gene-therapy
(31)
Chris McNulty
Chris McNulty is the interim CEO of Ring Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech developing genetic medicines that use commensal anelloviruses as delivery vectors. An MIT-trained engineer with a Harvard MBA, he joined Ring in May 2023 as Chief Financial Officer and Head of Corporate Strategy and stepped up to lead the company in December 2024. Over more than 15 years in pharma and biotech finance, he has closed financing transactions worth more than $300 million across companies including VBI Vaccines, InVivo Therapeutics, Repligen, and Genzyme.
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.
Joel Schneider
Joel Schneider is the founder, president and CEO of Carbon Biosciences, a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech building gene therapies from parvovirus-derived vectors rather than the more common adeno-associated viruses. He launched the company out of stealth in 2022 with a $38 million Series A led by Agent Capital, pairing his operating background with the science of gene therapy pioneer Robert Kotin. Trained as a stem cell biologist with a Rutgers Ph.D. and a Harvard postdoc, Schneider was the first employee at Solid Biosciences before founding Carbon to push vectors that carry larger genetic payloads, target specific tissues such as the lung, and sidestep the pre-existing immunity that limits current gene therapies. Carbon's lead program targets cystic fibrosis.
Rich Small
Rich Small is the CEO of Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, the Cumberland, Rhode Island clinical-stage biotech that in March 2025 won FDA approval for ENCELTO, the first and only treatment for macular telangiectasia type 2 (MacTel). A CPA and Northeastern University graduate, he joined Neurotech as CFO in 2007 and took over the top job in 2016, guiding the company's encapsulated cell technology platform from experimental science to a commercial retinal implant.
Syed T. Husain
Syed T. Husain is the Chairman and CEO of Made Scientific, a Princeton, New Jersey cell therapy contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) that he relaunched in 2025 out of the former BioCentriq. Backed by GC Corporation, the company runs a 60,000-square-foot GMP facility built to move autologous and allogeneic cell therapies from clinical batches to commercial supply. A chemical engineer by training who started on the manufacturing floor at Wyeth and Pfizer, Husain spent more than two decades in CDMO leadership at Lonza, Alcami, Emergent BioSolutions, and Resilience before taking the top job. He named the rebranded company MADE for Manufacturing and Development Excellence.
Tuyen Ong
Tuyen Ong is a physician-turned-biotech executive who spent four years as CEO of Ring Therapeutics, the Flagship Pioneering company trying to turn anelloviruses - harmless viruses that already live in nearly everyone - into a redosable delivery system for genetic medicines. Trained as an ophthalmologist at University College London with an MBA from NYU Stern, he built his career on gene therapy for rare eye disease at Nightstar, Biogen, PTC, Bausch & Lomb and Pfizer before betting on a virus most scientists had written off as biological junk. In 2025 he co-founded PharmasMarket, a drug-development consultancy.
Xuandai Nguyen
Xuandai Nguyen, Ph.D., MBA, is Vice President, Head of Global Program Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Beacon Therapeutics, an ophthalmic gene therapy company working to restore sight in people with inherited and prevalent retinal diseases. A scientist-turned-strategist, Nguyen has spent more than two decades moving medicines from bench to market, with senior roles at Genentech, Forma Therapeutics and ACELYRIN spanning immunology, ophthalmology, respiratory and sickle cell disease. Trilingual and Berkeley- and Cornell-trained, Nguyen sits at the intersection of hard science and commercial strategy, translating complicated biology into the plans that decide which therapies reach patients.
Jack Milwid
Jack Milwid is a scientist-turned-company-builder who sits in the Office of the CEO at Lila Sciences, the Flagship Pioneering venture chasing 'scientific superintelligence' through autonomous AI-run laboratories. A materials engineer with a Harvard-MIT PhD, he has spent his career founding biotech companies from scratch - among them Sana Biotechnology, Neon Therapeutics, Cobalt Biomedicine and Kaleido Biosciences - and co-founded the investment firm Related Sciences. His trademark is turning early science into operating companies.
Eduardo Abeliuk
Eduardo Abeliuk is the founder and CEO of TeselaGen Biotechnology, a Silicon Valley company building AI agents and enterprise software for biological R&D. A Chilean-born physicist and electrical engineer with a Stanford PhD, he sits at the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence, and software - treating DNA as data and lab work as something that ought to be automated. Before biotech he built a Facebook app that hit a million users in weeks and an edtech platform across Latin America. He holds multiple US patents in computational biology and synthetic biology and his academic work has been cited more than a thousand times.
Matt Wilsey
Matt Wilsey is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned biotech founder and CEO of Grace Science, a company building gene therapy and small-molecule programs for NGLY1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic condition that his daughter Grace was diagnosed with in 2013. A Stanford BA and MBA who started his career at the White House and the Department of Defense before co-founding Zazzle and CardSpring (acquired by Twitter), Wilsey applied a startup operator's playbook to drug discovery, funding roughly 75 scientists across 20 medical centers in five countries and partnering with Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi to turn a tiny patient community into a research enterprise.
