neurodegeneration
(13)
Suchul Jang
He spent a decade engineering tiny vesicles to smuggle drugs where they were needed. Now he is running the American arm of a Korean biotech that wants the brain to clean up after itself - quietly, without the inflammation that has shadowed Alzheimer's drugs for years.
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.
Gerhard Koenig
Gerhard Koenig is the Chief Executive Officer of Augustine Therapeutics, a Belgian-Boston biotechnology company developing highly selective, brain-penetrant HDAC6 inhibitors for neuromuscular, neurodegenerative and cardiometabolic diseases. A neurobiologist by training with more than 30 years in drug development, he has led and co-founded multiple biotechs, including Arkuda Therapeutics, whose portfolio was acquired by Johnson & Johnson, and Quartet Medicine. He stepped up from Executive Chairman to CEO of Augustine in January 2025 as the company moved to enter the clinic, then helped close a large Series A to fund a proof-of-concept trial in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.
J. Robert Coleman
J. Robert Coleman, PhD, MBA, is Chairman and CEO of HERVolution Therapeutics, a Copenhagen-based biotech developing immunotherapies that target human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) - the ancient viral DNA lodged in the dark genome that reawakens in cancer, aging, and neurodegeneration. A trained virologist, he co-founded Codagenix, where he built a synthetic-biology vaccine platform into a clinical-stage pipeline and raised nearly half a billion dollars before pivoting to HERVs in late 2023.
Christin Glorioso
Christin Glorioso, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and serial entrepreneur who is CEO and co-founder of NeuroAge Therapeutics, a San Francisco brain-health company building AI-powered 'aging clocks' for the human brain. Trained at MIT and the Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Medical Scientist Training Program, she spent two decades studying how brains age before leaving academia to turn that research into a diagnostic and drug-development engine. NeuroAge combines MRI brain-volume data, cognitive testing and proprietary RNA blood biomarkers - validated on data from more than 500,000 people - to estimate brain age and dementia risk decades before symptoms. She also founded the nonprofit Longevity Global and led the world's top-ranked US COVID-19 forecasting model in the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge.
Scott Greenberg
Scott Greenberg is the Chief Business Officer of Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco building small-molecule drugs to stop nerves from dying. He joined in February 2025 to steer business development and corporate strategy as the company pushes its lead SARM1 inhibitor, NB-4746, into the clinic. He arrives with more than two decades crossing the line between finance and biology - a Goldman Sachs banking start, more than a decade at Celgene, an operations leadership role at Roivant Sciences, and a stint as Chief Operating Officer at Aro Biotherapeutics. He studied both Finance and the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania before an MBA at Harvard.
Andrew Dervan
Andrew Dervan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cajal Neuroscience (Cajal Therapeutics), a Seattle biotech that launched in 2022 with $96 million to rethink how drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases are discovered. A Harvard-trained physician with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Yale, he spent years leading cell therapy and immuno-oncology business development at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb. Unusually for a biotech CEO, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington, evaluating people with adult-onset neurological conditions.
Joanne Kotz
Joanne Kotz is a chemist-turned-biotech-CEO who runs Atalanta Therapeutics, a Boston company using divalent siRNA to silence disease-causing genes throughout the brain and spinal cord. She took the top job in June 2025 after co-founding and leading Jnana Therapeutics from a blank slate to a roughly $1 billion acquisition by Otsuka. Before founding companies she helped build them from the science up, as a director at the Broad Institute, a leader of F-Prime's neurodegeneration initiative, and the founding editor of Nature Chemical Biology. Her career runs an unusual loop: bench scientist, science journal editor, partnership architect, founder, and now CEO of a company chasing some of the hardest diseases in the central nervous system.
Ron Cohen
Ron Cohen, M.D., is a biotech entrepreneur with a 30-year record of building companies that ship medicines for the nervous system. He founded Acorda Therapeutics in 1995 from his apartment and grew it into a public company that brought multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's therapies to market. After Acorda's sale to Merz in 2024, he evaluated roughly two dozen startups before taking the CEO seat at Oryon Cell Therapies in March 2026, a Belmont, Massachusetts company developing autologous neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's. He is a past Chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO).
Shilpa Sambashivan
Shilpa Sambashivan is the CEO and a co-founder of Nura Bio, a South San Francisco biotech building brain-penetrant small molecules that aim to stop nerves from dying. A protein biochemist by training, she helped spin the company out of academic labs in 2018, built its R&D engine as Chief Scientific Officer, and was elevated to CEO in September 2024 alongside a $68M Series A extension that pushed total funding past $140M. Her lead drug, NB-4746, blocks the SARM1 enzyme that triggers axon self-destruction.
Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Asa Abeliovich
Asa Abeliovich is a physician-scientist turned serial biotech founder who spent two decades at the lab bench at Columbia before deciding the only way to get his ideas into patients was to start companies. He co-founded Alector, founded and sold Prevail Therapeutics to Eli Lilly for about $1 billion, and now runs Leal Therapeutics, a Worcester startup chasing a contrarian idea: that fixing the brain's broken metabolism can treat everything from schizophrenia to ALS to Alzheimer's. Leal spent over two years in stealth before surfacing with a clinical-stage pipeline and roughly $114 million raised.
Jennifer Cygan
Jennifer Cygan is a seasoned biotech executive and Chief Business Officer at EpiBiologics, where she helps advance a pipeline of novel bispecific antibodies designed to selectively degrade extracellular protein targets in oncology and immunology. With a Ph.D. from Harvard and over two decades of business leadership in biotechnology, she has been a pivotal force at Genentech, Calico Life Sciences (managing a $2.5B AbbVie alliance), and has co-founded and served as CBO for multiple emerging biotech companies including Broadwing Bio, Eikon Therapeutics, GenEdit, and Plexium. Her career sits at the intersection of science and strategy - translating cutting-edge biology into deals, partnerships, and companies that matter.