physician-scientist
(28)
Karl Beutner Spent 350 Trials Learning What Biotech Founders Usually Learn Too Late
Before he became a biotech founder, Karl Beutner built a practice, ran more than 350 clinical trials and helped guide over a dozen products to approval. DermBiont is the latest chapter in a career spent turning small, testable decisions into durable progress.
Mani Subramanian Is Building His Second Act Around the Cell's Power Bill
After helping annotate genomes and guide five Gilead therapies to approval, the physician-scientist left the large-company machine to build OrsoBio - a small team making a careful wager on how cells spend energy.
Stan Wang Bet on an Organ Most People Forget. Then Came the $140 Million Deal.
A physician-scientist spent years turning the overlooked thymus into an engineering problem. His path from Akron to Cambridge, the NIH and Harvard ended in a deal - but the longer experiment is only beginning.
Sekar Kathiresan Bet His Career on a One-Time Idea
A history major became a cardiologist, a geneticist, and then a first-time founder. His wager was simple to say and difficult to build: turn lessons from naturally protective genes into medicines designed to work once.
Ahmet Tutuncu Has Spent 30 Years Fixing the Last Inch of Medicine
A physician-scientist turned three-time respiratory founder, Ahmet Tutuncu keeps returning to an unfashionable question: what good is a sophisticated drug if its delivery device gets in the way?
Chris Apfel Is Building a Second Opinion for the Tumor Itself
The physician-scientist behind a globally used clinical score is now betting that live tumor evidence can make cancer treatment decisions less abstract, one microtumor at a time.
Senan Ebrahim
Senan Ebrahim is the founder and CEO of Delfina, a San Francisco digital health company using AI and data science to improve pregnancy care and close gaps in maternal health. A physician-scientist with an MD and a PhD in computational neuroscience from Harvard, he founded Delfina after witnessing a preventable stillbirth during medical training. He earlier founded Hikma Health, a nonprofit building free health-data tools for refugee and low-income patients. Delfina raised a $17M Series A in early 2025 led by U.S. Venture Partners.
Jan Witowski
Jan Witowski is the co-founder and CEO of Ataraxis AI, a New York precision-medicine company building AI models that read cancer tissue to predict how a patient's disease will behave and which treatments will help. A physician-scientist with an MD and PhD, he spent a decade in medical imaging research at Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and NYU Langone before spinning Ataraxis out of NYU in 2023. The company's first product, Ataraxis Breast, is billed as the first AI-native prognostic and predictive test for breast cancer, and it raised a $20.4 million Series A in 2025 led by AIX Ventures.
Allison Luo
Allison Luo, MD is the Chief Medical Officer of Mirador Therapeutics, a San Diego precision-medicine company that launched in 2024 with more than $400 million to attack immuno-fibrotic diseases using its Mirador360 development engine. A physician scientist with more than two decades in clinical development, she was CMO of Prometheus Biosciences before Merck bought it for $10.8 billion, and has since reassembled with that team to build Mirador. She sits on the board of Triveni Bio and has held medical-leadership roles across Ventyx, Biora, Iveric Bio and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Belinda Tan
Belinda Tan is a physician-scientist turned serial founder who builds the missing evidence layer for wellness. An MIT-trained, UCLA MD/PhD dermatopathologist, she co-founded Science 37 to pioneer decentralized, telemedicine-enabled clinical trials, then launched People Science, a Los Angeles public-benefit company she co-leads with her husband Noah Craft. Her mission: bring the rigor of the randomized trial to the things people already use - probiotics, traditional Chinese medicine, food-as-medicine, psychedelics - so wellness can be backed by data instead of marketing.
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.
Maria Artunduaga
Maria Artunduaga is a Colombian-born physician-scientist, inventor and founder and CEO of Samay (formerly Respira Labs), a Mountain View medtech startup building a wearable plus AI platform that uses patented acoustic resonance to monitor lung function at home. She walked away from a plastic surgery residency at the University of Chicago after losing her grandmother Sylvia, taught herself engineering, and turned a kitchen-table idea into a company that has won the world's most competitive medtech accelerator and landed her on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders list. She holds an MD, an MPH and an MTM, has collected dozens of prizes, six issued patents, and publications in Nature, NEJM and PNAS.
