转载：注册参会 | 2024 BioSpark Annual Meeting

Gordon Freeman, PhD, Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, is renowned for discovering the PD-L1 and PD-L2 proteins. Dr. Freeman showed that PD-L1 and PD-L2 bound to PD-1 to turn off the immune response and that blockade of PD-L1/PD-1 enhanced immune responses.  He further showed that PD-L1 is highly expressed on many tumors and allows these tumors to resist immune attack. Dr. Freeman’s work led directly to the development of a successful strategy for cancer immunotherapy - blocking the PD-1-ligand interaction. Dr. Freeman has published over 400 scientific papers and holds over 90 US patents on immunotherapies. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors, is a Fellow of the AACR and SITC Academies, and has received numerous awards, including the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, and the Richard Smalley, MD, Memorial Award. Dr. Freeman received his Ph.D. degree in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University.

Dr. Feng is the Poitras Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an Investigator and Associate Director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Director of the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research of the Yang Tan Collective at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an Institute Member and the Director of Model Systems and Neurobiology at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Feng’s research is devoted to understanding the mechanisms regulating the development and function of synapses in the brain and how synaptic and circuit dysfunction may contribute to brain disorders. Using genetically engineered animal models, Dr. Feng’s laboratory combines cutting-edge technologies and multidisciplinary approaches to unravel the neurobiological mechanisms of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Feng’s lab is also a leading lab in developing genetic tools and animal models for neuroscience and brain disorder research.

Dr. Feng has won numerous awards for his scientific achievements including Beckman Young Investigator Award, Gill Young Investigator Award, McKnight Neuroscience of Brain Disorders Award, McKnight Technology Innovation Award, and Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award. Dr. Feng is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Feng studied medicine at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in the beautiful city of Hangzhou, China.  He obtained his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo in the laboratory of Dr. Linda Hall and postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis under the guidance of Dr. Joshua Sanes. Prior to joining the faculty at MIT, he was a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology, Duke University School of Medicine.

Manolis Kellis is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT where he directs the MIT Computational Biology Group (compbio.mit.edu). His research is in disease genetics, epigenomics, gene circuitry, non-coding RNAs, comparative genomics, and phylogenetics. He has authored more than 230 journal publications that have been cited more than 115,000 times. He has helped direct several large-scale genomics projects, including the Roadmap Epigenomics project, the comparative analysis of 29 mammals, the human and the Drosophila Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, and the Genotype Tissue-Expression (GTEx) project. He received the US Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT, where he received the Sprowls award for the best doctorate thesis in computer science. He lived in Greece and France before moving to the US. 

Chong is a Partner at F-Prime Capital.  He focuses primarily on biopharmaceutical and medical technology sectors and works closely with the Eight Roads Ventures Asia team to manage portfolio companies and new investment opportunities in China. At F-Prime, Chong has been involved in a number of company formations including as a founding investor of Skyline Therapeutics, K36 Therapeutics, and RareStone Group. Prior to joining F-Prime in 2015, Chong was an associate in McKinsey and Company’s Boston office, a hedge fund healthcare equity analyst with Massif Partners and Affirmed Healthcare, and a researcher focusing on developmental neurobiology at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory in Singapore.

Chong holds a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from University of Virginia and a MBA from Darden School of Business, University of Virginia.  He received his B.S. in biology from Zhejiang University, China.

Erica Wang Esq. is the founding attorney for Veritas Law LLC.  Erica has been working in the legal field for over 25 years.  She is experienced of handling various legal issues in the fields of corporate operation and management, business collaborative transactions, mergers and acquisitions, labor employment, ethics compliance and dispute resolutions in China and the US.  Before founding Veritas Law LLC in Boston in 2024, Erica was the General Counsel of an AI-enabled drug discovery platform technology company, responsible for that company’s legal, compliance and intellectual property matters.  Previously, Erica had acted as General Counsel of Eli Lilly China, General Counsel of 3M Greater China Area and Assistant General Counsel of 3M Global Legal Affairs, as well as the Global General Counsel of Innovent Biologics.  Early in her career, Erica had practiced law in leading global law firms for a total of seven years (at Simmons & Simmons, and Baker McKenzie).

