Alex Aravanis is the CEO and co-founder of Moonwalk Biosciences, a precision epigenetics company he launched in 2024 with $57 million and Broad Institute scientist Feng Zhang. An engineer-turned-physician with degrees from UC Berkeley and Stanford, he co-founded the cancer early-detection company GRAIL, later returned to Illumina as Chief Technology Officer, and now wants to rewrite the 'software of the genome' without cutting a single strand of DNA.
Swamy Vijayan is the CEO and cofounder of Zafrens, a San Diego biotech reinventing drug discovery by shrinking a 96-well plate down to 200,000 microwells that image and sequence single cells at once. A physicist by training who admits he was driven less by a love of biology than by dissatisfaction with theoretical physics, he is a serial founder whose previous company Omniome sold to Pacific Biosciences for up to $800 million. His stated goal is not a quick exit but a foundation for smart people to do important things for the next 100 years.
Vik Vaz is a physician-turned-executive who became CEO and President of San Diego multi-omics biotech Pleno Inc. in December 2024, arriving the same day the company closed a $25M Series B. Trained as a surgeon and interventional oncologist, he later ran strategy and companion diagnostics at Illumina and was a partner at both McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. At Pleno he is commercializing the RAPTOR platform, which uses proprietary Hypercoding technology to detect DNA, RNA and protein targets in a single sample at high speed and low cost.
Elaine Cheung is Chief Business Officer at Moonwalk Biosciences, a South San Francisco biotech backed by $57 million in funding and co-founded by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang and former Illumina CTO Alex Aravanis. With 20+ years navigating the inflection points of genomic medicine - from spinning GRAIL out of Illumina, helping architect its $900M+ Series B, and steering Lyell Immunopharma through its IPO - Cheung brings a rare combination of scientific literacy and deal-making precision. At Moonwalk, she is helping build the business infrastructure for a company that has pivoted from epigenetic editing to siRNA-based therapeutics targeting adipose biology and obesity.