Asit Parikh
Asit Parikh is a physician-scientist turned biotech chief executive who runs MOMA Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company built around the idea of systematically drugging molecular machines - the highly dynamic, shape-shifting proteins that most drug hunters avoid. An MD-PhD trained at Vanderbilt with clinical roots in gastroenterology, he spent two decades at Millennium and Takeda, where he helped steer the inflammatory bowel disease drug vedolizumab (Entyvio) from research to global blockbuster, before taking the CEO seat at MOMA in 2021. He has since raised a $150 million Series B and signed a roughly $2 billion partnership with Roche to push precision cancer medicines toward the clinic.
Charles R. Bridges
Charles R. Bridges, M.D., Sc.D., is Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at CorVista Health, where he leads the science behind a machine-learning cardiac diagnostic platform. A cardiac surgeon turned engineer-executive, he holds an A.B. in applied physics from Harvard, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School (which he entered at 18), and both an M.S. in electrical engineering and a D.Sc. in chemical engineering from MIT. He was the first African American full professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, served as a technology chief at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen, and in 2022 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. His record spans 175 peer-reviewed publications, 15 patents, and more than $10 million in continuous NIH funding.
J. Eduardo Rame
J. Eduardo Rame is a Philadelphia cardiologist who treats the sickest hearts in medicine - patients in the final stage of heart failure who depend on pumps, transplants and the chance their own muscle can be coaxed back to life. As the Louis R. Dinon MD Professor and enterprise chief of Advanced Cardiac and Pulmonary Vascular Disease at Jefferson Health, he runs an integrated division built around recovery rather than replacement. Yale-trained in biophysics, Oxford-trained in health economics and Harvard-trained in medicine, he spent a decade founding Penn's mechanical circulatory support program before bringing that work to Jefferson. His research on left ventricular assist devices, including the landmark MOMENTUM 3 trial, has been cited more than 12,000 times.
J. Gene Wang
J. Gene Wang is a physician-scientist and the founder and CEO of Immetas Therapeutics, a biotech he co-founded in 2018 with Harvard's David Sinclair to attack the chronic, low-grade inflammation that drives aging and age-related cancers. Trained with an M.D. from Peking University and a Ph.D. in immunobiology from Yale, Wang spent roughly two decades inside Merck, Abbott, GSK, and Novartis, where he helped move blockbuster drugs like Humira, Gardasil, Zolinza, and Varubi from lab bench to patients. At Immetas he is engineering bispecific antibodies designed to retune inflammation inside the tumor microenvironment and break resistance to checkpoint immunotherapy, backed by an $11M Series A from Morningside Ventures.
Vivek Lal
Dr. C. Vivek Lal is a physician-scientist turned founder who runs resbiotic, a Birmingham-based wellness company building clinically tested probiotic and prebiotic supplements on a 'Gut-X Axis' platform. A double board-certified neonatologist who directs the Pulmonary Microbiome Lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Lal turned more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and NIH-funded lab work into a string of companies, including the drug-development firm Alveolus Bio and the pediatric chain Urgent Care for Children. In September 2025, resbiotic closed an $8 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $14.5 million.
Perry Nisen
Perry Nisen is a physician-scientist and CEO of Quanta Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotech building next-generation oral KRAS inhibitors for RAS-driven cancers. A former pediatric oncologist turned pharma executive, he ran the GSK oncology portfolio later acquired by Novartis for over $16 billion, led the Sanford Burnham Prebys research institute, and serves on Teva's board. He now chases the 'undruggable' mutations that drive a quarter of all human cancers.
Zhen Su
Zhen Su is the CEO of Marengo Therapeutics, a Cambridge biotech reprogramming T cells to wake up the immune system against cancer. A physician-scientist with nearly three decades in oncology, he ran a billion-dollar global cancer franchise at Merck KGaA, helped deliver eight regulatory approvals as CMO of EMD Serono, and now steers Marengo's STAR platform into the clinic on the back of a $2.8B Ipsen partnership.
