rna-interference
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Alicia Secor
After three decades turning complex science into operating companies, Alicia Secor has taken on a new translation problem: helping Paratus turn lessons from evolution into a disciplined pipeline of medicines.
City Therapeutics
City Therapeutics is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company engineering the next generation of RNA interference (RNAi) medicines. Founded by pioneers of the RNAi field, including former Alnylam CEO John Maraganore and Nobel-adjacent academic scientists, the company designs novel siRNA trigger molecules and targeting ligands intended to make RNAi drugs more potent, more specific, and able to reach tissues beyond the liver. Launched in October 2024 with a $135M Series A and backed by a further $99.5M Series B in 2026, City is advancing a pipeline led by CITY-FXI for thromboembolic disease and CITY-RBP4 for Stargardt disease, alongside research collaborations with Biogen and Bausch + Lomb.
Atalanta Therapeutics
Atalanta Therapeutics is a Boston-based biotechnology company pioneering RNA interference (RNAi) therapies for diseases of the brain and spinal cord. Its proprietary divalent small interfering RNA (di-siRNA) platform is engineered to silence disease-causing genes durably and broadly across the central nervous system - long the hardest place in the body to reach with RNAi. Founded out of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School by leaders in the RNAi field, including Nobel laureate Craig Mello, the company is advancing wholly-owned programs in KCNT1-related epilepsy and Huntington's disease toward the clinic, alongside collaborations with Biogen and Genentech.
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.