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Sekar Kathiresan Bet His Career on a One-Time Idea
A history major became a cardiologist, a geneticist, and then a first-time founder. His wager was simple to say and difficult to build: turn lessons from naturally protective genes into medicines designed to work once.
Lina Polimeni Wants Health to Have a Life Outside the Doctor’s Office
After 23 years at Eli Lilly, the Italian-born marketer is turning a pharmaceutical company into a participant in culture - and treating attention as a responsibility, not a trophy.
Tom Large
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.
Josh Bilenker
Josh Bilenker is the CEO and co-founder of Treeline Biosciences, a Watertown, Massachusetts biotech building precision oncology medicines. A physician by training who once reviewed cancer drugs at the FDA, he founded Loxo Oncology in 2013 and took a tumor-agnostic, genomics-first approach he likened to 'moneyball' target selection. Loxo produced three FDA-approved medicines and was bought by Eli Lilly for roughly $8 billion in 2019. In 2021 he started Treeline with former Novartis research head Jeff Engelman, and in 2026 the company agreed to merge with Standard BioTools to go public as 'Treeline Biosciences' (Nasdaq: TRLN).
Kunwoo Lee
Kunwoo Lee is the CEO and Co-founder of BreezeBio (formerly GenEdit), a Brisbane, California-based biotech company pioneering non-viral gene delivery through its proprietary NanoGalaxy platform. A Siebel Scholar and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who earned his PhD from UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Program in Bioengineering, Lee co-founded GenEdit in 2016 alongside Professor Niren Murthy and fellow researcher Hyo Min Park, building out a polymer nanoparticle library of thousands of chemically distinct compounds capable of delivering diverse genetic payloads to specific tissues. The company has raised over $118 million including a $60M Series B in February 2026, struck a landmark $644M collaboration deal with Genentech, and rebranded to BreezeBio to signal its pivot from platform company to clinical-stage therapeutics developer advancing BRZ-101 for Type 1 Diabetes.