series A to scale production to tons per year.
Bryan Stuart
Bryan Stuart is the Chief Executive Officer and a director of Atavistik Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company building precision allosteric small molecule therapeutics on its Atavistik Metabolite-Protein Screening (AMPS) platform. He joined in July 2023 after more than two decades leading biopharma companies, including roles as CEO of Fulcrum Therapeutics, Yarra Therapeutics, and Kastle Therapeutics. Under his leadership Atavistik has raised a $120 million Series B in December 2025, later extended to $160 million, to advance its lead programs for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia and myeloproliferative neoplasms toward the clinic.
Cheng Zhang
Cheng Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Character Biosciences, a precision-medicine biotech that flips traditional drug discovery on its head by starting with patients instead of targets. Trained in mathematics and philosophy at Duke and shaped by years at UBS, Oliver Wyman, and Pfizer, Zhang built Character around a proprietary database of thousands of patients with age-related macular degeneration, combining genomics, longitudinal clinical data, retinal imaging, and machine learning to reclassify common diseases of aging into genetic subtypes. In 2025 the company raised an oversubscribed $93 million Series B to move its lead eye-disease candidates into the clinic.
Dominique Verhelle
Dominique Verhelle is a French-born scientist and biotech entrepreneur who co-founded and leads NextRNA Therapeutics, a Boston company building small-molecule drugs that target long non-coding RNA to treat cancers and neurological disorders. With a PhD in life sciences and an MBA in entrepreneurship, she has spent more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and startups - including Celgene, Pfizer, Third Rock Ventures, and Takeda - and helped launch Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics before starting NextRNA. She is also an outspoken advocate for women founders in biotech.
Eddine Saiah
Eddine Saiah, Ph.D., is the CEO and President of Stablix, a preclinical biotechnology company pioneering targeted protein stabilization (TPS) as a new class of small-molecule medicines. A medicinal chemist and drug hunter with more than 25 years of experience, he joined Stablix as Chief Scientific Officer in 2022 and moved into the chief executive role in 2025. His career spans big pharma research leadership at Pfizer and Wyeth, an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Atlas Venture, and CSO duties at Navitor Pharmaceuticals. He is a co-inventor and author on more than 120 patents and publications, and has helped advance more than a dozen small-molecule candidates into clinical trials.
Joanna Stanicka
Joanna Stanicka is the co-founder, president and CEO of Axonis Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech developing first-in-class oral medicines that target the brain chloride transporter KCC2 to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain and spinal cord injury. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who began her career in cancer biology in Ireland, she moved from the bench to the boardroom, taking Axonis from a Boston Children's Hospital discovery to a company that raised a $115 million Series A in 2024 and pushed its lead drug, AXN-027, into first-in-human trials.
Lan Huang
Lan Huang is a chemist turned biotech entrepreneur and the Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of SEED Therapeutics, a New York clinical-stage company designing molecular glues that direct the cell's own disposal machinery to break down disease-driving proteins once considered undruggable. She earlier founded BeyondSpring Pharmaceuticals and took it public on NASDAQ. A UC Berkeley PhD who solved an early E3 ubiquitin ligase structure, she built SEED around targeted protein degradation with collaborators including Nobel laureate Avram Hershko, and secured partnerships with Eli Lilly and Eisai.
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.
Nan Ji
Nan Ji is co-founder, president and CEO of PAQ Therapeutics, a Burlington, Massachusetts clinical-stage biotech pioneering autophagosome-tethering compounds (ATTECs) to degrade KRAS and other 'undruggable' disease drivers. A Harvard-trained organic chemist with 30+ patent applications, he spent seven years at Novartis, helped build Kymera Therapeutics from seed stage as VP of Chemistry, and launched PAQ in 2020 to hijack the body's natural cellular clean-up machinery for cancer and neurodegenerative disease.
Sean X. Hu
Sean X. Hu is the President and CEO of Rapafusyn Pharmaceuticals, a Baltimore-based biotech spun out of Johns Hopkins that is building a library of natural-product-like macrocycles it calls RapaGlues. He is a genomics PhD turned Wharton MBA turned management consultant turned operator, with prior stops at Bristol Myers Squibb, CuraGen, Illumina, AT Kearney, IMS, Bionest, BioStrat, GlobalData, and Avotres. In September 2025 he closed an oversubscribed $44M Series A led by BioTrack Capital and Yonjin Capital to push RapaGlues into difficult-to-drug targets.
Shengfang Jin
Shengfang Jin is a co-founder and the President and CEO of Ensem Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech developing small-molecule cancer drugs by targeting protein pockets that only exist while the protein is in motion. Under Jin, Ensem built its Kinetic Ensemble platform, took its first CDK2 inhibitor into the clinic, and its ETX-636 breast cancer program earned FDA Fast Track designation. She trained at Tufts and Harvard, spent years at Agios helping deliver first-in-class cancer metabolism drugs, and then ran discovery biology at Editas before starting Ensem.