Leadership
Mike Patane, PhD
President

Mike Patane has 20 years of drug discovery and development experience with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations. Most recently, he was CSO at Eyegate Pharmaceuticals where he focused on the development of ophthalmic products, which included oversight of all R&D, clinical, and regulatory functions. Prior to that, he was Executive Director, Global Discovery Chemistry, at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research where he was responsible for infectious diseases and ophthalmology drug discovery franchises and fulfilled a variety of strategic roles. Previously, Mike was Director, Medicinal Chemistry at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he led drug discovery efforts for their oncology and metabolic disease programs. Earlier in his career, Mike was a Research Fellow in Medicinal Chemistry at Merck & Co. He earned a BS in Chemistry from Fordham University, a PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Southern California, and completed his post-doctoral studies in Synthetic, Natural Products, and Medicinal Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute.
David Williams, PhD
President, NANNA Therapeutics

Bharat Lagu, PhD
Head of Drug Discovery

Domi Stickens, PhD
Senior Director of Translational Science

Lisa Molz
Senior Director of Translational Sciences
Paul Perkins
Controller, Director of Operations

Scientific Advisory Board
Johan Auwerx, MD, PhD
Scientific Founder

Andrew Dillin, PhD
Scientific Founder

Ron Evans, PhD
Scientific Founder

H. Robert Horvitz, PhD
Scientific Founder

Jodi Nunnari, PhD

Mason Freeman, MD

Mason W. Freeman, MD is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and serves as Chief of the Lipid Metabolism Unit and Director of Translational Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Trained in internal medicine and endocrinology, Dr. Freeman has spent twenty years studying the trafficking of cholesterol into and out of macrophages. From 2005-2007, while on a leave of absence from MGH/Harvard, he served as a head of the Novartis Translational Medicine program for Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases as well as the company’s Global Head of Biomarker Development. Dr. Freeman is a Venture Partner at 5 AM Ventures, an early-stage life science venture firm, and in that role he has served as a consultant to multiple life science startup companies. He has contributed to the creation of over 29 companies since 2007, serving on the board of Envoy Therapeutics, a neuroscience company acquired by Takeda in 2012, as well as playing a key medical advisor role at Relypsa, which developed the first chronic oral therapy for hyperkalemia. Dr. Freeman is the editor of the Adult Primary Care lipid section of a leading medical textbook, UpToDate. He graduated from Harvard and received his MD at the University of California, San Francisco. He served as an intern, resident, endocrinology fellow, and Chief Resident in Medicine in the Department of Medicine at MGH. He trained as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Biology Department at MIT where he cloned the first macrophage scavenger receptor to be molecularly identified.