Jacob Donoghue
Jacob Donoghue is a physician-scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Beacon Biosignals, a Boston company applying machine learning to EEG brain data to build neurobiomarkers for psychiatric, neurological, and sleep disorders. Trained with an MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in neuroscience from MIT, he started Beacon in 2019 on the bet that decades of overlooked brainwave recordings could be turned into a precision-medicine engine for drug development and diagnosis. Under his leadership the company has raised over $116M, secured FDA clearance for a wearable EEG headband, acquired home sleep-testing firm CleveMed, and partnered with more than half of the world's top ten biopharma companies.
Michelle Longmire
Dr. Michelle Longmire is the co-founder and CEO of Medable, the leading platform for agentic AI in clinical development. A Stanford-trained physician-scientist who grew up in a Los Alamos nuclear-research family, she pivoted from dermatology to founding Medable in 2015 after hitting enrollment walls in her own clinical research. Under her leadership, Medable has raised over $500 million in venture capital, deployed its platform in roughly 400 trials across 70 countries in 120 languages, and served more than one million patients globally - transforming how the world runs clinical trials.
Eric Green
Eric Green is the Founder and CEO of Trace Neuroscience, a South San Francisco biotech company racing to develop the first effective ASO therapy for ALS. A Harvard-and-Stanford-trained physician-scientist with a background in cardiology, Green co-founded iLab Solutions (acquired by Agilent), Respira Design (Stanford $50K Challenge winner), and Maze Therapeutics before launching Trace with a $101 million Series A in November 2024. Trace's lead program targets UNC13A - a protein lost in ALS patients - using an antisense oligonucleotide designed to restore healthy nerve-muscle communication. With clinical trials targeting early 2026, Green is betting human genetics can do for ALS what it did for heart failure.
Jorge Dimartino
Jorge F. DiMartino, M.D., Ph.D., is Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Clinical and Translational Development at Plexium, a San Diego-based biotech pioneering targeted protein degradation. A physician-scientist trained in genetics, immunology, and pediatric oncology across UC Berkeley, Cornell, UC San Diego, and Stanford, DiMartino has spent over two decades advancing cancer drugs from bench to bedside. His fingerprints are on three now-marketed therapies: vismodegib, venetoclax, and enasidenib - each a breakthrough in its own right. At Plexium, he oversees clinical programs targeting SMARCA2, IKZF2, CDK2, and CRAF using the company's DELTA Discovery platform, a novel approach to degrading proteins previously considered undruggable.
Josh Lehrer
Josh Lehrer is a physician-scientist and biotech executive serving as CEO of Marea Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company harnessing human genetics to develop first-in-class medicines for cardiometabolic diseases. A cardiologist by training with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and UCSF, Lehrer brings over two decades of drug development experience spanning Genentech, Global Blood Therapeutics (where he oversaw the FDA approval of Oxbryta for sickle cell disease), and Graphite Bio. At Marea, he has led the company from a Third Rock Ventures incubation to a $190 million-funded enterprise with two clinical-stage programs showing strong early efficacy data, including a 53% reduction in remnant cholesterol with MAR001 published in The Lancet.
Pavan Cheruvu
Dr. Pavan K. Cheruvu is the President and CEO of Bitterroot Bio, a Palo Alto-based biotech pioneering the field of cardio-immunology — the intersection of the immune system and cardiovascular disease. A Rhodes Scholar, board-certified cardiologist, and physician-scientist who trained at Duke, Oxford, Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, Cheruvu is guiding Bitterroot Bio's lead program BRB-002 — a first-in-class CD47-targeting therapy for atherosclerosis — through clinical development after a landmark $145M Series A in 2023 and positive Phase 1 results in 2025.
Ron Alfa
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.
Hal Paz
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.
Tom Cahill
Thomas J. Cahill, MD, PhD is the founder and managing partner of Newpath Partners, a Boston-based life sciences venture firm he built from the ground up to translate breakthrough academic science into medicines. A structural biologist trained under two Nobel laureates, Cahill has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies — including Prime Medicine, Chroma Medicine, and Autobahn Therapeutics — and became one of the pandemic's most consequential behind-the-scenes operators when he assembled Scientists to Stop COVID-19, a coalition that fed curated research directly to the White House and helped redirect Regeneron's manufacturing to Dublin.