SLAS Ignite Showcase 2021

Michelle is a Professor and Department Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. Her lab focuses on chemical biology of protein-protein interaction networks and other challenging targets in diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. She recently co-founded two startup companies based on these programs. Michelle also co-directs the UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC), which works with investigators in academics, biotech, and pharma to develop first-in-class probes and drug leads for novel targets across therapeutic areas. She is the President of the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium and a Director of SLAS. Before UCSF, Michelle was the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover inhibitors of protein-protein interactions, including IL-2/IL-2R and LFA1/ICAM (lifitegrast).

Elizabeth (Ela) Mirowski started as an SBIR/STTR program director in May 2020. Before NSF, Ela was a Founder and CEO of Verellium, a medical device startup. At Verellium she built strong collaborative partnerships across industry, academia, and federal labs to develop novel solutions for clinical imaging that resulted in new products and new market segments. She also worked for High Precision Devices (HPD) where she successfully transferred several technologies into prototypes and commercialized them, creating a standalone, revenue-generating company, QalibreMD, in just three years. As a principal investigator on SBIR grants from various federal agencies, Ela led the program direction including research, engineering, manufacturing, and market development. In addition to these activities, she engaged in fundraising from venture capital and private equity sources. For more than 17 years, Ela worked for and consulted to small businesses managing the development of technologies involving photonics for displays, semiconductor electronics, renewable energies, nanomaterials, and lab-on-chip platforms for evaluating neural growth and biological processes at the single-molecule level. Ela holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Colorado, a B.A. in Chemistry from Columbia University, and completed a National Research Council post-doctorate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Kursad Araz is a co-founder and CTO of Correlia Biosystems. At Correlia, Kursad is part of a team working to expand the power of proteomics for data-driven biology utilizing advancements in microfluidics, automation and computational technologies. Previously Kursad was a postdoctoral researcher in UC Berkeley Bioengineering Department where he was the lead inventor of Correlia's ANDI gel technology through a collaboration with Novartis. Kursad completed his PhD at Cornell University developing MEMS and microfluidic technologies for biological applications. His work has been the recipient of several best student paper and presentation awards.

Maddalena Adorno, PhD is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dorian Therapeutics, Inc. and the main inventor of the senoblocker technology.

Before founding Dorian, Maddalena completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University studying Stem Cell and Aging Biology. She was then awarded a Siebel fellowship and received two grants to further advance her research. During her 15 years spent in Academia, she published 13 papers in high-impact journals including Nature, Cell and Science, and her discoveries in stem cell biology were considered amongst the most important research at Stanford University in 2013. In 2014, she co-founded StemGuard, Inc., a biotech company developing neuroprotectors for degenerative diseases. She is also an inventor on several patents in cancer biology, aging and degenerative diseases. In 2019 she was an invited speaker at the Time 100 Health Summit where she presented senoblockers as novel potential therapeutics for aging.
Maddalena received her M.Sc. in Medical Biotechnology magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in Biomedicine from University of Padova, Italy. Before moving to US, she also served for two years on the executive board of the National Italian Association of Biotechnologists (ANBI).

Jesus Soriano is Program Director of the NSF Partnerships for Innovation program. Previously, Jesus served as SBIR/STTR Program Director for Biomedical and Smart Health Technologies since 2012, when he joined NSF after 20 years of international experience in executive leadership in the biopharmaceutical and non-profit sectors, start-up formation and funding, technology commercialization, and academic teaching and research. Prior to NSF, he was the Senior Advisor to the Puerto Rico Trust for Science, Technology and Research, a technology-based development organization. Previously, he was Executive Vice President at QRxPharma, Ltd., a clinical-stage specialty pharmaceutical company focused in pain management and central nervous system disorders. Before, he was Senior Director of Business Development at Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. Previously, he held several executive leadership positions at the global bioresource center ATCC, including Vice President for IP, Licensing and International Business Development, and was Associate Director for R&D Operations and Business Development at Entremed, Inc, a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company developing therapeutics for the treatment of cancer. Jesus began his career as a family doctor in Spain; he then worked at the University of Geneva Medical School, Switzerland initially as Research Scientist and then as Assistant Professor. He initially came to the US as a visiting scientist to the National Cancer Institute (NIH) under an advanced researcher fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He holds a MBA in Corporate Finance from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School; a Ph.D. in Medical Sciences from the University of Geneva, Switzerland; and a M.D. from the University of Alicante, Spain.

