small-molecules
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Craig Gibbs Has Spent a Career Turning Lab Logic Into Biotech Momentum
From a protein-engineering bench to the CEO seat at Vivace Therapeutics, Craig Gibbs has built a career around one stubborn question: how does promising biology become a drug program that can actually move?
Adam Friedman
He took the name from the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation. Now Adam Friedman is betting a Boston biotech, and up to $1.9 billion in deals, on drugging the targets everyone else called impossible.
Sofie Qiao
Sofie Qiao, Ph.D. is a chemist-turned-biotech-founder who has built a career at the intersection of hard science and dealmaking. Trained in organic chemistry at Harvard and MIT, she founded LEAD Therapeutics (acquired by BioMarin in 2010, source of the PARP inhibitor Talazoparib now sold by Pfizer), ran WuXi Ventures, and then founded and led Vivace Therapeutics from 2015 to 2026, raising more than $100 million to advance first-in-class small molecules targeting the Hippo/YAP-TEAD pathway in cancer. She now leads Virtuoso Therapeutics, another company she founded.
Phil Vickers
Phil Vickers is President and CEO of Solu Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech building small-molecule 'chimeras' that ferry cytotoxic payloads to disease-driving cells. He arrived in September 2023 after runs at Faze Medicines and Northern Biologics, and R&D leadership at Shire, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Pfizer and Merck. In April 2025 he closed a $41M Series A with Eli Lilly, Pappas Capital and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of STX-0712 for CMML.
Dennis X. Hu
Dennis X. Hu is the founder and CEO of Drug Hunter, a subscription knowledge platform that distills the science behind new medicines for more than 200 R&D institutions, including most of the world's top pharma and biotech companies. A medicinal chemist by training, he led small-molecule teams at Genentech and the biotech RAPT Therapeutics (where he helped invent the Phase II oncology candidate tivumecirnon) before turning a side project into a fully remote company of 20+ employees that reaches millions of searches a year and runs entirely on subscription revenue.
Felix Wong
Felix Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Integrated Biosciences, a Redwood City biotech using synthetic biology, optogenetics and explainable AI to discover small-molecule drugs for age-related disease. A physicist and mathematician by training with a Harvard PhD in applied physics, he led the team that reported the first new structural class of antibiotics discovered with explainable deep learning - published in Nature in 2023 - and pioneered the AI-driven discovery of senolytics. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare and has authored more than 30 papers in journals including Nature, Science and Cell.
Jordi Mata-Fink
Jordi Mata-Fink is the co-founder and CEO of Gate Bioscience, a Brisbane, California biotech building an entirely new class of small-molecule drugs called Molecular Gates. The idea is deceptively simple and technically audacious: instead of chasing disease-causing proteins after they leave the cell, Gate's molecules park inside the cell's secretory channel (Sec61) and selectively stop a single harmful protein from ever getting out, while letting everything else pass. A chemical engineer trained at Stanford and MIT, Mata-Fink spent years inside Flagship Pioneering helping spin up companies like Editas and Rubius before founding Gate in 2021. The company emerged from stealth in 2023 with $60M, and in November 2025 raised an oversubscribed $65M Series B led by Forbion with Eli Lilly joining, pushing total funding to $135M as it heads toward the clinic. He coaches youth soccer on the side.
Michael Foley
Michael Foley is a medicinal chemist turned serial biotech founder who is now CEO and co-founder of Excelsior Sciences, a New York company building 'chemistry that machines can do.' His proprietary 'smart blocc' building blocks let robots and AI run iterative carbon-carbon bond formation in a closed loop, aiming to collapse the wall between drug discovery and manufacturing. Foley has founded multiple biotechs, ran the Broad Institute's Chemical Biology Platform, and was founding CEO of the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute. Excelsior launched with $95 million in 2025.
Chris Varma
Chris Varma, Ph.D., is Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Frontier Medicines, a clinical-stage biotech attacking cancer's 'undruggable' proteins using chemoproteomics, covalent chemistry, and machine learning. A serial biotech founder with 20+ years in life sciences, he previously co-founded Blueprint Medicines (acquired by Sanofi for $9B+ in 2025) and Warp Drive Bio (acquired by Revolution Medicines in 2018), and held investor roles at Third Rock Ventures, Flagship Pioneering, and MPM Capital. His career spans the FDA, Novartis, and three successful company builds - with Frontier Medicines now advancing FMC-376, a first-in-class dual KRAS G12C inhibitor, through Phase 1/2 clinical trials.