Erica received the Most Influential General Counsel Award of 2023 issued by Chambers and Partners, a world-renowned legal ranking institute.  Erica actively participates in non-profit social activities in China and the US.  She is a Board member of the Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association (New England Chapter).  She participated in the planning of many events for Boston Chinese Investment Club, the University Forum (formerly the Harvard Forum) and other non-profit organizations.  She often spoke at professional legal events, and startup financing platforms.  She also lectured to the Cheung Kong EMBA class on legal topics. Erica wrote a number of legal articles for LexisNexis, and was interviewed by top financial social media accounts frequently.    

Erica graduated from Fudan University Law School and the University of Chicago Law School.  She participated in Harvard Law School’s Visiting Scholar Program.  She is a registered lawyer in New York and Massachusetts.  She also holds the Chinese lawyer’s qualification.  Erica is based in the Boston area currently.  

Frank is currently CSO Partner at Curie.Bio, a founder-focused venture firm that invest in early stage companies to help founders turn their ideas into transformative medicines in a capital efficient way. Prior to joining Curie.Bio, Frank was the Chief Scientific Officer at KSQ Therapeutics, a biotech company that that has built an industry-leading CRISPRomics platform to discover optimal oncology and IO targets, where he advanced the first selective USP1 inhibitor and eTIL programs into the clinic.  Prior to joining KSQ Therapeutics, Frank served as Head of Global Oncology Target Discovery at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), where he was responsible for developing the early oncology drug discovery portfolio. Frank earned his Ph.D. in biology from MIT and was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School.

Isabel Aznarez is senior vice president of Discovery Research and a co-founder at Stoke Therapeutics. Isabel has extensive experience in human genetics, RNA metabolism and modulation of RNA processes using antisense oligonucleotides. Prior to founding Stoke Therapeutics, she was a research investigator with Professor Adrian Krainer, whose lab she joined as a postdoctoral fellow in 2008. Previously, Isabel was a researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children with Professor Lap-Chee Tsui, where she focused on the effect of cystic fibrosis mutations on the splicing of the CFTR gene. Isabel holds a Ph.D. in molecular and medical genetics from the University of Toronto and a B.Sc. in biology and human genetics from the University of Uruguay.

Jeff is a phvsician and scientist and serves as the Chief Scientific Oficer Of ENSEMTherapeutics.He comes to ENSEM with more than 25 years clinical practicetranslational scientific research, and biotech leadership experience in oncology, immuno.oncology,and epigenetics.As anexperienced biotech executive in the drugdevelopment space, Jeff recently served as the Chief Scientific Officer at Epizyme, inc.where he led the company's scientific strategy, including directing preclinical research tosupport the further development of the EZH2 inhibitor, TAZVERIK® (tazemetostat). anoadvancing the company's broader epiaenetic pipeline. He also served as a member ofthe leadership team during its acquisition by lpsen. Prior to joining Epizyme, he servedas Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Incwhere he was responsible for the company's scientific strategy, preclinical developmentand translational science. During his tenure at infinity, the company advanced severaoral Pl3K inhibitors into the clinic. He was also part of the leadership team during theAbbVie partnership and was involved in the licensing of the Pl3K6/y inhibitor.COP|KTRA® (duvelisib) to Verastem Oncology.

Prior to his industry experience, Jeff was an Associate Professor of Pathology at HarvaroMedical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and is board certified inAnatomic Pathology and Hematology. His laboratory at BWH focused on translationamedicine research and biomarker identification in oncology and he is a leading expert incancer biology, with authorship on over 200 journal articles, reviews, and book chaptersJeff received his B.S.in Biology and his M.D., Ph.D.in Medicine and MolecularPathology from Stony Brook University.

Jonathan Dry trained in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Manchester and Bioinformatics at the University of Exeter UK, studying the genetics of type 1 diabetes and AI modelling of protein motifs.  Over 17 years at AstraZeneca he built and managed a 55 person global organisation delivering computational biology and data science for Early Oncology.  He pioneered target biology transcriptomics for precision medicine, new methods for actionable DNA variant detection, and research advancements for knowledge integration and causality in machine learning.  Jonathan is now VP Pharma R&D at Tempus where he is scientific lead for major alliances with big pharma, and leads R&D, new discovery and platform development projects. He has >40 publications in peer reviewed journals in the fields of drug discovery, oncology and computational biology.

