immuno-oncology
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Helena Chaye Spent 20 Years Looking for the Right Virus
A virologist went to law school, learned patents were only the beginning, and built a career carrying engineered viruses from the lab toward the clinic. At KaliVir, every detour has become part of the job.
Axel Hoos Keeps Choosing the Empty Blueprint
He helped give immuno-oncology a working language, rebuilt an oncology operation after its cupboard was cleared, and turned a young biotech into a clinical-stage company. Now Axel Hoos is starting again.
Alan Walts Has Spent Four Decades Turning Chemistry Into Companies
The Aleta Biotherapeutics CEO built his career in the quiet machinery of biotech: translating science, assembling teams, making deals, and turning one mentor’s habit of connecting people into an institution.
Jieyi Wang’s Long Bet on Antibodies That Need a Second Signal
After 22 years inside Abbott and AbbVie, the antibody scientist started Lyvgen around a precise design problem: how to make immune activation depend on where - and with what - an antibody binds.
Li-Fen Lee Is Building a Biotech Around What the Immune System Misses
After two decades inside immunology labs and drug-discovery groups, Li-Fen Lee founded Apeximmune to search for the immune system’s overlooked brakes - then turn those discoveries into antibody medicines.
Aron Knickerbocker Built a Career by Following the Data
The Aulos Bioscience CEO has spent three decades moving closer to the work - from the lab, to the deal table, to the small teams where one clear decision can redirect an entire company.
Steven Everett
Steven Everett is a biotechnology executive and cancer scientist who founded MaveriX Oncology in Palo Alto, California, where he serves as President and CEO. With a background rooted in more than two decades of cancer research at the University of Oxford, University of Dundee and UCSF, he has built his career around a single idea: making cancer drugs that switch on only inside tumors. At MaveriX he is developing conditionally activated small-molecule therapeutics that exploit hydroxylase biology in the tumor immune microenvironment, aiming to hit cancer hard while sparing healthy tissue.
Tom Soloway
Tom Soloway is the Chief Executive Officer of T-knife Therapeutics, a transatlantic biotech developing T-cell receptor (TCR-T) therapies aimed at solid tumors. With more than 25 years across strategy, operations, corporate finance and venture capital, he has helped build and finance a string of life sciences companies including Transcept Pharmaceuticals, Ascendis Pharma and Audentes Therapeutics. He took the helm of T-knife in January 2021, positioning the Berlin- and San Francisco-based company to move its 'supercharged' TCR-T candidates into the clinic while staying lean and capital-efficient.
Filippo Petti
Filippo Petti is the Chief Executive Officer of Leucid Bio, a London-based clinical-stage biotech developing next-generation CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumours built on a proprietary lateral CAR platform spun out of two decades of King's College London research. Appointed CEO in July 2023, Petti pairs a bench-science start at OSI Pharmaceuticals with years on Wall Street as a healthcare investment banker and equity analyst, and a prior run leading Celyad Oncology as CEO and CFO. Under his watch, Leucid moved its lead asset LEU011 into the AERIAL Phase I/IIa trial, reporting early proof-of-concept in relapsed/refractory solid tumours in late 2025.
Lina Yao
Lina Yao is a pharmaceutical scientist and the founder of Teon Therapeutics, a Redwood City, California biotech developing first-in-class, orally administered small-molecule cancer drugs that target G-protein coupled receptors to reverse tumor-driven immune suppression. A molecular pharmacologist by training with an MD and PhD and more than two decades in drug discovery, she built her career at CV Therapeutics and Gilead Sciences before launching Teon in 2018. She led the company through an oversubscribed $30 million Series A in 2021 and into the clinic with two novel programs: TT-702, an adenosine A2B receptor antagonist, and TT-816, a cannabinoid CB2 receptor antagonist being studied in combination with Merck's KEYTRUDA.
Phil Vickers
Phil Vickers is President and CEO of Solu Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech building small-molecule 'chimeras' that ferry cytotoxic payloads to disease-driving cells. He arrived in September 2023 after runs at Faze Medicines and Northern Biologics, and R&D leadership at Shire, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Pfizer and Merck. In April 2025 he closed a $41M Series A with Eli Lilly, Pappas Capital and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of STX-0712 for CMML.
Briggs Morrison
Briggs Morrison is a medical oncologist turned biopharma leader who runs Crossbow Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building TCR-mimetic antibody drugs that aim T-cells at cancer targets once thought unreachable. Before Crossbow he ran late-stage R&D at the scale of an industry giant, serving as Chief Medical Officer and EVP of Global Medicines Development at AstraZeneca, and holding senior development roles at Pfizer and Merck across three decades. His fingerprints are on blockbuster cancer medicines including TAGRISSO and LYNPARZA. Today he splits his identity between operator and investor: CEO of Crossbow, Entrepreneur Partner at MPM BioImpact, and a fixture on biotech boards including chair of Arvinas.