Ramon Salsas Escat
Ramon Salsas Escat is the Chief Business Officer of GEMMA Biotherapeutics (GemmaBio), the Philadelphia gene-therapy company spun out of Jim Wilson's lab to widen global access to AAV therapies for rare inherited diseases. A chemist by training who earned a PhD in computational and systems biology at MIT and an MBA at IESE, Salsas has led or co-led more than 20 transactions across AAV gene therapies, CNS disorders, oncology and manufacturing platforms, with cumulative deal value north of $4 billion in upfront payments and milestones. He helped build the business engine at Penn's Gene Therapy Program, served as SVP of Business Development at G2 Bio, and now runs business development, alliance management, legal and IP at GemmaBio, where he played a pivotal role in the company's founding and its $34 million seed round.
Ryan Swoboda
Ryan Swoboda is the co-founder and CEO of NAVAN Technologies, a San Carlos, California biotech commercializing NanoStraw, a non-viral platform that pokes microscopic hollow tubes into living cells to deliver DNA, mRNA, and proteins without killing them. He spun the technology out of Stanford's Melosh Group in 2017 while finishing his graduate research, holds inventor status on early NanoStraw patents, and ran the company's NSF STTR Phase II grant before becoming CEO in 2019. A first-generation college graduate, he splits his energy between scaling a deep-tech delivery platform for cell and gene therapy and running science demos for low-income kids.
Akin Akinc
Akin Akinc is the founding CEO of Aera Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building a new way to deliver genetic medicines using human protein nanoparticles derived from the body's own retroelements. A chemical engineer by training, he spent nearly two decades at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where he helped invent the lipid nanoparticle delivery that produced ONPATTRO, the world's first approved RNAi therapeutic, and later ran the Givlaari and fitusiran programs. Recruited by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, Akinc launched Aera out of stealth in 2023 with $193 million to tackle what he calls genetic medicine's single greatest unmet need: delivery.
Alvin Luk
Alvin Luk is a biotech executive, neuroscientist and entrepreneur with more than three decades in global drug development. He is President & Chief Medical Officer (Group) and U.S. CEO of HanchorBio, a clinical-stage immunology and immuno-oncology company building Fc-based designer biologics, and co-founder and CEO of CRISPR gene-editing company HuidaGene Therapeutics. Across his career he has contributed to roughly two dozen approved products and more than 250 global regulatory submissions, including LUXTURNA, the first FDA-approved gene therapy. A 2025 TIME100 Health honoree, he wants to turn HanchorBio into the 'Genentech of Asia.'
Jason Cole
Jason F. Cole is the founding CEO and board member of Zag Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that launched in October 2025 with $80 million to develop thymus-targeted medicines for autoimmune diseases, starting with Type 1 diabetes. A lawyer by training with a J.D. from Columbia and an A.B. in Government from Dartmouth, Cole has spent more than two decades in biotech operations and finance. At bluebird bio he helped grow the company from roughly 100 to 1,200 employees, raised over $3.7 billion in equity financings, and helped deliver multiple first-in-class gene and cell therapies to patients. He most recently led SalioGen Therapeutics as CEO and Board Chair, and serves as Vice Chair of the MassBio board.
Samuel Murphy
Samuel Murphy is co-founder and CEO of Salubris Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Gaithersburg, Maryland developing complex biologics for cardiovascular, oncology, and neurodegenerative disease. A Penn-trained virologist who did his postdoc in the lab that became Spark Therapeutics, he spent a decade in pharma strategy consulting and life-sciences investment banking before joining Salubris in 2017 and taking the CEO seat in 2020. His lead program, JK07, is the first clinical-stage selective ErbB4 agonist aimed at being a disease-modifying biologic for heart failure. He also runs international business development for the company's Chinese parent, Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals.
Shankar Ramaswamy
Shankar Ramaswamy is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Kriya Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building one-time gene therapies for common, highly prevalent chronic diseases rather than only rare ones. A physician by training who started his career evaluating drug candidates at Roivant Sciences and helping launch Axovant's record biotech IPO, he founded Kriya in 2019 and has since raised more than $600 million to vertically integrate gene therapy design, computational biology and in-house GMP manufacturing.
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).
Alec Nielsen
Alec Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Asimov, a Boston synthetic biology company building computer-aided design tools for living cells. His MIT PhD work in the Voigt Lab produced Cello, a programming language that compiles plain-text logic instructions into thousands of DNA letters. Asimov turned that academic breakthrough into a commercial platform for designing and manufacturing biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DARPA, and a $175M Series B led by CPP Investments.
