harvard-medical-school
(12)
Shidong Jia
Shidong Jia, MD, PhD, is the founder and global CEO of Predicine, a Silicon Valley precision-oncology company building multi-omic liquid biopsy tests that read cancer from blood and urine. Trained as a physician-scientist at Harbin Medical University, Peking Union Medical College, Dana-Farber and Harvard, he ran oncology biomarker strategy at Genentech before leaving to start Predicine in 2015. His pitch is simple: precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine, built 'From Pharma, For Pharma.'
Howard L. Kaufman
Howard L. Kaufman, M.D., FACS, is a surgical oncologist and cancer immunotherapy pioneer who serves as President and CEO of Ankyra Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech developing anchored immunotherapies. He led the pivotal Phase III trial of T-VEC, the first oncolytic virus ever approved by the FDA for cancer, and has published more than 500 scientific papers over a 20-plus year research career. He now leads Ankyra's work on anchored IL-12 therapy, tolododekin alfa (ANK-101), aiming to deliver powerful immune drugs directly into tumors without the toxicity of systemic dosing.
Alina Su
Alina Su is the co-founder and CEO of Generation Lab, a San Francisco longevity startup building an at-home cheek-swab test that measures biological age across organs and systems. She got her first medical device patent at 15, founded the needle-free injection company NovaXS, left a Harvard Medical School PhD to commercialize aging science from UC Berkeley's Conboy Lab, and made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023. Generation Lab has raised about $11M and counts geneticist George Church and Aubrey de Grey among its advisors.
Andrew Dervan
Andrew Dervan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cajal Neuroscience (Cajal Therapeutics), a Seattle biotech that launched in 2022 with $96 million to rethink how drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases are discovered. A Harvard-trained physician with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Yale, he spent years leading cell therapy and immuno-oncology business development at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb. Unusually for a biotech CEO, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington, evaluating people with adult-onset neurological conditions.
Andrew Le
Andrew Le is the co-founder and CEO of Buoy Health, an AI-driven health navigation platform he started out of Harvard Innovation Labs in 2014 after taking three years off from Harvard Medical School. A physician by training who once researched brain cancer, Le built Buoy to answer one deceptively simple question for people who reach for Google first: when do I actually need to see a doctor? Under his leadership Buoy has raised more than $66 million and reached millions of users, drawing backing from major insurers including Optum, Cigna and Humana.
J. Eduardo Rame
J. Eduardo Rame is a Philadelphia cardiologist who treats the sickest hearts in medicine - patients in the final stage of heart failure who depend on pumps, transplants and the chance their own muscle can be coaxed back to life. As the Louis R. Dinon MD Professor and enterprise chief of Advanced Cardiac and Pulmonary Vascular Disease at Jefferson Health, he runs an integrated division built around recovery rather than replacement. Yale-trained in biophysics, Oxford-trained in health economics and Harvard-trained in medicine, he spent a decade founding Penn's mechanical circulatory support program before bringing that work to Jefferson. His research on left ventricular assist devices, including the landmark MOMENTUM 3 trial, has been cited more than 12,000 times.
Michael Goldberg
Michael Goldberg is the founder and CEO of SURGE Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech pioneering intraoperative immunotherapy. His idea is deceptively simple: when a surgeon removes a solid tumor, don't leave the cavity empty - fill it with an injectable, biodegradable hydrogel that releases immune-activating medicine right where cancer is most likely to return. A trained chemist who earned a PhD at MIT under Robert Langer and did postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, Goldberg became a Harvard Medical School professor before leaving academia to translate his lab's discovery into the clinic. SURGE has raised roughly $58M, cleared an FDA IND, and completed Phase 1 dosing of its lead program ahead of a registrational trial in triple-negative breast cancer.
Philip Kantoff
Philip Kantoff is a medical oncologist who spent three decades shaping how the world treats prostate cancer, then walked away from running medicine at one of the country's largest cancer hospitals to start a company. As co-founder and CEO of Convergent Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is developing CONV01-alpha, an alpha-emitting radioantibody that hunts down prostate tumor cells and irradiates them at close range. He has published more than 500 papers, been cited over 85,000 times, mentored a generation of oncology leaders, and at an age when most peers retire, raised $90 million in Series A funding to bring a new class of cancer therapy into the clinic.
Sheldon Kwok
Sheldon J.J. Kwok is the CEO and co-founder of LASE Innovation, a Boston-area techbio company turning microscopic lasers into cellular barcodes. He spent his PhD at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital building particles that emit pure laser light from inside living cells, then spun the work into a company aiming to give every cell a trackable identity and add a time dimension to flow cytometry.
Yongjoon Choe
Yongjoon Choe is the founder and CEO of lululab, the Seoul-based AI skincare company that spun out of Samsung's C-Lab in 2017. He turned a genome-sequencing detour at Harvard into Lumini, a system that reads ten-plus skin conditions from a single face photo in about ten seconds and recommends products to match. Under Choe, lululab has won CES Innovation Awards four years running and built its diagnostics on a deep-learning model trained on millions of skin-data points.
Connie Lehman
Connie Lehman is a radiologist who spent three decades reading mammograms and decided the picture could tell a different story. As founder and CEO of Boston-based Clairity, she built the first FDA-authorized AI platform that reads a routine screening mammogram and estimates a woman's five-year risk of developing breast cancer, spotting tissue patterns invisible to the human eye. A Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, she left a celebrated academic career to commercialize the idea that imaging should predict cancer, not just find it. TIME named her to its 2026 TIME100 Health list and Forbes to its 50 Over 50: Innovation list.
Jacob Donoghue
Jacob Donoghue is a physician-scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Beacon Biosignals, a Boston company applying machine learning to EEG brain data to build neurobiomarkers for psychiatric, neurological, and sleep disorders. Trained with an MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in neuroscience from MIT, he started Beacon in 2019 on the bet that decades of overlooked brainwave recordings could be turned into a precision-medicine engine for drug development and diagnosis. Under his leadership the company has raised over $116M, secured FDA clearance for a wearable EEG headband, acquired home sleep-testing firm CleveMed, and partnered with more than half of the world's top ten biopharma companies.