immunotherapy
(23)
Sabah Oney
Sabah Oney is the president and CEO of Dispatch Bio, a Philadelphia- and San Francisco-based biotech engineering a universal treatment for solid tumors using CAR-T cell therapy. Born in Cyprus and in the U.S. since age 18, he holds a genetics degree from the University of Kansas, a PhD in genetics and genomics from Duke, and an MBA from Stanford. Across nearly two decades in biotech he helped scale Ariosa Diagnostics (acquired by Roche), took Alector public as its chief business officer, co-founded Vilya, and served as a venture partner at ARCH. Dispatch launched publicly in 2025 with $216 million behind its FLARE platform and CAR-T pioneer Carl June among its founders.
Daniel Getts
Daniel Getts, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of CREATE Medicines (formerly Myeloid Therapeutics), a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building RNA-based in vivo immune programming therapies that reprogram T cells, NK cells and myeloid cells directly inside the body. An immunologist trained at the University of Sydney with an MBA from Western Michigan, he previously founded Cour Pharmaceuticals and served as VP of Research at TCR2 Therapeutics. He has more than 45 peer-reviewed publications, multiple issued patents, and a track record of large pharma partnerships, including Takeda's $420M licensing deal for TIMP-GLIA. In May 2026 CREATE closed a $122 million Series B to advance its in vivo CAR pipeline across autoimmune disease and oncology.
Debra Weidanz
Debra Wawro Weidanz is the co-founder, CEO and chief scientist of Resonant Sensors Incorporated, an Arlington, Texas biotech that builds label-free, high-throughput biosensor systems used to speed antibody discovery, drug screening and diagnostics. An electrical engineer turned inventor, she developed the company's guided-mode resonance sensor technology out of research at the University of Texas at Arlington, and later co-founded the cancer-immunotherapy startup Abexxa Biologics, which Boehringer Ingelheim acquired in 2021. With her husband Jon, she has become a notable UTA benefactor, funding a named tissue-engineering lab and research fellowships.
Elizabeth Czerepak
Elizabeth Czerepak is a life sciences finance executive with more than three decades in big pharma, venture capital, and public biotech. She is Chief Financial Officer and VP of Corporate Development at Mirror Biologics, a clinical-stage immunotherapy company in Wesley Chapel, Florida, where she also served as acting CEO from July 2024 to May 2025. Over her career she has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars, taken companies public through IPOs and SPAC mergers, and worked on landmark pharma transactions including the search that led to BASF Pharma's sale to Abbott. She sits on the boards of Delcath Systems and TransCode Therapeutics.
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.
Kevin Walton
Kevin Walton is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Baseimmune, a London-based biotech using AI and computational protein design to build next-generation vaccines and active immunotherapies. He joined in 2024 after a career in biotech corporate development and dealmaking at Moderna, StrideBio, Curis and G1 Therapeutics, and is steering the company beyond infectious-disease vaccines into chronic diseases, starting with a lead fibrosis program in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
J. Robert Coleman
J. Robert Coleman, PhD, MBA, is Chairman and CEO of HERVolution Therapeutics, a Copenhagen-based biotech developing immunotherapies that target human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) - the ancient viral DNA lodged in the dark genome that reawakens in cancer, aging, and neurodegeneration. A trained virologist, he co-founded Codagenix, where he built a synthetic-biology vaccine platform into a clinical-stage pipeline and raised nearly half a billion dollars before pivoting to HERVs in late 2023.
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.
Li Sun
Li Sun is the founder and CEO of Shennon Biotechnologies, a San Francisco single-cell immunotherapy company that profiles millions of immune cells in hours to pinpoint the rare T cells and antibody targets that fight cancer. A physicist by training (PhD from Harvard's Weitz lab, M.Eng from MIT), she spent five years as a deep-tech venture investor at Bessemer and Foundation Capital before building the platform herself. Shennon emerged from stealth in March 2023 with a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
Angèle Maki
Angèle Maki, PhD, is a biopharmaceutical business development executive with more than 20 years of deal-making across emerging biotechs and global pharma. In December 2025 she became the first Chief Business Officer of Ability Biotherapeutics, a Montreal-based company building logic-gated antibodies with its generative-AI platform AbiLeap. A Stanford-trained biological chemist who started at the University of Winnipeg, she has held senior roles at Medarex, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, 23andMe, Merck, Eli Lilly, ReCode Therapeutics and Callio Therapeutics, and chairs the non-profit Canadian Entrepreneurs in Life Sciences.
Sanuj Ravindran
Sanuj Ravindran, M.D., is the CEO of Simcha Therapeutics, a New Haven clinical-stage immunobiology company turning a once-overlooked immune molecule, interleukin-18, into a cancer weapon. A board-certified physician who spent a decade as a venture capitalist before becoming a serial biotech company-builder, Ravindran took the helm in 2022 to push ST-067, a decoy-resistant IL-18 designed to slip past the body's own off-switch and reawaken the immune system inside tumors. He has run drug programs across oncology and rare disease, structured more than $2 billion in deals, and bets his career on therapies that promise more than incremental gains.
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.'
Catherine Sabatos-Peyton
Catherine Sabatos-Peyton is a cancer immunologist turned biotech CEO who runs Larkspur Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building small-molecule drugs that attack cancer's ability to hide from the immune system. As a Harvard PhD student she helped first describe TIM-3, now a major checkpoint protein; she later led discovery of the anti-TIM-3 antibody sabatolimab at CoStim and Novartis. In 2021 she stepped from the lab bench to the corner office, and now leads an all-female executive team whose lead drug, the PIP4K2C degrader LRK-4189, entered human trials in late 2025.
Dan Baker
Dan Baker is a physician-scientist turned biotech founder who spent two decades at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen division helping bring immunology blockbusters Remicade, Simponi and Stelara to patients, before launching Brisbane-based Kira Biotech in 2019 as its founding CEO. Kira is developing KB312, a first-in-class antibody designed to selectively retrain the immune system rather than broadly suppress it, aimed at autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and type 1 diabetes. A rheumatologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years, Baker also advises drug-development organisations and serves as a healthcare venture partner.
Errik Anderson
Errik Anderson is the founder and CEO of Alloy Therapeutics, a Lexington, Massachusetts biotech he built around a single idea: stop selling drugs and start selling access to the tools that make them. A bioengineer and serial entrepreneur, he has founded or co-founded seven venture-backed biotech companies - Adimab, Alloy, Compass Therapeutics, Alector, Arsanis, and Avitide among them - whose technologies have helped discover more than 90 therapeutic antibodies now approved or in FDA review. Alloy reinvests 100% of its revenue into science and, by design, can never be sold. Outside the lab, Anderson co-owns the New England Free Jacks pro rugby team and has chaired Major League Rugby's Board of Governors.
Russell Beckerman
Russell Beckerman is a biotech entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Overture Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based company engineering precision antibody medicines targeting obesity and metabolic dysfunction. He previously co-founded 82VS, a venture studio embedded within Alloy Therapeutics that has launched nine drug companies since 2020. His work sits at the intersection of cutting-edge antibody biology, company creation, and the conviction that the next generation of obesity drugs will be antibodies - not peptides.
Srini Akkaraju
Srini Akkaraju, MD/PhD, is the Founder and Managing General Partner of Samsara BioCapital, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm he founded in 2016 to translate cutting-edge biology into transformative therapeutics. With a Stanford MD/PhD in Immunology and a computer science foundation from Rice University, Akkaraju has spent over 25 years at the intersection of science and capital - from corporate development at Genentech to partnership roles at J.P. Morgan Partners, Panorama Capital, New Leaf Venture Partners, and Sofinnova Ventures. Samsara has built a portfolio of 93+ companies with 32 IPO exits, backing breakthroughs in immunotherapy, cell therapy, kidney disease, and gene therapy. His conviction-driven approach is evident in moves like a $19M personal stake in Scholar Rock, and his belief that biotech is entering an 'unbelievable innovation cycle' over the next two to three decades.
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.
Rami Elghandour
Rami Elghandour is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx (NASDAQ: ACLX), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation cell therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. An engineer turned venture capitalist turned serial CEO, he has led two successful IPOs, built two multibillion-dollar public companies, and raised over $1.75 billion in capital. At Arcellx, he transformed the company from an early-stage startup into a commercial-ready organization with a peak valuation exceeding $6 billion, advancing the anito-cel BCMA CAR-T therapy toward FDA approval for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. A TEDx speaker on unconscious bias and gender equity, Rami is also an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' and the Sundance-premiered 'American Doctor.'
Terry Rosen
Terry Rosen is the CEO and co-founder of Arcus Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing combination cancer immunotherapies. A medicinal chemist by training with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Rosen has spent over 30 years at the intersection of chemistry and oncology - from Abbott Laboratories and Pfizer to Amgen, and then co-founding Flexus Biosciences which sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $1.25 billion in 2015. He immediately used that platform to launch Arcus, which has since secured a landmark 10-year partnership with Gilead Sciences and advanced multiple molecules into pivotal clinical studies, including casdatifan, a best-in-class HIF-2α inhibitor showing strong results in kidney cancer.
Pavan Cheruvu
Dr. Pavan K. Cheruvu is the President and CEO of Bitterroot Bio, a Palo Alto-based biotech pioneering the field of cardio-immunology — the intersection of the immune system and cardiovascular disease. A Rhodes Scholar, board-certified cardiologist, and physician-scientist who trained at Duke, Oxford, Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, Cheruvu is guiding Bitterroot Bio's lead program BRB-002 — a first-in-class CD47-targeting therapy for atherosclerosis — through clinical development after a landmark $145M Series A in 2023 and positive Phase 1 results in 2025.
Ron Alfa
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.
Nathaniel Fernhoff
Nathaniel Fernhoff is the CEO and Co-founder of Orca Bio, a late-stage biotechnology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California, developing high-precision allogeneic T-cell immunotherapies to treat blood cancers and autoimmune diseases. Holding a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and dual Bachelor's degrees in Biological Sciences and Mathematics from Stanford, Fernhoff co-founded Orca Bio in 2016 based on decades-old Stanford research. He rose from Chief Scientific Officer to CEO in May 2025, leading the company through a landmark Phase 3 clinical trial for Orca-T - showing 78% survival free from chronic graft-versus-host disease versus 38% for standard-of-care - a BLA submission under FDA Priority Review, and a $250M Series F round bringing total funding to over $625M. With a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Sacramento capable of producing ~3,000 cell therapy products per year, Fernhoff is steering Orca Bio toward potential commercialization and a cure for blood diseases without compromise.