gene-editing
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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.
Reza Rezaei Built a Career at the Handoff Between Science and Sales
A veterinarian and animal scientist learned to translate laboratory detail into commercial trust. After a decade climbing Cyagen's ranks, Reza Rezaei now leads the company from the junction of research, customers and scale.
Christian Cobaugh
Christian Cobaugh is a molecular biologist turned biotech operator who has spent more than 15 years at the frontier of genetic medicines. In January 2026 he became CEO of Alloy Genetic Medicines, the nucleic-acid division of Alloy Therapeutics, where he leads work on the AntiClastic cyclic nucleic acid platform for ASOs, siRNA, and other RNA therapeutics. He is best known for founding Vernal Biosciences, an mRNA contract manufacturer he built in Colchester, Vermont, on the premise that everyone who needs mRNA should be able to get it. Before Vernal he was the first scientist in the Alexion-Moderna mRNA partnership and held discovery, development, and manufacturing roles at Arcturus Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics, Translate Bio, and Omega Therapeutics.
Örn Almarsson
Örn Almarsson is the co-founder and CEO of Axelyf, an Icelandic-American biotech building next-generation lipid nanoparticles to deliver RNA medicines beyond the liver. Before Axelyf he ran the delivery sciences team at Moderna from 2013 to 2020, helping engineer the components behind the Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, after earlier stints at Merck and Alkermes. A bioorganic chemist by training, he is the co-author of more than 70 publications and over 60 patents, and is now pairing a proprietary lipid library with a machine-learning model called ANNA to crack the hardest problem in RNA medicine: delivery.
Alla Zamarayeva
Alla Zamarayeva is the co-founder and CEO of CellFE, a Bay Area biotech building a non-viral, microfluidics-based platform for engineering human cells. A UC Berkeley engineering PhD and former Goldwater Scholar, she spun a piece of academic research she stumbled onto during her doctorate into a company aiming to make cell therapies cheaper, gentler, and eventually available at the point of care. In 2023 she led CellFE to a $22 million Series A backed by M Ventures, and she is steering the company toward redefining how gene-edited cell therapies are manufactured.
Jennifer Bergheiser
Jennifer Bergheiser is the Chief Business Officer of eGenesis, the Cambridge biotech turning gene-edited pig organs into a real answer to the transplant waitlist. She runs corporate strategy and all portfolio and commercial development, drawing on more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and consulting. Her resume runs from screening deals at Domain Associates to steering the blockbuster autoimmune drug Stelara at Centocor/Johnson & Johnson. At eGenesis she helps commercialize one of medicine's boldest bets: organs grown in pigs, edited dozens of times over, transplanted into living humans.
Yuanyuan Xu
Yuanyuan Xu is a structural biologist turned biotech founder who left the protein-crystallography bench at Tsinghua and Yale to build Cure Genetics (克睿基因), a Suzhou clinical-stage company chasing cell and gene therapies for solid tumors and genetic disease. She founded it in 2016, raised a $60M Series B in 2021, and bets on two homegrown platforms: an invariant-natural-killer-T cell therapy (AIMS CAR-NKT) and a directed-evolution engine for new AAV capsids (VELP).
Marc Montserrat
Marc Montserrat is the Chief Executive Officer of DNA Script, a French-American biotech pioneering enzymatic DNA synthesis - a technology that lets labs print custom DNA on demand, in hours instead of days. A Wharton MBA and industrial engineer by training, Montserrat spent two decades building commercial operations at Ariosa Diagnostics (prenatal testing), Omniome (next-gen sequencing), and Deepcell (AI-powered single-cell analysis) before co-founding Splice Bio and ultimately landing as CEO of DNA Script in October 2024. He was drawn into life sciences after a misdiagnosis scare at 24 that convinced him life was too short to spend on work without meaning.
Jacob Borrajo
Jacob Borrajo is the Founder and CEO of Amber Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech company pioneering a first-of-its-kind RNA writing platform capable of multi-kilobase edits. With a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and research training at the Broad Institute, Borrajo has spent his career building at the intersection of CRISPR, machine learning, and synthetic biology. Amber Bio launched in August 2023 with a $26 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Playground Global, with strategic participation from Eli Lilly and the Retinal Degeneration Fund. His platform's key innovation: treating diseases with high allelic diversity using a single therapeutic product, by editing RNA rather than DNA - making gene therapy safer, reversible, and dramatically more scalable.
Ali Madani
Ali Madani is the founder and CEO of Profluent, the AI-first protein design company based in Emeryville, California. A machine learning researcher by training, he holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and pioneered the use of large language models to generate functional proteins from scratch - first at Salesforce AI Research as the architect of ProGen, then at Profluent where his team created OpenCRISPR-1, the world's first AI-designed and open-source gene editor, published in Nature in 2025. With $150M in total funding from Bezos Expeditions, Altimeter Capital, Spark Capital, and Insight Partners, Madani is on a mission to make biology programmable - designing proteins that don't exist in nature to solve the biggest challenges in human health, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.
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.
Trevor Martin
Trevor Martin is the co-founder and CEO of Mammoth Biosciences, the CRISPR company he built alongside Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and two of her graduate students. A Princeton-trained computational biologist who earned his PhD at Stanford, Martin turned a cold email to Doudna into a $465M-funded platform company developing ultracompact CRISPR systems - including NanoCas, the first efficient extrahepatic gene editor - aimed at permanently curing genetic diseases.
Jorge Conde
Jorge Conde is a General Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests at the intersection of biology, computer science, and engineering. Born in Miami to Cuban and Peruvian parents, Conde co-founded Knome — the first company to offer whole-genome sequencing directly to consumers — alongside Harvard geneticist George Church, then spent years as CSO, CFO, and CPO at Syros Pharmaceuticals before joining a16z in 2017. An MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, he is one of the most prominent voices arguing that the 21st century belongs to biology the way the 20th belonged to physics.
Steven Banerjee
Steven Banerjee is the Founder and CEO of Nextnet, a life sciences AI platform that organizes and connects the world's biomedical knowledge. A serial biotech entrepreneur originally from New Zealand, he trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Canterbury, served as a Doctoral Fellow at IBM Labs, and collaborated with gene sequencing pioneer Ron Davis at Stanford before founding his first venture, Mekonos - a cell and gene therapy company that raised over $40 million and was acquired. He then founded Nextnet in late 2020 to bring AI-native research tools to scientists, building a platform now used across 100+ countries by researchers at Harvard, MIT, MD Anderson, and UCSF. Nextnet's Copilot and Explorer tools are powered by a purpose-built biomedical ontology unifying data from PubMed, ChEMBL, Ensembl, and millions of scientific sources.
Tom Cahill
Thomas J. Cahill, MD, PhD is the founder and managing partner of Newpath Partners, a Boston-based life sciences venture firm he built from the ground up to translate breakthrough academic science into medicines. A structural biologist trained under two Nobel laureates, Cahill has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies — including Prime Medicine, Chroma Medicine, and Autobahn Therapeutics — and became one of the pandemic's most consequential behind-the-scenes operators when he assembled Scientists to Stop COVID-19, a coalition that fed curated research directly to the White House and helped redirect Regeneron's manufacturing to Dublin.