rna-therapeutics
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Brian O’Callaghan and the Art of Showing Up
He learned the rules inside global pharma, then chose companies where every arrival matters. At Deep Genomics, Brian O’Callaghan’s job is to turn formidable RNA research into a business that can deliver medicines.
Shehnaaz Suliman built a career by changing the scale of the problem
From Cape Flats protests to Oxford, Wall Street and the biotech boardroom, Suliman kept asking one question: how can one decision reach more people?
Serge Messerlian
Serge Messerlian is the Chairman and CEO of Creyon Bio, a San Diego biotech using AI to design oligonucleotide medicines. A life-science operator with more than 25 years across oncology, hematology, immunology and rare disease, he has led Teon Therapeutics as CEO, run Janssen Oncology as President at Johnson & Johnson, and held senior roles at Actelion, Baxalta and Baxter International. He joined Creyon first as an investor and board member through DCVC Bio, then stepped in as Executive Chairman and Acting CEO in fall 2024 and took the full CEO title in April 2025 as the company prepares to enter the clinic in 2026.
Dominique Verhelle
Dominique Verhelle is a French-born scientist and biotech entrepreneur who co-founded and leads NextRNA Therapeutics, a Boston company building small-molecule drugs that target long non-coding RNA to treat cancers and neurological disorders. With a PhD in life sciences and an MBA in entrepreneurship, she has spent more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and startups - including Celgene, Pfizer, Third Rock Ventures, and Takeda - and helped launch Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics before starting NextRNA. She is also an outspoken advocate for women founders in biotech.
Jacob Becraft
Jacob 'Jake' Becraft is the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, a Boston biotech building the first programmable platform for mRNA medicines. Trained as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he helped invent what he calls a 'programming language for mRNA' - genetic circuits that let a drug make decisions inside the body, switching on only where and when it should. Strand's lead candidate, a self-replicating mRNA that instructs tumors to produce their own IL-12, delivered early complete responses in a first-in-human trial. Becraft has raised more than $400 million to chase the idea that programming biology will be as transformative for medicine as software was for computing.
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.
Karl Ruping
Karl Ruping is the founder and CEO of Tiba Biotech, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company developing biodegradable nanoparticle delivery systems for RNA vaccines and therapeutics. He also runs incTANK Ventures, a seed fund spun out of MIT and Boston-area research labs, and sits at Harvard's Asia Center as an associate working on international patent policy. Lawyer, computational scientist, financier, and operator wrapped into one resume.
Adam Margolin
Adam Margolin is a computational biologist turned biotech founder who co-founded Flashpoint Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company engineering spherical-nucleic-acid nanomedicines that aim to turn weak cancer therapies into curative ones. After a 20-year academic career that took him from Wharton and Wall Street to running the #3-ranked genetics department in the country at Mount Sinai, and a stint as a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures, he teamed with Northwestern nanotech pioneer Chad Mirkin to build Flashpoint. He led the company as founding CEO through a $10M seed round before handing the chief executive role to biotech veteran Barry Labinger in 2025. His mission is deeply personal: his mother died of cancer when he was three.
Örn Almarsson
Örn Almarsson is the co-founder and CEO of Axelyf, an Icelandic-American biotech building next-generation lipid nanoparticles to deliver RNA medicines beyond the liver. Before Axelyf he ran the delivery sciences team at Moderna from 2013 to 2020, helping engineer the components behind the Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, after earlier stints at Merck and Alkermes. A bioorganic chemist by training, he is the co-author of more than 70 publications and over 60 patents, and is now pairing a proprietary lipid library with a machine-learning model called ANNA to crack the hardest problem in RNA medicine: delivery.
Richard Law
Richard Law is the Chief Business Officer of HAYA Therapeutics, the Lausanne- and San Diego-based biotech decoding the 'dark genome' to build RNA-guided medicines that reprogram disease-driving cell states. A computational chemist turned dealmaker with a Oxford PhD in molecular biophysics and an Imperial MBA, he spent over a decade at Evotec, then steered Exscientia through its 2021 Nasdaq IPO, marquee pharma partnerships, and 2024 merger with Recursion before joining HAYA in March 2025 to drive its partnering strategy and growth.