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.
Paul Blanchfield is the CEO of Alpha-9 Oncology, a Boston-based clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company developing targeted alpha and beta therapies for cancer. He took the top job in November 2025 after running Lantheus as President, following earlier operator stints at Takeda and Shire and a five-year run at McKinsey.
Asit Parikh is a physician-scientist turned biotech chief executive who runs MOMA Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company built around the idea of systematically drugging molecular machines - the highly dynamic, shape-shifting proteins that most drug hunters avoid. An MD-PhD trained at Vanderbilt with clinical roots in gastroenterology, he spent two decades at Millennium and Takeda, where he helped steer the inflammatory bowel disease drug vedolizumab (Entyvio) from research to global blockbuster, before taking the CEO seat at MOMA in 2021. He has since raised a $150 million Series B and signed a roughly $2 billion partnership with Roche to push precision cancer medicines toward the clinic.

Heidi Gillmore is a commercial leadership executive at TerSera Therapeutics, the Deerfield, Illinois specialty pharmaceutical company she helped build from its 2016 inception. Across roles spanning marketing, strategy, business development and running TerSera's US oncology business, she has helped turn a portfolio of 'one-and-only' therapeutics, including the prostate and breast cancer drug Zoladex, into a durable commercial enterprise. A University of Northern Iowa graduate with a University of Chicago credential, she sits on the board of the Illinois Biotechnology Innovation Organization and has spent her career taking specialty and orphan medicines from acquisition to market.
Vincent Ling is the Chief Business Officer of Morphocell Technologies, a Laval-based regenerative medicine company building iPSC-derived engineered tissues to treat severe organ dysfunction, starting with liver disease. A biotech and pharma veteran of three decades, he spent 12 years at Takeda's Center for External Innovation, where he identified and backed the Kariko-Weissman mRNA platform out of the University of Pennsylvania - the science that became the first COVID mRNA vaccines and earned the 2023 Nobel Prize. He has held leadership roles at Genetics Institute, Adnexus Therapeutics, and Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, and advises the Gates Foundation and academic institutions.