Phil Vickers is President and CEO of Solu Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech building small-molecule 'chimeras' that ferry cytotoxic payloads to disease-driving cells. He arrived in September 2023 after runs at Faze Medicines and Northern Biologics, and R&D leadership at Shire, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Pfizer and Merck. In April 2025 he closed a $41M Series A with Eli Lilly, Pappas Capital and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of STX-0712 for CMML.
Briggs Morrison is a medical oncologist turned biopharma leader who runs Crossbow Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building TCR-mimetic antibody drugs that aim T-cells at cancer targets once thought unreachable. Before Crossbow he ran late-stage R&D at the scale of an industry giant, serving as Chief Medical Officer and EVP of Global Medicines Development at AstraZeneca, and holding senior development roles at Pfizer and Merck across three decades. His fingerprints are on blockbuster cancer medicines including TAGRISSO and LYNPARZA. Today he splits his identity between operator and investor: CEO of Crossbow, Entrepreneur Partner at MPM BioImpact, and a fixture on biotech boards including chair of Arvinas.
Eric Januar is a co-founder and CEO of BANIQL, a Silicon Valley deep-tech startup reinventing how the world pulls nickel and cobalt out of the ground for electric-vehicle batteries. With 12 years in electronics, battery and semiconductor R&D - including a stint at Merck and a prior startup exit - he helped build BEST (the Baniql Extraction SysTem), a low-temperature, low-pressure process that the company says cuts electricity use by roughly 98 percent and reaches 99.7 percent nickel sulfate purity with net-zero toxic waste. BANIQL closed a US$1.6M seed round in 2024 and completed a 100 kg/month pre-pilot plant by year-end.
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.
Mike Stapleton is the Chief Business Officer of QbDVision, the Austin-based software company building a Digital CMC platform for pharma and biotech. He spent three decades moving between the lab bench, the boardroom, and the consulting deck - senior scientist at BP, COO at Accelrys, leader at Life Technologies, PerkinElmer, Merck, Microsoft, and Accenture - before joining QbDVision's board and then stepping in to run its commercial strategy. His argument is contrarian for a software executive: the bottleneck in drug development is not the platform, it is the people willing to standardize how an industry handles its data.
Yang Liu is a cancer immunologist turned serial biotech founder who chairs and runs OncoC4, the Rockville, Maryland company developing next-generation immune checkpoint antibodies. After decades as an endowed professor at NYU, Ohio State, Michigan, and beyond, he co-founded OncoImmune (acquired by Merck for $425M) and then OncoC4, whose lead anti-CTLA-4 antibody gotistobart is in late-stage development with BioNTech. He left full-time academia to take his own discoveries from the bench into patients.
Mathai Mammen is the Chairman, CEO and President of Parabilis Medicines (formerly FogPharma), a Cambridge biotech going after cancer targets long written off as undruggable. A trained physician-chemist who co-founded Theravance out of grad school and later ran R&D at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, he has had a hand in the discovery or development of roughly 19 approved medicines. At Parabilis he is betting on Helicon peptides - engineered molecules that slip inside cells to hit protein-protein interfaces small molecules and antibodies cannot reach.