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John Maraganore and the promotion he tried to refuse
He wanted to stay in the laboratory. A reluctant move into business led to nineteen years running Alnylam - and a new chapter building companies, backing founders, and knowing when to hand over the keys.
Andy Orth Knows the Hard Part Comes After the Breakthrough
The City Therapeutics CEO has spent a career translating new science into organizations that can move - with a bias for shared purpose, quick decisions and the unglamorous work that follows discovery.
Akin Akinc
Akin Akinc is the founding CEO of Aera Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building a new way to deliver genetic medicines using human protein nanoparticles derived from the body's own retroelements. A chemical engineer by training, he spent nearly two decades at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where he helped invent the lipid nanoparticle delivery that produced ONPATTRO, the world's first approved RNAi therapeutic, and later ran the Givlaari and fitusiran programs. Recruited by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, Akinc launched Aera out of stealth in 2023 with $193 million to tackle what he calls genetic medicine's single greatest unmet need: delivery.
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.
Dee Datta
Dee Datta, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Switch Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company pioneering conditionally activated siRNA (CASi) molecules to treat neurodegenerative diseases and other conditions with significant unmet need. With a PhD from Caltech, an MBA from Stanford, and a career spanning venture capital at The Column Group and Longitude Capital, corporate development at Forty Seven Inc., and the C-suite at XOMA, Datta brings rare scientific depth and dealmaking fluency to one of the most ambitious RNA medicine platforms in the field. Switch raised a $52 million Series A in March 2023 and in late 2024 named its first development candidate - CASi-APOE, a brain-targeted, liver-sparing RNAi therapy aimed at the 60% of Alzheimer's patients who carry the APOE4 gene variant.