Jerry McMahon
Dr. Jerry McMahon is the President and CEO of STORM Therapeutics, a Cambridge, UK biotech pioneering drugs that target RNA modifying enzymes. A biochemist-turned-operator with more than 30 years in oncology drug development, he has led biotechs from bench to IPO, helped bring the cancer drug sunitinib (Sutent) to patients, and now steers STORM's first-in-class METTL3 inhibitor STC-15 through the clinic - the first RNA modification enzyme inhibitor ever to enter human trials.
Jessicca Rege
Jessicca M. Rege, Ph.D. is the Chief Executive Officer of Sus Clinicals, Inc., a biotech accelerating cancer drug development through the Oncopig Cancer Model, an FDA-cleared, genetically engineered pig platform for preclinical testing. A pharmaceutical scientist with more than 15 years in oncology R&D and global medical affairs, she previously served as Chief Development Officer at Mural Oncology, where she helped lead the company's public offering, and as VP, Head of Clinical Development, Oncology at Alkermes. She holds a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences with a focus on pharmacogenomics from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Adam Margolin
Adam Margolin is a computational biologist turned biotech founder who co-founded Flashpoint Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company engineering spherical-nucleic-acid nanomedicines that aim to turn weak cancer therapies into curative ones. After a 20-year academic career that took him from Wharton and Wall Street to running the #3-ranked genetics department in the country at Mount Sinai, and a stint as a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures, he teamed with Northwestern nanotech pioneer Chad Mirkin to build Flashpoint. He led the company as founding CEO through a $10M seed round before handing the chief executive role to biotech veteran Barry Labinger in 2025. His mission is deeply personal: his mother died of cancer when he was three.
Scott Peterson
Scott Peterson is the Chief Business Officer of T-Cypher Bio, an Oxford-based biotech building next-generation TCR therapeutics for solid tumors and autoimmune disease. A Harvard-trained PhD who started his career at the lab bench as a medicinal chemist at Merck, he crossed over to the deal side and spent two decades shaping pipelines and partnerships at Intarcia, Spero, and Dewpoint Therapeutics before taking the commercial helm at T-Cypher. He is the rare dealmaker who can read both a term sheet and a reaction mechanism.
Michael Shih
Michael Shih is the Chief Executive Officer of NeoPhore Ltd, a London-based small molecule neoantigen immuno-oncology company developing first-in-class drugs that target the DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway to make cancers more visible to the immune system. An attorney by training with degrees in biology, he spent nearly two decades structuring biotech deals before sitting in the chief executive's chair, with senior business development and corporate development roles at Kite Pharma, Biogen, Sanofi, Epizyme, Forest Laboratories, Kastle Therapeutics and Eisai. He took the helm at NeoPhore in December 2024, right after the company closed an oversubscribed Series B round backed by Bristol Myers Squibb.
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.'
Andrew Schiermeier
Andrew Schiermeier is the President and CEO of AvenCell Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dresden, Germany building switchable, universal CAR-T cell therapies for hard-to-treat cancers like acute myeloid leukemia. An engineer-turned-operator with a Harvard PhD in applied mathematics, he spent two decades across startups and global pharma - five years at CRISPR pioneer Intellia Therapeutics rising to COO, and a stint running Merck KGaA's oncology business across 60-plus countries - before taking AvenCell's helm in 2021 and leading its $112 million Series B in 2024.
J. Gene Wang
J. Gene Wang is a physician-scientist and the founder and CEO of Immetas Therapeutics, a biotech he co-founded in 2018 with Harvard's David Sinclair to attack the chronic, low-grade inflammation that drives aging and age-related cancers. Trained with an M.D. from Peking University and a Ph.D. in immunobiology from Yale, Wang spent roughly two decades inside Merck, Abbott, GSK, and Novartis, where he helped move blockbuster drugs like Humira, Gardasil, Zolinza, and Varubi from lab bench to patients. At Immetas he is engineering bispecific antibodies designed to retune inflammation inside the tumor microenvironment and break resistance to checkpoint immunotherapy, backed by an $11M Series A from Morningside Ventures.
John Lu
Shi-Jiang (John) Lu is a stem cell scientist and the founder, President and CEO of HebeCell Corp, a Natick, Massachusetts biotech building off-the-shelf cancer-killing immune cells from pluripotent stem cells. He spent two decades in regenerative medicine, was a top-ranked inventor in the global stem cell patent landscape, and led research at Advanced Cell Technology before that company was absorbed by Astellas. At HebeCell he pioneered a 3D, feeder-free bioreactor process for growing iPSC-derived natural killer (NK) and CAR-NK cells at industrial scale - aiming to make potent immune therapies as standardized and reproducible as a manufactured product.
