small-molecule
(7)
Steven Everett
Steven Everett is a biotechnology executive and cancer scientist who founded MaveriX Oncology in Palo Alto, California, where he serves as President and CEO. With a background rooted in more than two decades of cancer research at the University of Oxford, University of Dundee and UCSF, he has built his career around a single idea: making cancer drugs that switch on only inside tumors. At MaveriX he is developing conditionally activated small-molecule therapeutics that exploit hydroxylase biology in the tumor immune microenvironment, aiming to hit cancer hard while sparing healthy tissue.
Shengfang Jin
Shengfang Jin is a co-founder and the President and CEO of Ensem Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech developing small-molecule cancer drugs by targeting protein pockets that only exist while the protein is in motion. Under Jin, Ensem built its Kinetic Ensemble platform, took its first CDK2 inhibitor into the clinic, and its ETX-636 breast cancer program earned FDA Fast Track designation. She trained at Tufts and Harvard, spent years at Agios helping deliver first-in-class cancer metabolism drugs, and then ran discovery biology at Editas before starting Ensem.
Stewart Campbell
A. Stewart Campbell, PhD, is the CEO of Vertero Therapeutics, the Woburn, Massachusetts biotech formerly known as Axial Therapeutics. A medicinal chemist by training with more than 30 years in drug discovery, he runs a company built on an unusual bet: that the road to treating Parkinson's disease starts in the gut, not the brain. Campbell joined in 2017, took the top job in February 2021, engineered the 2025 rebrand from Axial to Vertero, and is steering the lead candidate VT-5006, a gut-selective small molecule, into its first clinical trials. He is a co-inventor on more than 20 patent families, including the foundational patents behind the approved graft-versus-host disease drug Rezurock.
Han Lim
Han Lim is the Chief Business Officer of DeepCure, a Boston-based company building an end-to-end automated platform for small molecule drug discovery that pairs AI with a virtual library of a quintillion synthesizable compounds, robotic synthesis, and automated assays. A physician-scientist by training, he holds a medical degree from the University of Queensland, a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and did postdoctoral physics research at MIT before spending roughly a decade on the UC Berkeley faculty running a lab in systems biology and bioengineering. He helped build the first generation of AI drug discovery companies as Chief Business Officer at Atomwise, where he launched the internal pipeline, raised $168M across two rounds, and signed partners including Eli Lilly and Charles River Laboratories. He now leads business development, portfolio planning, and corporate strategy at DeepCure.
Jean Cui
J. Jean Cui is a medicinal chemist who has invented three FDA-approved cancer medicines and now runs the biotech she founded to do it again. As scientific founder, President and CEO of BlossomHill Therapeutics in San Diego, she designs small molecules built to outmaneuver the resistance mutations that defeat earlier drugs. Her crizotinib, lorlatinib and repotrectinib all began as chemistry problems she solved at the molecular level. In 2024 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Her track record includes co-founding Turning Point Therapeutics, which Bristol Myers Squibb bought for $4.1 billion.
Markus Renschler
Markus Renschler is a medical oncologist turned biotech operator who runs Light Horse Therapeutics, a San Diego small-molecule drug discovery company that launched in January 2025 with a $62 million Series A and a Novartis deal worth up to $1 billion. He spent 25 years moving cancer drugs from the lab bench to the pharmacy counter, helped register blockbuster therapies in breast, lung and pancreatic cancer at Celgene and Pharmion, and previously took Cyteir Therapeutics from a discovery-stage startup to a publicly traded company. He trained at Princeton and Stanford and once built patient-specific lymphoma vaccines in Ron Levy's lab.
Margo Georgiadis
Margo Georgiadis is CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering and co-founder & CEO of Montai Therapeutics, a biotech company using AI to discover drugs from natural compounds humans have consumed for centuries. A Harvard double-alumna (Phi Beta Kappa undergrad, Baker Scholar MBA), she has reinvented herself across industries - from McKinsey partner to Google Americas President, Mattel CEO, Ancestry.com CEO (overseeing its $5B sale to Blackstone), and now biotech pioneer building a platform that turns ancient botanicals and foods into precision medicines for chronic disease.