medical-oncologist
(3)
Markus Renschler
Markus Renschler is a medical oncologist turned biotech operator who runs Light Horse Therapeutics, a San Diego small-molecule drug discovery company that launched in January 2025 with a $62 million Series A and a Novartis deal worth up to $1 billion. He spent 25 years moving cancer drugs from the lab bench to the pharmacy counter, helped register blockbuster therapies in breast, lung and pancreatic cancer at Celgene and Pharmion, and previously took Cyteir Therapeutics from a discovery-stage startup to a publicly traded company. He trained at Princeton and Stanford and once built patient-specific lymphoma vaccines in Ron Levy's lab.
Philip Kantoff
Philip Kantoff is a medical oncologist who spent three decades shaping how the world treats prostate cancer, then walked away from running medicine at one of the country's largest cancer hospitals to start a company. As co-founder and CEO of Convergent Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is developing CONV01-alpha, an alpha-emitting radioantibody that hunts down prostate tumor cells and irradiates them at close range. He has published more than 500 papers, been cited over 85,000 times, mentored a generation of oncology leaders, and at an age when most peers retire, raised $90 million in Series A funding to bring a new class of cancer therapy into the clinic.
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.