Redirecting the fibroblast-immune conversation to develop impactful therapies for patients

Ton Logtenberg is the founder and former President and CEO of Merus N.V., a Nasdaq-listed clinical-stage biotechnology company advancing leading-edge, targeted treatments based on multi-specific antibodies to address the unmet needs of cancer patients. Ton was founder and CEO of U-BiSys, which merged with Introgene to become Crucell, where he served as Chief Scientific Officer responsible for the discovery and development of vaccines and antibodies. Ton co-founded the HUB foundation for organoid technology and served on the board of directors and supervisory board. Recently, Ton co-founded and was appointed CEO of Gyes B.V., a biotech company exploring a next generation platform for therapeutic multispecific antibodies. He is currently Chairman of the Board of Synox Therapeutics, Board member of the Forbion European Acquisition Corporation, and Venture Partner at Forbion. Ton has a PhD in immunology from Utrecht University and did  post-doctoral work at Columbia University with Dr. Frederique Alt. Ton was a professor of Immuno-Biotechnology at Utrecht University, where he is currently professor in Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences.

Susan Hill joined Mestag from Gyroscope Therapeutics, where she was Chief Business Officer and helped drive the company’s $62m Series B. Previously she was founding Chief Executive Officer of Orbit Biomedical ($12m Series A) and Chief Business Officer of Freeline Therapeutics. Susan served in the Business & Corporate Development team at Alexion (ALXN), and spent eight years at Merck Serono in a series of Corporate & Business Development and Portfolio Management roles. Susan began her career in strategy consulting/M&A, followed by three years leading biotech seed investments. She has an MA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is a previous Fellow of the Securities Institute.

Houman Ashrafian is Managing Partner at SV and he co-leads SV’s Biotech franchise, which has a long history of building high value, successful new companies and bringing transformational drugs from discovery to market. He joined SV in 2016 as a Venture Partner, was promoted to Partner in 2017 and became a Managing Partner in 2018. He has founded five SV companies – Sitryx, Enara Bio, Zarodex, TrexBio, Alchemab and Catamaran Bio. Houman serves on the Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) Investment Committee and as a Director of Karus Therapeutics. He also serves on the boards of Therini, Imbria, Quell and Prilenia. Previously, Houman co-founded the services company Cardiac Report in 2003, as well as Heart Metabolics in 2008. Heart Metabolics successfully repositioned perhexiline as a treatment for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and heart failure. Perhexiline is now in advanced clinical trials and has orphan drug designation. He went on to become Vice President and Head of the Clinical Science Group at UCB Pharma. Additionally, Houman is co-founder and Chairman of Weatherden, a boutique clinical development company.

Kate Bingham, Managing Partner at life sciences venture capital firm SV Health Investors, co-leads SV’s biotech franchise, which has a long history of building companies developing transformational new medicines. SV’s investments have resulted in the launch of twenty drugs for inflammatory and autoimmune disease, blindness and cancer. In 2021 Kate was awarded a DBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services as Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, where she led a team of world-class experts with the shared purpose of finding and manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines. Kate is a board member of the Francis Crick Institute and helped launch the Dementia Discovery Fund. She has a first class degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and an MBA from Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar).

Fiona MacLaughlin is a Senior Director, Venture Investments, at Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, inc., the strategic venture arm of Johnson & Johnson. Prior to joining JJDC, Fiona was a Director at Inkef Capital, where she led both pharma and MedTech investments and held Board seats in a number of portfolio companies. A qualified pharmacist, Fiona is passionate about helping early-stage companies establish a value-building trajectory by engaging and challenging management and creating optimal development plans. Fiona began her career in biotech focusing on the development of non-viral gene therapy and other novel delivery solutions. A fundamental interest in philanthropy led her to the Wellcome Trust and a focus on translational funding, including establishing a fund to support the development of affordable healthcare technologies in India. Fiona’s transition to venture investing began with a move to Advent Life Sciences, where she was involved in helping shape and build a number of early-stage companies including Arrakis Therapeutics.

Juliette Audet is Partner at Forbion, based out of the Netherlands. She sits on the investment committee of the Ventures strategy, investing in therapeutics companies from preclinical stage to clinical POC. In addition to serving as a board member of Mestag Therapeutics, she currently serves as a board member for New Amsterdam Pharma and Gyes, and as an observer for Sitala. Prior to joining Forbion, Juliette was a Principal at the Novartis Venture Fund based in Boston. There, she sat on the boards of TScan Therapeutics,  Annexon Biosciences and Forma Therapeutics as an observer. Juliette was also leading the management NVF’s public equities. Before that, Juliette was a Senior Manager of Strategy at Novartis AG, where she worked with the senior executive team of the Pharma division. Juliette spent the first years of her career in management consulting at McKinsey and Company focusing on pharma and biotech, based out of the Swiss and then New York offices. Juliette graduated with distinction from Harvard Business School (MBA) and received her MSc in physics (Suma Cum Laude) from EPFL (Lausanne, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

