Tom Large

Tom Large is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals, a Waltham, Massachusetts startup hunting for the next generation of medicines for brain disorders. A neurobiologist by training, he spent two decades inside big pharma - leading neuroscience research at Eli Lilly and running preclinical research and translational medicine at Sunovion - before launching Blue Oak in 2016 to chase drugs with genuinely new mechanisms for bipolar depression, schizophrenia and treatment-resistant depression. His teams pioneered a target-agnostic approach to CNS drug discovery, and he later partnered with AI specialist Exscientia to design 'bispecific' small molecules that hit two targets at once.