fibrosis
(4)
Kevin Walton
Kevin Walton is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Baseimmune, a London-based biotech using AI and computational protein design to build next-generation vaccines and active immunotherapies. He joined in 2024 after a career in biotech corporate development and dealmaking at Moderna, StrideBio, Curis and G1 Therapeutics, and is steering the company beyond infectious-disease vaccines into chronic diseases, starting with a lead fibrosis program in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Adam Freund
Adam Freund is the founder and CEO of Arda Therapeutics, a San Carlos biotech built on a simple, contrarian bet: many chronic diseases are caused by specific cells gone wrong, so the cure is to find and delete those cells while leaving healthy tissue intact. A molecular biologist with a Berkeley PhD and a Stanford postdoc, he spent seven years at Google-backed Calico Life Sciences, where he helped grow the company from roughly 15 to 200-plus people and started its most advanced anti-aging therapeutic program. In late 2021 he left to start Arda as a solo founder with a deck and a thesis, and by October 2024 had raised a $43M Series A led by a16z Bio + Health. His tools are single-cell sequencing to map disease cell-by-cell and antibodies to do the deleting.
Aditya Venugopal
Aditya Venugopal is the Chief Business Officer of Alentis Therapeutics, a clinical-stage Swiss biotech chasing first-in-class therapies aimed at claudin-1 for fibrosis and cancer. An immunologist turned dealmaker, he spent 15-plus years moving between the lab bench and the negotiating table: a Ph.D. in immunology from Weill Cornell, seven years in strategic life-science consulting, then senior roles at Intercept, VectivBio and Versanis Bio. He has a habit of being in the room when companies get acquired - VectivBio went to Ironwood, Versanis went to Eli Lilly - and he reunited with CEO Mark Pruzanski at Alentis after first partnering with him at Intercept.
Mark Gaffney
Mark Gaffney is the Chief Executive Officer and Board member of Calluna Pharma, an Oslo-based clinical-stage biopharma chasing inflammatory and fibrotic disease by tuning the body's innate immune system. A mechanical engineer turned lawyer turned dealmaker, he spent two decades building and selling biotechs - Oxular went to Regeneron, Vedere Bio to Novartis - before taking the helm of a company born from the merger of Oxitope Pharma and Arxx Therapeutics and freshly backed by a 75 million euro Series A.