organic-chemistry
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Stefan Pastine
Stefan Pastine is an American chemist, inventor and deep-tech founder who builds materials most people never think about but every device depends on. After earning a PhD in organic chemistry from Columbia and doing postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, he founded Connora Technologies to make recyclable epoxy resins, which was acquired by Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019. That same year he founded Thintronics, a Bay Area startup developing next-generation dielectric insulator films for printed circuit boards and semiconductor packaging. His pitch is deceptively simple: the insulator, long ignored while engineers obsessed over transistors, is the overlooked bottleneck for faster, cooler AI data centers - and Thintronics wants to unseat a Japanese giant that has held 90% of the market for three decades.
Terrence Connolly
Terrence (Terry) Connolly is a chemist-turned-dealmaker who runs K36 Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech chasing a single target: NSD2/MMSET, an epigenetic switch that drives hard-to-treat cancers. A Ph.D. organic chemist who started at the lab bench making molecules at Roche, Wyeth and Celgene, he crossed over into business development at Celgene, closed more than two dozen deals, then ran the business side at Skyhawk and Dragonfly. In 2021 he took the top job at K36, and now steers its lead compounds KTX-1001 (for t(4;14) multiple myeloma) and KTX-2001 (for treatment-resistant prostate cancer) through early clinical trials, backed by a $70 million Series B led by Nextech Invest with Bristol Myers Squibb participating.
Nassim Usman
Nassim Usman is an organic chemist turned biotech operator who runs Totus Medicines, an Emeryville, California company using a DNA-encoded covalent library platform (OmniDEL) paired with machine learning to build small-molecule drugs against targets long considered undruggable. He took the CEO chair in December 2023 alongside a $66 million Series B, and its lead drug, TOS-358, is the first covalent PI3K-alpha inhibitor in the clinic. Over three decades he has moved from bench chemistry on RNA and ribozymes to the top jobs at Sirna Therapeutics, Catalyst Biosciences, and Principia Biopharma, plus a stint as a venture investor at Morgenthaler Ventures.
Joel Barrish
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.
Thomas Sisto
Thomas Sisto is the CEO and co-founder of XL Batteries, a Marlborough, Massachusetts startup commercializing water-based organic flow batteries for long-duration, grid-scale energy storage. A synthetic organic chemist by training, Sisto discovered the company's core molecule during a Columbia University postdoc - a compound he originally designed for solar cells that turned out to be extraordinarily stable in pH-neutral saltwater. He spun XL out of Columbia in 2019 and has since steered it from a lab curiosity to its first commercial pilot, betting that cheap, abundant organic chemicals can break China's grip on the battery supply chain.
Jeffrey Stafford
Jeffrey Stafford is the CEO and co-founder of 858 Therapeutics, a San Diego clinical-stage biotech developing small-molecule cancer drugs against novel targets in DNA-damage repair, innate immunity and RNA epigenetics. A chemist by training, he has spent three decades turning molecules into medicines: his discovery teams contributed to three FDA-approved drugs, and he previously led Jecure Therapeutics (acquired by Genentech in 2018) and co-founded Quanticel Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Celgene in 2015). 858's lead asset, the PARG inhibitor ETX-19477, won FDA Fast Track status and posted a 57% response rate in BRCA-mutated ovarian cancer at ASCO 2026.
Terry Rosen
Terry Rosen is the CEO and co-founder of Arcus Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing combination cancer immunotherapies. A medicinal chemist by training with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Rosen has spent over 30 years at the intersection of chemistry and oncology - from Abbott Laboratories and Pfizer to Amgen, and then co-founding Flexus Biosciences which sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $1.25 billion in 2015. He immediately used that platform to launch Arcus, which has since secured a landmark 10-year partnership with Gilead Sciences and advanced multiple molecules into pivotal clinical studies, including casdatifan, a best-in-class HIF-2α inhibitor showing strong results in kidney cancer.
Sofia Touami
Sofia Touami, Ph.D., is the Chief Business Officer of Lycia Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotech pioneering lysosomal targeting chimeras (LYTACs) - a platform invented by Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi to degrade disease-causing extracellular proteins. A trained organic chemist who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford and did postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute, Touami has built a career as one of biotech's sharpest dealmakers, having orchestrated major transactions including Frontier Medicines' landmark global collaboration with AbbVie before joining Lycia in July 2023. She helped close Lycia's oversubscribed $106.6 million Series C in May 2024, positioning the company to bring its LYTAC-based autoimmune therapies into clinical trials.