Issi Rozen is a Venture Partner at GV, where he primarily focuses on the formation of new companies and early-stage investments. Issi is an experienced biotech executive and a serial entrepreneur who co-founded multiple start-ups, including GV portfolio company Verve Therapeutics. Previously, Issi spent a decade at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he was the Institute’s first Chief Business Officer and a member of the Executive Leadership Team. At the Broad, Issi led the creation of the Office of Strategic Alliances and Partnering and was responsible for developing innovative scientific and business collaborations, initiating and establishing new ventures around novel technologies and overseeing strategy and licensing of the Institute’s intellectual property portfolio. Issi played a key role in the creation and spin-out of over 20 start-ups from the Institute. Prior to joining the Broad, Issi led strategy and business development efforts at a number of biotech companies. An accomplished jazz guitarist, Issi is also a former professor at Berklee College of Music. He earned his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Diana Bernstein is a Vice President at Northpond Ventures on the firm’s biotechnologies team. Previously, Diana was a Senior Associate at MRL Ventures Fund, the corporate venture fund of Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK), investing in early-stage human therapeutics companies. Prior to that, she was an Associate at Flagship Pioneering, leading projects to conceive and build platform-based therapeutics companies. Diana also spent time at Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals (now Leadiant Biosciences) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. She received her PhD in pharmacology from University of Pennsylvania, and a BS in finance and BS in cell biology and molecular genetics from University of Maryland, College Park.

Neil Weir is CEO of Sitryx, a biotech in the field of immunometabolism. Prior to Sitryx, Neil was SVP, Discovery at UCB, overseeing an integrated portfolio of small molecule and antibody projects in immunology and neurology. He and his teams transitioned 33 new chemical entities into development in immunology and oncology as well as bone and neurology, including the marketed medicines Cimzia, Besponsa and Romosozumab. He was an inventor of Cimzia® and dual-signalling domain chimeric receptors now known as second generation CAR-Ts. Neil served as chair of the board of Beryllium BioSciences in Boston and as a non-exec member of the boards of the RNA Medicines company (Boston) and Ondek (Perth). Neil chaired the UK ABPI innovation board from 2012 to 2018, has been involved in various MRC advisory board positions, and was a member of the steering board for the German federal government’s Neuroallianz consortium.

Prof. Brenner is the Brigham Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Human Immunology Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. He is co-chair of the NIH-FNIH RA/SLE Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) consortium. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Lee C. Howley Prize for Research in Arthritis (Arthritis Foundation), the Distinguished Basic Investigator Award (American College of Rheumatology) and the Carol-Nachman Prize in Rheumatology. Michael’s laboratory and The Human Immunology Center he leads, design and implement high dimensional immunophenotyping, single cell transcriptomic analyses and functional studies to deconstruct human autoimmune disorders. Using a combination of single cell technologies and functional models, his current work is defining new stromal subsets, their roles in synovial pathology, and how to target them therapeutically.

Chris Buckley is Kennedy Professor of Translational Rheumatology at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. Chris received a degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford with subsequent undergraduate training in medicine (MBBS) at the Royal Free Hospital, London. His postgraduate medical training was in general medicine and rheumatology at the Hammersmith Hospital, London, and John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Chris obtained a DPhil at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford. He subsequently joined the Department of Rheumatology in Birmingham, was awarded an MRC Senior Clinical Fellowship and in 2002 became Arthritis Research UK Professor of Rheumatology. In 2012 he was appointed Director of the Birmingham NIHR Clinical Research Facility. In May 2017 Chris took up a new joint academic post between the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford as Director of NIHR Infrastructure in Birmingham for Birmingham Health Partners to Direct the Arthritis Therapy Acceleration Programme (A-TAP). In 2021 he moved to the Kennedy Institute as Director of Clinical Research. He has given the Heberden Oration at the British Society of Rheumatology, the Paul Klemperer Lecture (Arthritis Foundation) at the American College of Rheumatology and is the recipient of the Carol-Nachman Prize in Rheumatology, the Albert-Hasinger Lecture and Prize in Immunology and the William Harvey Medal for Medicine.