Asa Abeliovich
Asa Abeliovich is a physician-scientist turned serial biotech founder who spent two decades at the lab bench at Columbia before deciding the only way to get his ideas into patients was to start companies. He co-founded Alector, founded and sold Prevail Therapeutics to Eli Lilly for about $1 billion, and now runs Leal Therapeutics, a Worcester startup chasing a contrarian idea: that fixing the brain's broken metabolism can treat everything from schizophrenia to ALS to Alzheimer's. Leal spent over two years in stealth before surfacing with a clinical-stage pipeline and roughly $114 million raised.
Mike Carusi
Mike Carusi is a General Partner at Lightstone Ventures, a leading life sciences venture capital firm based in Portola Valley, California, with $847 million in assets under management. With a career spanning over three decades in healthcare investing, Carusi has built a reputation as one of the most active early-stage investors in biotech and medical devices, appearing on the Forbes Midas List for top technology and life science investors. He co-founded Lightstone Ventures in 2014 after years at Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), and has overseen landmark exits including Plexxikon (acquired by Daiichi Sankyo for ~$1 billion), Ardian (acquired by Medtronic for $800 million), Ra Medical Systems (acquired by UCB for $2.3 billion), and dozens more. He teaches healthcare venture capital at Dartmouth Tuck and is a faculty member of the Stanford Biodesign Emerging Entrepreneurs Forum.
Stuart Peterson
Stuart Peterson is the Founder and Managing General Partner of ARTIS Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he launched in 2001 that coined and trademarked the term 'TechBio.' A 2017 Forbes Midas List honoree, Peterson led early-stage investments in YouTube (acquired by Google) and StemCentrx (acquired by AbbVie for $10.2 billion - the largest-ever venture-backed life sciences acquisition), and has since focused ARTIS at the convergence of computer science and life science, closing a $200 million TechBio II Fund in December 2023 to back next-generation health and medicine companies deploying AI, machine learning, and deep learning to transform human health.
Frank D. Lee
Frank D. Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Pacira BioSciences, a specialty pharmaceutical company pioneering non-opioid pain management solutions. A 30-year industry veteran who immigrated to the United States from South Korea, Lee built his career across Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, and a 13-year tenure at Genentech where he oversaw $11 billion in global product sales. Before joining Pacira in January 2024, he led Forma Therapeutics through a transformative journey from drug-discovery startup to clinical-stage biotech, culminating in a $1.1 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2022. At Pacira, Lee is executing the '5x30' strategy - five bold objectives to transform the company into an innovative biopharma powerhouse by 2030, including advancing the PCRX-201 gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis, which has already earned FDA Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation.
John McHutchison
John McHutchison, AO, MD is the CEO and Chairman of Tune Therapeutics, a pioneering epigenome editing company based in Durham, NC. An internationally acclaimed hepatologist and drug developer, McHutchison spent nearly a decade at Gilead Sciences as Chief Scientific Officer, where he led the development of transformative hepatitis C cures used by over 3.2 million people worldwide, including Sovaldi and Harvoni. Now at Tune, he is steering the company's TEMPO epigenome editing platform toward a new era of precision medicine for chronic and complex diseases.
Sandy Macrae
Sandy Macrae is a Scottish physician-scientist who has led Sangamo Therapeutics, the Brisbane, California gene-editing pioneer, as President and CEO since June 2016. Trained at Glasgow and Cambridge - where Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner supervised his PhD - he ran emerging-markets R&D at GSK and was Global Medical Officer at Takeda before staking his career on zinc finger technology and genomic medicines for rare and neurological diseases.
Francisco Leport
Francisco Leport is the co-founder and CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, a South San Francisco-based company pioneering high-throughput in vivo drug discovery for age-related diseases. Trained as a physicist at Stanford, Leport pivoted from particle physics and energy tech into biotech, driven by a lifelong fascination with longevity sparked by his mother's fruit fly research. Gordian's signature 'mosaic screening' platform uses gene therapy vectors and single-cell RNA sequencing to test hundreds of therapies simultaneously in single animal models, with an AI system called Pythia scoring results against human disease signatures - achieving 80% accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes. The company raised a $60M Series A in April 2024, backed by Founders Fund, Gigafund, and The Longevity Fund, and in early 2026 announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to accelerate obesity drug discovery.
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.
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.
Samuel Rodriques
Samuel Rodriques is a physicist-turned-bioengineer and co-founder and CEO of Edison Scientific, the AI-driven scientific discovery company behind Kosmos - an AI scientist that reportedly condenses six months of PhD-level research into a single day. A MIT PhD and Hertz Fellow who invented implosion fabrication and pioneered spatial transcriptomics, Rodriques left the Francis Crick Institute to co-found FutureHouse (funded by Eric Schmidt) in 2023, then spun it into for-profit Edison Scientific, which raised a $70M seed round at a $250M valuation in December 2025. Named to Time 100 AI in 2025, he is on a mission to cure all diseases by mid-century through AI-accelerated science.
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.