Mathai Mammen is the Chairman, CEO and President of Parabilis Medicines (formerly FogPharma), a Cambridge biotech going after cancer targets long written off as undruggable. A trained physician-chemist who co-founded Theravance out of grad school and later ran R&D at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, he has had a hand in the discovery or development of roughly 19 approved medicines. At Parabilis he is betting on Helicon peptides - engineered molecules that slip inside cells to hit protein-protein interfaces small molecules and antibodies cannot reach.
Gregory L. Verdine is a Harvard-trained chemical biologist who coined the phrase 'drugging the undruggable' and built an empire around it. The Erving Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, he co-invented stapled peptides, pioneered the field of chemical biology, and founded or co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies - several of which reached the Nasdaq and three of which produced FDA-approved drugs. In July 2023 he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Venture Partner on the Bio + Health team, bringing his rare combination of deep scientific discovery, serial entrepreneurship, and capital deployment to one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms.