transplant-surgeon
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Ken Drazan
Ken Drazan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio), a South San Francisco clinical-stage company building computationally designed, programmable T-cell therapies to attack solid tumors. A board-certified liver transplant surgeon turned operator and investor, he previously was President and Chief Business Officer of GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), founded the robotic surgery company Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), and co-founded the private equity firm Bertram Capital. At ArsenalBio he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and forged collaborations with Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech, betting that gene-edited 'integrated circuit' T cells - and an AI foundation model of the T cell - can turn cell therapy into something curative for cancers that have resisted it.
Ngoc Thai
Ngoc L. Thai, MD, PhD is a transplant surgeon turned biotech founder who built one of the world's largest pancreas programs before chasing a hunch from a cup of his uncle's tea. As founder, co-CEO and CMO of Pittsburgh-based Imagine Pharma, he is developing IMG-1, a polypeptide first isolated from a Vietnamese tea plant, into therapies that coax insulin-producing islet cells to multiply and regenerate. The company raised a $32.5M Series A in October 2023 to advance IMG-1 across oral delivery, therapeutics, and regenerative medicine platforms aimed at type 1 diabetes, wound healing, and other underserved conditions.