An Experienced Team of Precision Oncology Experts

Neha brings over 12 years of experience in healthcare investment banking and finance. Neha joined us from Goldman Sachs where she served as a vice president in the Healthcare Investment Banking Group and a member of the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Group within the Investment Banking Division. While at Goldman Sachs, she established herself as a senior leader in the healthcare coverage group, working with a variety of biopharmaceutical boards and management teams on a broad range of strategic financial matters, executing financings as well as leading M&A transactions. Neha has successfully executed over $100 billion in transactions in the biopharmaceutical, medical technology, and tools/diagnostics sectors. She is currently on the Arcutis Biotherapeutics, Inc. Board of Directors and serves as a member of their Audit Committee. She holds a BSE in Biomedical Engineering and Economics from Duke University.

Mark joined us from Audentes Therapeutics where he was Senior Vice President and General Counsel and helped lead its sale to Astellas Pharma. Prior to joining Audentes, he was Executive Vice President and Chief Business Development and Legal Officer at PaxVax where he led the company’s Legal, Compliance, Government Affairs and Business Development functions and helped lead its sale to Emergent BioSolutions. Mark also held senior legal positions at Biogen and Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, and served as Counsel at the global law firm Bingham McCutchen (now part of Morgan Lewis), where his work focused on mergers and acquisitions, venture capital financing, securities regulation and general corporate matters. Mark holds a BA from Yale University and a JD from Boston College Law School.

Richard brings over a decade of global clinical strategy and drug development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry to Kinnate. Prior to joining our team, he was Chief Medical Officer and Global Head of Oncology Programs at WuXi NextCODE where he was responsible for leading the clinical development of large-scale genomics and target biomarker discovery programs. Prior to WuXi NextCODE, he was with cancer detection company GRAIL as Group Medical Director and Program Lead of the Circulating Cell-Free Genome Atlas (CCGA), the largest-ever prospective study of circulating nucleic acids in cancer. He also guided the development of early clinical oncology assets as Head of Early Development Oncology Group and Early Development Leader at Amgen. While Senior Medical Director at Puma Biotechnology, Richard led the Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials in metastatic breast cancer and lung cancer for the development of the targeted cancer therapeutic Nerlynx® (neratinib). He was also a clinical hematology and oncology fellow, and later an NIH-funded faculty member at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital where he focused on translational biology and therapeutics studies within the molecular oncology and hematological malignancies programs. Richard has co-authored 60 publications in high impact clinical, translational & basic research journals including NEJM, Nature and Cancer Cell, and is the coinventor on 2 patents. He holds an MBBS and PhD as well as a BMedSc from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Robert brings a wealth of experience in drug discovery, medicinal chemistry and precision oncology to Kinnate. Prior to joining us, he spent more than 20 years in various senior roles at Pfizer, where he was most recently, Senior Director, Design Chemistry. Other positions he held at the pharma company were Senior Director of Cancer Chemistry, Project Leader and Scientist. While at Pfizer, he is a coinventor for a number of FDA-approved precision oncology therapies including Inlyta® (axitinib), Lorbrena® (loratinib) and Xalkori® (crizotinib). Robert has published nearly 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and holds 19 patents in drug development-related areas. He holds a PhD and MA in Organic Chemistry from Harvard University and a BS in Chemistry from University of California, Berkeley.

Jill DeSimone brings more than 40 years of global business expertise in life sciences to Kinnate’s board. Most recently, she served as President of U.S. Oncology at Merck & Co., Inc., where she established the company’s oncology division, growing it from less than $500 million in annual revenue to $9 billion in just eight years. She led three key product launches and more than 45 indication launches, including Keytruda®. Prior to joining Merck, Ms. DeSimone was Senior Vice President of Global Women’s Health at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd., where she built its first global business unit. Ms. DeSimone began her career at Bristol Meyers Squibb and held roles of increasing responsibility culminating as the Senior Vice President of U.S. Oncology, a role in which she helped launch the first FDA-approved CTLA-4 immune checkpoint inhibitor, Yervoy®.