Dr. Jun Wang is currently an assistant professor at Department of Pathology and the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center of NYU Langone health who has been working on cancer immunology and immunotherapy for over fifteen years. He finished his postdoctoral research in Dr. Lieping Chen’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Yale Department of Immunobiology. His research interest lies in discovering and understanding novel receptor-ligand pathways with immune-modulatory functions and how to best utilize them as potential targets for cancer immunotherapy. During these years, Dr. Wang developed several genome-scale proprietary screening platforms leading to valuable industrial partnerships, some of which formed the basis of NextCure, Inc. He has discovered several first-in-class targets, such as FGL1/LAG-3 and Siglec-15, which represent novel tumor immune evasion mechanisms and new approaches for cancer immunotherapy. The first-in-human cancer clinical trials targeting the Siglec-15 pathway are currently ongoing at Yale and NYU, in addition to other sites. Moreover, Dr. Wang also examined the mechanisms of anti-tumor efficacy versus liver toxicity of agonistic anti-CD137 (4-1BB) therapy and provided new insights for alleviating liver pathology without disruption of anti-tumor immunity.Moving forward, Dr. Wang is planning to use innovative technologies to identify key mechanisms within the tumor microenvironment in the control of anti-tumor immunity and to design useful next-generation cancer immunotherapies with rational biomarkers.

Kasper Roet, PhD, is CEO and co-founder of QurAlis Corporation. He is also co-founder and serves on the board of directors of EnClear Therapies. Kasper is a passionate neuroscientist and therapy developer who specializes in gene therapies and stem cell technology-based precision medicine solutions for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative diseases. Kasper’s work at the Netherlands Brain Bank emphasized the need for effective treatments for patients and their families. Upon seeing the incredible achievements in stem cell modeling and gene discoveries in ALS, Kasper realized that this is the time to make a real difference for patients. 

He decided to move to Boston from the Netherlands with his wife, and work with two visionary leaders in ALS stem cell disease modeling, Harvard professors Clifford Woolf and Kevin Eggan with whom he co-founded QurAlis to bring breakthrough precision therapies for ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases. Kasper was trained by industry thought leaders at Johnson & Johnson along with forward-thinking scientific and business thought leaders at Harvard University. Kasper obtained his PhD degree at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the Free University of Amsterdam and obtained a master’s degree with honors from the University of Amsterdam. Kasper was awarded the Milton Safenowitz postdoctoral fellowship from the ALS Association. With QurAlis, Kasper won two Golden Tickets (Amgen 2017 and Pfizer 2018), became a JLabs member in 2018, won the Fierce15 Biotech award in 2020, and was awarded the 2022 Henri Termeer Transatlantic Connections Award.  

Leon ‘Jun’ Tang, is the founding partner of InScienceWeTrust BioAdvisory, a business development company focused on the East-West cross-border partnerships in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Tang is also the founder of InScienceWeTrust Community, which has more than 2,000+ members from Asian biotech community. He is also the c-founder and host of Bioverse webinar.

Dr. Tang serves as a scientific advisor to Mianus Capital, a boutique US-based healthcare PE/VC fund currently focused on ophthalmology. He is also an advisor to BioSpark, an Asian biotech professional’s association based in Massachusetts.

Previously, Dr. Tang was a senior director of BD Search & Evaluation at Shanghai Henlius Biotech, a public biotech listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a biotech sell-side analyst at Barclays Investment Bank, and a senior manager/senior analyst at the philanthropic venture fund of Cancer Research Institute of New York.

Dr. Tang has published 50+ academic papers, some of which are in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Lancet Oncology, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Communications, Science Advances, PNAS, etc. Dr. Tang received his bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University, master’s degree from Nankai University, PhD from Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai, and postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. 

As LifeMine’s chief data officer, Lihua brings vast experience in drug discovery from target identification to translational medicine, data science and early clinical development. Lihua is passionate about integrating and applying data science across R&D, partnering with all functions to drive the platform and pipeline forward.

Lihua was previously at FogPharma, where she led the data science function and co-led the company’s discovery platform and new targets. Prior to Fog, Lihua was at H3, where she first served as head of bioinformatics and later as chief data science officer and president. Preceding H3, Lihua was the cancer bioinformatics leader at AstraZeneca Oncology US.

Lihua holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Boston University, studying under Dr. Temple Smith, and an M.E. and B.E. in biomedical engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China

Marian Nakada has more than 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, starting her career at the laboratory bench at Centocor and moving to a research leadership role before Centocor’s acquisition by Johnson & Johnson.  She later transitioned to Janssen business development and later joined JJDC.   

Marian has a A.B. in Biology from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Pennsylvania.  She has authored 62 peer-reviewed publications and 14 book chapters and is a past reviewer for the NIH Pharmacology Study Section.   

