Jason F. Cole is the founding CEO and board member of Zag Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that launched in October 2025 with $80 million to develop thymus-targeted medicines for autoimmune diseases, starting with Type 1 diabetes. A lawyer by training with a J.D. from Columbia and an A.B. in Government from Dartmouth, Cole has spent more than two decades in biotech operations and finance. At bluebird bio he helped grow the company from roughly 100 to 1,200 employees, raised over $3.7 billion in equity financings, and helped deliver multiple first-in-class gene and cell therapies to patients. He most recently led SalioGen Therapeutics as CEO and Board Chair, and serves as Vice Chair of the MassBio board.
Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is the founding CEO and now Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a Cambridge-based company building generative and predictive AI on the world's largest multi-modal oncology dataset. He grew the company from a 2017 startup into a roughly $1.9 billion business with about 1,300 employees, acquiring TeraRecon's imaging technology and ASCO's CancerLinQ network along the way. A former Accenture managing director, Novartis research COO, and McKinsey partner, he co-authored the widely cited book Healthcare Disrupted and chairs the MassBio board.