John Mulligan
John Mulligan is the founder and CEO of Bonum Therapeutics, a Seattle biotech building antibody-regulated biologics that switch on only at their target. A serial entrepreneur with roughly 30 years across drug discovery and company formation, he has founded four companies in fields he often entered as a novice - including Good Therapeutics, whose PD-1-regulated IL-2 program Roche acquired in 2022 for $250M upfront. Bonum spun out of that deal with $93M in Series A funding to apply the same conditional-activation science across oncology, autoimmunity, metabolic disease, and pain. Mulligan holds a BS in biology from MIT and a PhD from Stanford, and was named a Top Industry Leader by the PharmaVoice 100 in 2023.
Ken Drazan
Ken Drazan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio), a South San Francisco clinical-stage company building computationally designed, programmable T-cell therapies to attack solid tumors. A board-certified liver transplant surgeon turned operator and investor, he previously was President and Chief Business Officer of GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), founded the robotic surgery company Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), and co-founded the private equity firm Bertram Capital. At ArsenalBio he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and forged collaborations with Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech, betting that gene-edited 'integrated circuit' T cells - and an AI foundation model of the T cell - can turn cell therapy into something curative for cancers that have resisted it.
Kumar Srinivasan
Kumar Srinivasan is the President and CEO of Wugen, a St. Louis clinical-stage biotech building off-the-shelf memory NK and CAR-T cell therapies for cancer. A chemist turned dealmaker, he spent 25+ years in pharma and biotech business development, most notably engineering the partnering strategy at Turning Point Therapeutics that culminated in its $4.1 billion acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb. Since taking Wugen's helm in March 2023, he has steered its lead programs WU-CART-007 and WU-NK-101 into pivotal and early clinical trials.
Marc Lajoie
Marc Lajoie is a protein designer turned biotech CEO. He co-founded Outpace Bio in 2021 in Seattle, where he is chief executive, building engineered cell therapies that aim to bring the kind of cures seen in blood cancers to the solid tumors that make up the vast majority of cancer cases. Trained in George Church's genome-engineering lab at Harvard and David Baker's Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, Lajoie helped pioneer the design of proteins with moving parts - molecules that compute, switch, and make decisions inside living cells. Outpace raised a $144M oversubscribed Series B in 2024 to push its AI-powered, protein-designed therapies toward the clinic.
Michael Boretti
Michael Boretti is the Chief Business Officer of Solu Therapeutics, a Boston biotech building a new class of cell-killing medicines on its CyTaC (Cytotoxicity Targeting Chimera) platform licensed from GSK. A bioengineer-turned-dealmaker with roughly two decades in biopharma, Boretti leads business development, strategic financing and alliance management. His earlier stops include CBO of Celsius Therapeutics, VP of Business Development at Epizyme, and VP of Corporate Development and Alliance Management at AVEO Oncology, where he helped shape partnerships with Astellas, Novartis and Janssen. He holds a B.S. in engineering science from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
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.
Robert Ross
Robert Ross is a medical oncologist turned biotech executive and the founding CEO of Clasp Therapeutics, a Baltimore-based clinical-stage immuno-oncology company building bispecific T cell engagers that target mutated cancer driver peptides presented by HLA with what the company calls absolute specificity. Launched in March 2024 with a $150 million Series A from Third Rock Ventures, Novo Holdings and Catalio Capital, Clasp is commercializing science from Johns Hopkins legends Bert Vogelstein and Drew Pardoll. Ross previously ran Surface Oncology through its acquisition by Coherus, led oncology at bluebird bio, and trained as a physician at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and UCSF.
Tom Smart
Tom Smart is a biotech executive with a 25-year run of taking cancer companies from the lab bench to Wall Street and back again. He currently leads Actym Therapeutics, a cancer-immunotherapy company building bacteria-delivered gene therapies, after a career that ran through AnaptysBio, XOMA, Cell Genesys and Genetics Institute. He helped shepherd the PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor that became GSK's Jemperli, founded and sold an antifungal company, and is named in industry records as a CEO and board member at oncolytic-virus company Seneca Therapeutics. His specialty is the unglamorous middle: financings, partnerships, IPOs and acquisitions that decide whether a promising molecule ever reaches a patient.
Zhen Su
Zhen Su is the CEO of Marengo Therapeutics, a Cambridge biotech reprogramming T cells to wake up the immune system against cancer. A physician-scientist with nearly three decades in oncology, he ran a billion-dollar global cancer franchise at Merck KGaA, helped deliver eight regulatory approvals as CMO of EMD Serono, and now steers Marengo's STAR platform into the clinic on the back of a $2.8B Ipsen partnership.