targeted-therapeutics
(9)
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.
Ability Biotherapeutics
Ability Biotherapeutics (also known as Ability Biologics) is a Montreal-based biotech founded in 2023 that engineers highly selective, immune-cell-modulating antibody therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune disease. Its AbiLeap discovery engine pairs continuously learning AI with one of the largest antibody-antigen interaction databases ever assembled to generate fully human, IgG-based multispecific antibodies that sense their environment and act only where intended - so-called logic-gated therapeutics. Backed by US$18M in seed capital led by Amplitude Ventures, the company is advancing a pipeline of immuno-oncology and autoimmune candidates toward preclinical readiness.
CatenaBio
CatenaBio is a UC Berkeley spinout building a next-generation bioconjugation platform for targeted cancer therapies. Its proprietary CysTyr platform uses an engineered enzyme, Catenase, to forge a site-specific bond between cysteine and tyrosine residues (the C-Y Bond) using only native amino acids. This lets the company attach multiple different drug payloads to a single antibody, producing Multi-Payload Conjugates (MPCs) designed to overcome tumor resistance where conventional single-payload ADCs fall short.
Jason Gardner
Jason Gardner is the CEO of Ampersand Biomedicines and a CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering, where he leads a Boston-area biotech programming biologic medicines that act only at the site of disease. A Cambridge- and Oxford-trained scientist turned operator, he previously co-founded and ran Magenta Therapeutics through its IPO and spent years building GSK's Regenerative Medicine Unit. He is betting that the next generation of drugs will not just be potent but precise - going exactly where they are needed and nowhere else.
Luis Alvarez
Luis Alvarez is the founder and CEO of Theradaptive, a Frederick, Maryland biotech engineering proteins that latch onto implants and surgical materials to trigger the body to regrow bone, cartilage, and other tissue exactly where it is needed. A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and MIT-trained biological engineer, he traced the idea back to a combat tour in Iraq, where soldiers under his command lost limbs to delayed amputations. Theradaptive has since won multiple FDA Breakthrough Device Designations, raised more than $43 million, and moved its lead protein, AMP2, into human clinical trials.
Marco Lobba
Marco Lobba is a chemist turned CEO who co-founded CatenaBio (Catena Biosciences), a UC Berkeley spinout building a new way to staple proteins together. Trained in the labs of Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and chemist Matthew Francis, he turned a graduate-school enzyme trick into the CysTyr platform, where an engineered enzyme called Catenase forges a durable tyrosine-cysteine bond - the C-Y Bond - to assemble multi-payload conjugates that single-molecule chemistry could not. He was named to the San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40 in 2025.
Solu Therapeutics
Solu Therapeutics is a Boston-based clinical-stage biotech building a new class of medicines that selectively kill disease-driving cells. Its proprietary CyTAC (Cytotoxicity Targeting Chimera) and TicTAC (Therapeutic Index Control Targeting Chimera) platforms fuse the precise binding of small molecules with the cell-killing power of antibodies, reaching cell-surface targets - like GPCRs and ion channels - that traditional antibodies cannot. Its lead program, STX-0712, is a CCR2-targeting candidate in a Phase 1 trial for chronic myelomonocytic leukemia and other advanced blood cancers.
Michael Boretti
Michael Boretti is the Chief Business Officer of Solu Therapeutics, a Boston biotech building a new class of cell-killing medicines on its CyTaC (Cytotoxicity Targeting Chimera) platform licensed from GSK. A bioengineer-turned-dealmaker with roughly two decades in biopharma, Boretti leads business development, strategic financing and alliance management. His earlier stops include CBO of Celsius Therapeutics, VP of Business Development at Epizyme, and VP of Corporate Development and Alliance Management at AVEO Oncology, where he helped shape partnerships with Astellas, Novartis and Janssen. He holds a B.S. in engineering science from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ampersand Biomedicines
Ampersand Biomedicines is a Boston-area biotech founded by Flagship Pioneering that builds programmable biologic medicines designed to act only where disease lives. Its computational Address, Navigate, Determine (AND) Platform maps the body for ideal localization targets and designs AND-Body Therapeutics that anchor at a disease site and conditionally switch on biology there, aiming to widen the therapeutic window and cut the off-tissue side effects that limit conventional drugs.