PANEL 3 • 1:00 – 2:00pm
The AI Revolution in Rare Disease Drug Development
Claire Aldridge, Ph.D. is Chief Strategy Officer for Form Bio, the first spinout from the de-extinction and biodiversity company, Colossal Biosciences. Prior to this role, she was Senior Vice President, Chief of Staff and Corporate Strategy at Taysha Gene Therapies, a Dallas based company focusing on eradicating monogenic CNS disease. She previously served as Associate Vice President for Commercialization and Business Development at UT Southwestern Medical Center where she led a reimagining of academic medical center technology commercialization and oversaw the expansion of the office to include a Blackstone Launchpad to support entrepreneurs and brought the first wet lab co-working space to Dallas at Biolabs@Pegasus Park. Prior to that she served as VP, Venture Development with Remeditex Ventures, a biotech venture fund.
Jeff is Founder and CEO of La Jolla Labs, a new company developing technology for RNA therapeutics. Prior to this Jeff was Head of Data Sciences at Arcturus Therapeutics where he worked on several rare disease programs including both RNA-targeting and mRNA modalities. Jeff served as Director of Functional Genomics and Drug Discovery at Ionis Pharmaceuticals where he led teams in bioinformatics and screening technology. Prior to this he worked in the Bioinformatics Department at Genentech. Jeff currently serves as an advisor to his alma mater, the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Stephanie Oestreich is Managing Director of the Myeloma Investment Fund and serves on the boards of the German American Business Council and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women’s Network. She is also on the faculty of MIT, a member of the Launchpad Venture Group, an advisor at grIP Venture Studio, to Biognosys (a Bruker company), Invitris, CART company CelineTx and to OrangeGrove Bio and a member of the W20 Entrepreneurship task force, the official engagement group of the G20.
Previously she was Chief Business Officer at Galecto, Vice President at cell therapy company Mnemo Therapeutics, Venture Partner at RA Capital and Executive Vice President at Evotec where she built its North American investment arm and an incubator with Samsara BioCapital
Marina is currently an Associate Professor at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at UCSF. Prior to that she has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer where she focused on developing Precision Medicine strategies in drug discovery. She completed her PhD in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University. Dr. Sirota’s research experience in translational bioinformatics spans over 10 years during which she has co-authored over 100 scientific publications. Her research interests lie in developing computational integrative methods and applying these approaches in the context of disease diagnostics and therapeutics with a special focus on studying the role of the immune system in disease.