She is currently on the Boards of Navitor and a stealth NewCo and is a Board Observer for ONL Therapeutics, Aetion, Iterative Health, Arkuda Therapeutics and Rome Therapeutics.  

Marian is co-founder of IgniteVC where she is working to champion change through its diversity & inclusion efforts. Outside work, Marian is a Board Member at InnerCity Weightlifting whose mission is to amplify the voice and agency of people who have been most impacted by systemic racism and mass incarceration.

Paul joined Alnylam in March 2018 and is responsible for leading the Discovery and Translational Research function. He has overall responsibility for new target identification/validation, biomarkers and all preclinical drug discovery programs. Building on his depth of prior experience, he also leads the Alnylam Human Genetics center which focuses on identification of new drug targets from large genotype-phenotype datasets.

Paul has over 18 years of biotech and pharma experience. He joined Alnylam following a tenure at Amgen and deCODE genetics where he held roles of increasing responsibility. Most recently he was Director of the Translational Systems Biology group and led a large team that was focused on making discoveries from human genetics to influence target selection.

Paul obtained his academic training at the University of Edinburgh (BSc, Pharmacology) and the University of Dundee (PhD, Molecular Biology).

Dr. Qinghong (Avery) Yan is the co-Founder, President and CSO/COO of Leverna Therapeutics, an RNA-targeting startup company. Avery was the Head of Biology at FUSION BioVenture of Fosun Pharma USA. Prior to joining FUSION Bioventure in 2020, she was the Cell and Molecular Biology team lead at the Translational Systems Biology group at Amgen. Avery obtained her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Stony Brook University and completed her postdoctoral research at Columbia University.

Avery has extensive experience in R&D, investment, business development and start-up incubation in biotech and pharma companies. Her drug development experience includes a broad range of modalities including small/large molecule, ASO, siRNA, CAR-T, TCR-T and PROTAC programs. She has a track record of leading projects, closing deals, attracting talents and building teams. 

Avery is also the co-Founder and President of BioSpark Group.

Dr. X. Shirley Liu is the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company with pioneering technologies in novel target identification and antibody drug discovery in Oncology. Dr. Liu received PhD in Biomedical Informatics and PhD minor in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002. She has been a Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Department of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard University, until she joined GV20 full-time in 2022. Her research work focused on algorithm development and data integration modeling for translational cancer research. She has published over 270 papers and has an H-index of 120. Dr. Liu is a fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and was a Breast Cancer Research Foundation Investigator (2017-2021). She is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), Weitzman Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Endocrine Society (2016), ISCB Innovator Award (2020), and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences (2020). Her lab has mentored 27 PhD and postdoctoral trainees to independent academic careers. 

Simon has 20 years of drug discovery experience in top pharmaceutical companies and academic institutes. Simon helped conceptualize the initial scientific strategy for Rgenta and has led the development of the discovery platform since its launch. Prior to Rgenta, Simon was the head of genomics and computational biology group at Abbvie Foundational Neuroscience Center where he established the genomics platform and computational biology function for target discovery and validation. Before Rgenta, Simon was an accomplished scientist and group leader at Pfizer, where he led multiple novel therapeutic targets into Pfizer’s discovery portfolio and established close collaborations with academic institutions. Simon has co-authored more than 30 research publications and is currently an adjunct faculty at Brandeis University and a principal investigator in the GTEx Consortium

Tasuku Kitada is President and Head of R&D of Strand Therapeutics. He co-founded Strand and serves on its Board of Directors. Prior to Strand, Tasuku was Senior Biotechnology Analyst at Candriam Investors Group, where he conducted due diligence for the company’s multi-billion-dollar biopharma public equity investment strategy. At Candriam, he focused on cell and gene therapy companies, and also covered numerous oncology companies. Currently, Tasuku continues to serve Candriam Investors Group as an advisor. Prior to Candriam, Tasuku was a researcher at the Synthetic Biology Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he became the first scientist to create synthetic gene circuits using synthetic mRNA. This was the first demonstration of post-transcriptional circuits that can be “wired” to create a variety of networks of increasing complexity, which enabled cell type specific expression as well as small-molecule based control of gene expression from synthetic mRNA. This important research led to publications in Science, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Chemical Biology. The mRNA synthetic biology platform developed from this research has been exclusively licensed to Strand. Tasuku holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from University of California, Los Angeles and a B.S. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from University of Tokyo.