Cathy has many years’ experience of leading drug discovery programs from target validation through to patients. She is a pharmacologist and has been involved in, and has led teams which created over 13 marketed products and many candidate compounds. She gained her PhD at University College London and lead groups and projects focused on pre-clinical through to clinical drug discovery for GlaxoSmithKline. Cathy led the development of academic-industry drug discovery at Imperial College London and subsequently at University of California San Francisco (UCSF). At UCSF Cathy led the Innovative Catalyst translational program, supporting the succesful development of novel therapeutic, diagnostic, digital health and device products to exits such as licenses, start-up company formation and partnerships. In April 2018, Cathy joined Takeda to lead academic alliances and the development of academic Start-up companies in collaboration with Takeda .
Cathy is also a Visiting Scholar at Stanford ChEM-H contributing to Stanford SPARK and Adjunct Associate Professor Bioengineering & Therapeutics at UCSF.
Enabling the translation of novel academic science to patients is Cathy’s mission.

Sarah Lively, Senior Director, External Innovation, Discovery, Product Development & Supply (DPDS), is located at the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in South San Francisco, California. In this role, she has overall strategic and operational responsibility for the scouting and evaluation of external opportunities for DPDS in Western North America, Australia and New Zealand across all synthetic drug modalities. She provides transactional support from a scientific and strategic perspective for DPDS-driven deals and assists the Therapeutic Area Innovation Leads with her scientific and technological expertise. Sarah also partners with the JLABS organization to identify and foster start-up companies that are aligned with DPDS strategy.

Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Sarah was VP of Innovation and New Technology at ChemPartner, a global discovery CRO organization for which she set up and managed US lab operations and led initiatives to broker partnerships with academic institutes for early stage therapeutic discovery. She also introduced novel versions of B-cell cloning and DNA-encoded library (DEL) technologies to ChemPartner. Sarah has more than 20 years of experience in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries and has taken the lead in various small molecule discovery programs across a range of therapeutic areas, most notably at Tularik and Amgen.

Sarah is a skilled medicinal chemist and holds a Bachelors in Chemistry from Loughborough University and a Ph.D. in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Dr. Pace has over thirty years of experience in the life science field, with 20 years legal and corporate experience and 12 years in biotech research for large and small companies. He is a registered patent attorney with a record of over 40 issued US patents. Since 2001 he has helped many early and development stage companies in the life sciences with their strategic, intellectual property, and transactional activities. Dr. Pace has held executive management positions in several companies, including Novartis Corporation, Gentris Corporation, Quill Medical, Inc., and BASF Corporation. Dr. Pace has a J.D. degree from the School of Law at North Carolina Central University, and his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University. He has been CEO at Cell Microsystems since 2014.

Ethan O. Perlstein is a biotech entrepreneur, company builder, evolutionary pharmacologist, and cure sherpa. Ethan received a PhD in 2006 from Harvard University (Department of Molecular and Cell Biology) while working in the laboratory of Professor Stuart Schreiber. He completed an independent postdoctoral fellowship at the Lewis-Sigler Institute at Princeton University from 2007 to 2012. Since its founding in 2014, he is founder and CEO of Perlara PBC, the first biotech PBC partnering with highly motivated families to develop cures for genetic diseases. Ethan is CEO of Maggie's Pearl, a joint venture co-owned by Perlara and a PMM2-CDG family that will launch a Phase 2/3 trial of epalrestat for the treatment of PMM2-CDG, a congenital disorder of glycosylation, in the coming months.

David Fuller is the co-founder and CEO of Artificial who is developing a first-of-its-kind software stack and tools to empower labs to close the loop from scientific intent to reliable results for AI-driven and Cloud-ready lab orchestration.   David has over 25 years of experience in industrial automation and software platforms.  He has held positions in business and technology in such fields as Measurement and Automation where he was the VP of SW R&D at National Instruments.  While at NI, the tools and platforms he built provided the foundation for unique systems as diverse as the CERN hadron collider and SpaceX ground control.  He and several of the technical team now at Artificial, along with many others at NI, partnered with LEGO to build LEGO Mindstorms a low-code tool for kids of all ages to program LEGO robots.  After NI, David focused on Industrial Robotic and Logistic systems as CTO of the KUKA Group and the Managing Director of KUKA Robotics. KUKA is the number one global supplier of high throughput robots for Automotive production.  He received his BS in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M and in 2011 was recognized by the Texas Academy of Medicine & Engineering for Technology Innovation. He holds 42 patents.  He is driven by a love of technology that has a clear positive impact on society.