Mark Coles is Kennedy Professor of Immunology, Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Sciences, and Official Fellow, Reuben College, University of Oxford. Mark graduated with a BSc (Honors and Distinction) in microbiology from Cornell University in 1992. He completed his PhD in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. David Raulet. His research focused on natural killer cell receptor expression and function on T lymphocytes (NKT and CD8 T-cells). He undertook post-doctoral training with Prof. Dimitris Kioussis at the National Institute of Medical Research, London, investigating mechanisms leading to lymph node and thymus formation and function. In 2006, he moved as a lecturer to the Centre for Immunology and Infection at the University of York focusing on stromal immunology to identify stromal cell formation and function in human and murine lymph nodes and tertiary lymphoid tissue using fluorescent lineage reporters. In 2017, he moved from the University of York to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, where his groups use interdisciplinary approaches from single molecule imaging to multi-scale computational modelling to identify novel methods to therapeutically target immune mediated inflammatory disease with a specific focus on stromal immunology. He co-directs the Oxford Mathematical Immunology Group focusing on tissue pharmacology and immuno-physiology in cancer and inflammatory disease. He works closely with Prof. Christopher Buckley to support the Arthritis Therapy Acceleration Program (A-TAP).

Soumya Raychaudhuri is Professor of Medicine & Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School. He serves as the Director for the Center for Data Sciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School and is appointed as an Institute Member at the Broad Institute. He is clinically active and sees patients at the BWH Arthritis Center. After completing his MD/PhD at Stanford University, Soumya pursued clinical training in internal medicine, and then went on to pursue subspecialty training in rheumatology at BWH. He concurrently completed post-doctoral training in human genetics at the Broad Institute with Dr. Mark Daly. Since joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 2010, he has contributed to the understanding of the genetic basis of rheumatoid arthritis and other immune-mediated diseases. He has also been at the forefront of devising statistical and computational methods to localize genetic association signals to causal variants, and to interpret human genetic data in the context of functional information. He currently has active research programs in the human genetics and functional genomics of a wide range of human diseases including rheumatoid arthritis. He has been striving to define the key cell-states and their function driving inflammation in these diseases, including the inflammatory fibroblast.

David Tuveson is Director of the Cancer Center and the Roy J. Zuckerberg Professor of Cancer Research, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Chief Scientist at the Lustgarten Foundation and Past-President of AACR. David obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at M.I.T., followed by an MD and PhD at Johns Hopkins. He was a medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a medical oncology fellow at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. During his post-doctoral years in Boston, David co-developed KIT inhibitors for gastrointestinal stromal tumors with Dr. George Demetri. Simultaneously, he generated several widely used mouse cancer models with Dr. Tyler Jacks. As an independent investigator, David’s lab developed the first mouse models of ductal pancreatic cancer at the University of Pennsylvania. Subsequently, he was recruited to the University of Cambridge, UK, where his lab identified poor drug delivery as a barrier for therapeutic efficacy in pancreatic cancer. He was then recruited to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) as the Deputy Director of the Cancer Center and to serve as Director of Research for the Lustgarten Foundation. At CSHL, his lab co-developed pancreatic organoid cancer models with Dr. Hans Clevers, and made a series of observations regarding cancer fibroblasts, redox regulation and pancreatitis. His awards include the Rita Allen Award, the Jan Waldenström Award and the Hamdan Award. He was elected to the ASCI, AAP and the National Academy of Medicine.

_{©Len Marks Photography, 2021/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}

Prof. Jaffee is an internationally recognized expert in cancer immunology and pancreatic cancer.  She is Deputy Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Co-Director of the Skip Viragh Pancreatic Cancer Center, and Associate Director of the Bloomberg Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Her research focus is on developing novel immunotherapies for the treatment and prevention of pancreatic cancer.

Prof. Jaffee is a Past President of AACR. She has served on a number of committees at the National Cancer Institute, including the co-chair of the Biden Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel which identified high impact research priorities for the NCI.  She currently serves as Chief Medical Advisor to the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.  She is the inaugural director of the Convergence Institute for Integrating Technologies and Computational Sciences at Johns Hopkins.  Prof. Jaffee is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the SITC Academy of Immuno-Oncology and a Fellow of the AACR Academy. Most recently, she was appointed as chair of President Biden’s Cancer Panel.

Dr. Theresa Podrebarac, MD, MSc, is a physician scientist with extensive development expertise in the biotech industry. At Horizon Therapeutics, Dr. Podrebarac leads the clinical development function dedicated to bringing medicines for rare, autoimmune and severe inflammatory diseases to patients. Prior to Horizon, Dr. Podrebarac served as chief medical officer at three biotech companies focusing on rare diseases and gene therapy.  She was also vice president, immunology clinical development, at AbbVie, where she helped develop approved therapies for psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, atopic dermatitis and rheumatoid arthritis. At Biogen, she championed the development of several compounds in early development that became first in human trials, and has had multiple filing experiences in multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. Podrebarac holds an MSc in immunology from the University of Ottawa, an MD from Western University and was a postdoctoral fellow in Immunology at Harvard University. She was board certified in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology.