Rachel Haurwitz is the President and CEO of Caribou Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company she co-founded in 2011 with Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and colleagues Martin Jinek and James Berger. A pioneer in CRISPR commercialization, Haurwitz earned her PhD from UC Berkeley under Doudna's mentorship — she was the first student in the lab to work on CRISPR — and pivoted from academia to industry to bring genome-editing technology to patients. Under her leadership, Caribou has developed a proprietary Cas12a-based platform (chRDNA technology) enabling precise, multiplex genome editing for off-the-shelf allogeneic CAR-T and CAR-NK cell therapies targeting blood cancers and autoimmune diseases. She also co-founded Intellia Therapeutics in 2014 and has been recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30, Fortune 40 Under 40, and featured in Walter Isaacson's bestseller 'The Code Breaker.'
Nessan Bermingham, Ph.D., is a serial biotech entrepreneur and Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures who has co-founded eight biotechnology companies including Intellia Therapeutics - one of the first public CRISPR gene editing companies - which he built from concept to IPO in under two years. A child of an Irish Army officer raised on a military base in Co. Kildare, he traded academia for Wall Street, Wall Street for venture capital, and venture capital for founding the companies reshaping genetic medicine. Today he shepherds a portfolio of cutting-edge biotech companies at Khosla Ventures while pursuing 155-mile ultra-marathons and aspiring to race at Dakar.