Joel Barrish is the President and CEO of Avilar Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company pioneering extracellular protein degradation. A medicinal chemist by training with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Barrish spent 28 years at Bristol Myers Squibb rising to VP and Global Head of Discovery Chemistry, co-inventing blockbuster drugs including SPRYCEL (dasatinib) for leukemia. After stints as CSO at Achillion Pharmaceuticals and co-founder/President at Jnana Therapeutics, he founded Avilar in 2019 to build the ATAC and MTAC platforms - bifunctional molecules that hijack the body's own cellular recycling machinery to degrade disease-causing proteins outside the cell, a class of targets previously undruggable. Avilar has raised $75 million in total seed financing.
Inductive Bio is a New York-based AI company building a machine learning platform that predicts how small-molecule drugs will behave in the body before they are ever synthesized. By training models on a pre-competitive data consortium shared across biopharma teams, its Beacon models, Compass software, and Indy chemistry assistant help medicinal chemists nominate better development candidates faster - reducing the costly 'whack-a-mole' of balancing potency against ADMET properties in preclinical drug discovery.

Dinesh V. Patel, Ph.D. is the President and CEO of Protagonist Therapeutics (NASDAQ: PTGX), a Newark, California-based biopharmaceutical company he has led since December 2008. With over 38 years spanning medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, venture capital co-founding, and three CEO stints, Patel has guided Protagonist from a peptide-platform startup to a company with its first FDA-approved drug - ICOTYDE (icotrokinra), approved March 2026 as the world's first targeted oral peptide for moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, partnered with Johnson & Johnson.