Ms. DeSimone currently serves as a board member for Oncternal Therapeutics, a clinical-stage oncology company, Affini-T Therapeutics, an immune oncology cell therapy company, the Florida Cancer Specialists Foundation, a nonprofit organization that delivers non-medical aid for individuals undergoing treatment for cancer, and Praxis Precision Medicines, Inc., a clinical-stage company focused on development of therapies for the central nervous system.

She earned a B.S. in pharmacy from Northeastern University and completed a fellowship with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Melissa Epperly is a senior financial operating executive with nearly two decades of life sciences corporate development and financial experience. Ms. Epperly is currently CFO at Zentalis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNTL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing small molecule therapeutics targeting fundamental biological pathways of cancers. Prior to her current position, she served as CFO of PsiOxus Therapeutics Ltd., a clinical-stage gene therapy cancer company. Prior to that, Ms. Epperly served as CFO and Head of Business Development at R-Pharm US, a commercial-stage oncology company. She previously served as a Director at Anchorage Capital Group, a credit-focused hedge fund; a Vice President at Goldman Sachs in equity research in New York and London where she built GS SUSTAIN; and a management consultant with Bain & Company. She began her career at Morgan Stanley in New York in healthcare investment banking.

Ms. Epperly holds a B.A. in Biochemistry and Economics from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Dr. Keith Flaherty is Director of Clinical Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. As described in the more than 300 peer reviewed primary research reports he has authored or co-authored, Dr. Flaherty and colleagues made several seminal observations that have defined the treatment of melanoma when they established the efficacy of BRAF, MEK and combined BRAF/MEK inhibition in patients with metastatic melanoma in a series of New England Journal of Medicine articles for which Dr. Flaherty was the first author. Dr. Flaherty also has been a leader in assessing and identifying mechanisms of de novo and acquired resistance to BRAF inhibitor therapy and clinically evaluating next generation inhibitors, work that has had implications for resistance to targeted therapy regimens used to treat other malignant diseases. He is the principal investigator of the NCI MATCH trial, the first NCI-sponsored trial assigning patients to targeted therapy independent of tumor type on the basis of DNA sequencing detection of oncogenes. He serves ECOG as chair of the Developmental Therapeutics Committee and in 2013 was appointed as ECOG Deputy Chair for Biomarker Science. Dr. Flaherty joined the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors in 2018 and AACR Board of Directors in 2019. He serves as editor-in-chief of Clinical Cancer Research.

Carl L. Gordon, PhD, CFA, is a founding Partner and Co-Head of Global Private Equity at OrbiMed. For the last six years (2014 to 2019) Forbes® Magazine named Dr. Gordon one of the top 100 venture capitalists in the world when it placed him on the “Forbes Midas List”. He received a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1993) and a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Harvard College (1987), and was a Fellow at The Rockefeller University from 1993 to 1995.

Dr. Michael Rome joined Foresite Capital in 2016 and is active in the firm’s private and public market investments. Michael is a board director at Kinnate Biopharma with board observer roles (past and present) at Turning Point Therapeutics, Maze Therapeutics, Pharvaris, PACT Pharma, and Nurix Therapeutics. He has also led/co-led investments in several public companies across the Foresite portfolio. Prior to Foresite Capital, he was an analyst at DAFNA Capital Management, covering and formulating investment ideas for small/mid-cap biotech companies.

Michael previously worked in early-stage drug development for an academic start-up out of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. He received his PhD in Biochemistry from Caltech as an NSF graduate research fellow, and his BS in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology from UCLA. He has more than 12 years of experience as a research scientist and has authored numerous publications in biomedical research journals.

Dr. Sabzevari is currently President and CEO of Precigen, Inc., a dedicated discovery and clinical stage biopharmaceutical company. At Precigen, Dr. Sabzevari is leading discovery and development of the next generation of gene and cell therapies using precision technology to unmet medical needs in the areas of immuno-oncology, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases.

