hepatocellular-carcinoma
(3)
Niranjan Sardesai
Niranjan Sardesai is the founder, president and CEO of Geneos Therapeutics, a Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania biotech building personalized DNA-based cancer vaccines that are custom-designed to each patient's own tumor mutations. A Caltech-trained chemist with a Wharton MBA, he spent years as COO helping build Inovio Pharmaceuticals into a Phase III immunotherapy company before spinning out Geneos in 2016. Under his leadership Geneos published a landmark Nature Medicine paper in 2024 showing its neoantigen vaccine drove complete responses in advanced liver cancer, with some patients reaching multi-year, recurrence-free survival.
Michael Choukas
Michael Choukas is the co-founder and CEO of Autem Therapeutics, a Hanover, New Hampshire biotech building AutEMsys, a bioelectric platform that delivers personalized, amplitude-modulated electromagnetic frequencies to treat solid tumor cancers. A Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate, he spent two decades running clinical-development, real-world-data, and oncology-analytics businesses at firms like ConcertAI, Vector Oncology, United BioSource, SCIREX and Bain & Company, work he credits with more than $2.5 billion in market value creation. He raised a $10 million Series A-1 in 2022 and is steering Autem toward FDA-cleared trials in liver cancer and glioblastoma.
Cheng Liu
Cheng Liu is the founder, President, and CEO of Eureka Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Emeryville, California. A molecular cell biologist trained at UC Berkeley and Peking University, Liu invented a novel class of TCR mimic antibodies that allow engineered T cells to recognize intracellular tumor antigens - a major challenge in treating solid tumors. Since founding Eureka in 2006 after a decade at Chiron/Novartis, he has built a pipeline of ARTEMIS T-cell therapies targeting liver cancer, multiple myeloma, and neuroblastoma, with the company's ECT204 program earning FDA RMAT Designation in January 2026 - one of the highest-priority designations the FDA gives to regenerative medicine therapies. Eureka has raised over $168 million in total funding and holds more than 500 patents worldwide.