A. Stewart Campbell, PhD, is the CEO of Vertero Therapeutics, the Woburn, Massachusetts biotech formerly known as Axial Therapeutics. A medicinal chemist by training with more than 30 years in drug discovery, he runs a company built on an unusual bet: that the road to treating Parkinson's disease starts in the gut, not the brain. Campbell joined in 2017, took the top job in February 2021, engineered the 2025 rebrand from Axial to Vertero, and is steering the lead candidate VT-5006, a gut-selective small molecule, into its first clinical trials. He is a co-inventor on more than 20 patent families, including the foundational patents behind the approved graft-versus-host disease drug Rezurock.
Scott Peterson is the Chief Business Officer of T-Cypher Bio, an Oxford-based biotech building next-generation TCR therapeutics for solid tumors and autoimmune disease. A Harvard-trained PhD who started his career at the lab bench as a medicinal chemist at Merck, he crossed over to the deal side and spent two decades shaping pipelines and partnerships at Intarcia, Spero, and Dewpoint Therapeutics before taking the commercial helm at T-Cypher. He is the rare dealmaker who can read both a term sheet and a reaction mechanism.