Prior to Precigen, Dr. Sabzevari was co-founder and chief scientific officer of Compass Therapeutics, a fully integrated drug discovery and development company focused on manipulating the immune system to treat human disease. Prior to Compass Therapeutics, Dr. Sabzevari was senior vice president of immuno-oncology at Merck Serono (a subsidiary of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany), where her pioneering efforts led to the foundation of Merck Serono’s immuno-oncology translational innovation platform for developing and advancing therapies, including cancer vaccines, cancer stem cell treatments and approaches to reset the immune system so that it is primed to eliminate cancer cells. Prior to Merck Serono, Dr. Sabzevari led the Molecular Immunology Group at the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology at the US National Cancer Institute (LTIB-NCI), where she was focused on design, development and delivery of novel vaccines and immunotherapies for a range of human cancers.

Dr. Sabzevari has been author or senior author on over 40 scientific publications and has been the recipient of the Mass High Tech’s Women to Watch Award, the PharmaVOICE 100 Award and the NIH Merit Award for major contributions to the field of cancer immunotherapy. Most recently, Dr. Sabzevari received the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Team Science Award for her work on the NCI Cancer Immunotherapy Program Team.

Dr. Sabzevari received her Ph.D. in cell and molecular immunology and completed her postdoctoral work at the department of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute working on various immunotherapeutic modalities in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Laurie Smaldone Alsup, M.D. has more than 30 years of biopharmaceutical leadership experience in clinical drug development, global regulatory strategy, and product approvals across multiple therapeutic areas including cancer, rare disease and immunologic disorders. She currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Medical Officer of NDA Group, a regulatory and product development consulting firm. Prior, she was President and CSO of PharmApprove, a scientific communications consultancy and President and CEO of Phytomedics. During her 20 years at Bristol Myers Squibb she had leadership roles of increasing responsibilities in cancer and infectious diseases clinical development including Senior Vice President of Global Regulatory Science, co-chair of the Brand Development Operating Committee, where she was responsible for late-stage development and commercialization, and Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Business Risk Management. She currently serves on the board of directors at Arvinas Inc., Blackberry Limited, and Theravance Biopharma.

Dr. Smaldone Alsup holds a B.A. in biology from Fordham College and an M.D. from the Yale School of Medicine, where she completed her residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Medical Oncology.

Jim Tananbaum is the founder and chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, a U.S.-focused healthcare investment firm founded in 2011 that has approximately $3 billion in assets under management. Jim assembles the people, ideas and money needed to launch products that save lives and improve healthcare. He is always looking for visionaries: men and women with insights into therapeutics, devices, diagnostics or services that could, with the right support, change the world.

During the last three decades Jim has been a thought partner for some of the most impactful and fastest growth companies of their generation including: 10x Genomics (Nasdaq: TXG), Amerigroup (Nasdaq: ANTM), and Jazz Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: JAZZ).

Since high school, Jim has had two main areas of interest: 1) mathematics and computer algorithms and 2) biology and healthcare. Since founding Foresite Capital, Jim has been optimistic about the merger of these two previously very different fields. His intent has been to place Foresite Capital, its resources and networks at the frontier of this data-driven revolution, and to help build transformative healthcare companies that will significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of the entire U.S. healthcare system.

As an undergraduate, Jim attended Yale, where he graduated with a BS and BSEE in Applied Math and Electrical Engineering/Computer Science.  He then earned an MD from Harvard and graduated from the Harvard/MIT HST Program.  He also earned an MBA from Harvard while playing rugby.

Jim’s first success came while he was still at Harvard Business School when he co-founded GelTex Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq:GENZ). For less than $80 million in funding, GelTex brought two drugs to market. The company was acquired in 1999 for $1.4 billion when its lead drug, Renagel (later renamed Renvela), had an annual revenue run rate exceeding $19.5 million. Decades later, Renvela still has annual sales estimated over $850 million. Jim was the founding chief executive of Theravance, Inc. Under his tenure he raised over $350M. Theravance has since split into two parts, one of which is now part of GSK’s respiratory franchise through a joint venture, Innoviva (Nasdaq: INVA), and the other was spun out into Theravance Biopharma, Inc. (Nasdaq: TBPH). Together, they have a combined market capitalization that reaches almost $3 billion as of July 2020.

Jim’s investment experience includes being a co-founder of Prospect Ventures and earlier in his career, a partner of Sierra Ventures, where he established its healthcare services investment practice.