mcgill-university
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Serge Messerlian
Serge Messerlian is the Chairman and CEO of Creyon Bio, a San Diego biotech using AI to design oligonucleotide medicines. A life-science operator with more than 25 years across oncology, hematology, immunology and rare disease, he has led Teon Therapeutics as CEO, run Janssen Oncology as President at Johnson & Johnson, and held senior roles at Actelion, Baxalta and Baxter International. He joined Creyon first as an investor and board member through DCVC Bio, then stepped in as Executive Chairman and Acting CEO in fall 2024 and took the full CEO title in April 2025 as the company prepares to enter the clinic in 2026.
Tara Nickerson
Tara Nickerson, PhD, is President, CEO and Director of Therini Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurological and retinal diseases. A biopharma executive with more than 20 years of experience, she was a founding-team member and Chief Business Officer at both Maze Therapeutics and Prothena Corporation before taking the top job at Therini in 2024. She combines a research background from McGill University with an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School and a long track record of company-building, financing and dealmaking in the life sciences.
Nassim Usman
Nassim Usman is an organic chemist turned biotech operator who runs Totus Medicines, an Emeryville, California company using a DNA-encoded covalent library platform (OmniDEL) paired with machine learning to build small-molecule drugs against targets long considered undruggable. He took the CEO chair in December 2023 alongside a $66 million Series B, and its lead drug, TOS-358, is the first covalent PI3K-alpha inhibitor in the clinic. Over three decades he has moved from bench chemistry on RNA and ribozymes to the top jobs at Sirna Therapeutics, Catalyst Biosciences, and Principia Biopharma, plus a stint as a venture investor at Morgenthaler Ventures.
Daniel Saks
Daniel Saks is the co-founder and CEO of Landbase, a San Francisco agentic-AI company building GTM-1 Omni, an action model purpose-built to automate B2B go-to-market work. He previously co-founded and co-led AppDirect, the subscription-commerce platform that became a unicorn. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and McGill graduate, Saks traces his obsession with helping small businesses survive to his family's century-old furniture store in Niagara Falls, which closed during the Great Recession.
John Simpson
John Simpson is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Digital Health Strategies (DHS), a Washington, D.C.-based data and technology company he started in 2014 with Ben Texter after both worked at Blue State Digital, the agency behind Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 digital campaigns. DHS builds the Share of Health patient loyalty platform, using propensity modeling and precision marketing to help large health systems - including Scripps Health, Providence, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Geisinger and Hackensack Meridian Health - deepen patient relationships, close care gaps and turn grateful patients into donors. A McGill and University of Chicago graduate who spent two decades in media and digital fundraising at Digitas and Deep Focus, Simpson closed a Series A round in December 2023 and has landed DHS on the Inc. 5000.