The Genies Behind GEn1E

Our team has strong domain expertise in developing novel, first-in-class drugs as well as platforms

Ritu Lal, PhD, MS
CEO & Co-Founder

The founding CEO, Dr. Ritu Lal, has taken drugs from discovery through FDA approval 3 times. She has worked on previous generation p38 drugs

She also has 60+ publications in top tier journals

Dr. Sham Dholakia
CMO

We are excited to welcome Sham to our team as we further scale our AI/ML platform, our portfolio and strategic partnerships

Dr. Jeffrey Hasday
Inventor of the p38 technology

Division Head, Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine

Prof. Paul Shapiro
Inventor of the p38 technology

Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Wendy Luo, MS
Research

20+ years Research Leader
10+ IND filed

Maya Das, MD
Clinical Development

15+ years Physician Leader
5+ IND filed
Experience in rare disease clinical development

Matthew Cheng, MD
Translational Medicine

100+ publications
2+ patents
Experience in clinical trials

Andrew Sonderfan, PhD, DABT
Toxicology

30+ year R&D Leader
Contributed to FDA Approvals

Nate Larson, PhD
Drug Product

15+ years in Drug Product formulation, Process Development, and Drug Delivery
Expertise in inflammation, respiratory diseases, virology, oncology, endocrinology, and neurology

Beth Stannard, MS, CCRP, CCRC 
Clinical Operations

20+ years Clinical Operations
Contributed to 2 FDA Approvals

Soujanya Bhumkar, MS
AI/ML Platform

4 startups with successful exits
Experience in Platform development

Indraneel Roy, MS
AI/ML Platform

Systems Engineer with experience in Platform technology

Lassi Lehtovaara, MS
AI/ML Platform

Experience in Platform development

+ Extended Team including

Chemistry, Regulatory, Biostatistics, Health Economics, IP and Business Development

Strategic Advisors

Dr. François Nader

Dr. Nader currently serves as chairman of the board of directors of BenevolentAI, Neurvati Neurosciences and Talaris Therapeutics and as board director of Moderna and Ring Therapeutics. He also serves a senior advisor to Blackstone Life Sciences. Dr Nader is the former CEO of NPS Pharma, acquired by Shire for $5.2B.

Dr. Nader transformed NPS Pharma into a leading global biotech company focused on delivering innovative therapies to patients with rare diseases. He was recognized as the Ernst and Young National Life Science Entrepreneur of the Year®.

Dr. Alan Levy

Dr. Alan Levy is on multiple Boards including Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG), Tasso Inc., Holoclara Inc. and Bardy, Dx. He was founding CEO at Incline Therapeutics (acquired by The Medicines Company for $390 million), founding CEO and President at Northstar Neuroscience (raised $112 million in its IPO); CEO and President at Heartstream (acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $140 million); and President at Heart Technology (acquired by Boston Scientific for $500 million).

He was Senior Advisor and Venture Partner at Frazier Healthcare Partners and in addition, he held several leadership positions at Ethicon, a division of Johnson & Johnson, including Vice President of Research and New Business Development and Director. Dr. Levy earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the City University of New York and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Purdue University.

Mike Cassidy

Mike Cassidy was recently the CEO of Apollo Fusion, Inc.  and a Vice President at Google.  He was the Project Leader of GoogleX’s Project Loon (balloon-powered Internet for everyone).  Mike was the Co-Founder and CEO of five start-ups which were all successfully acquired: Apollo Fusion, Ruba, Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation.  Apollo Fusion designs and builds ion thrusters for satellites and was acquired by Astra for $145 million.  Ruba helped travelers share their favorite places and was acquired by Google.  Xfire helps gamers play online with their friends and was acquired by MTV for $110 million.  Direct Hit was a revolutionary search engine whose customers included MSN, Lycos, AOL, etc. and was acquired by IAC’s Ask.com for $500 million.  Stylus Innovation’s flagship product was computer telephony software Visual Voice.  Artisoft acquired Stylus for $13M.  Mike has a BS/MS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT.  He graduated from Harvard Business School.  He studied jazz piano at Berklee College of Music.

Tech Platform Advisor

Jared Friedman

Jared is Managing Director, Software and Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder of Scribd, which was funded by Y Combinator and grew to be one of the top 100 sites on the web. Jared previously worked at a pioneering AI company and studied computer science at Harvard.

Jared’s domain expertise in building scalable AI/ML platforms will be invaluable to accelerate GEn1E’s AI/ML platform for end-to-end drug development of therapies for rare & inflammatory diseases.

Scientific Advisors

Nevan Krogan

Professor, Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology
Director, Quantitative Bioscience Institute (QBI)
Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology
Faculty, Cancer Genetics, Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
Professor, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Adjunct Faculty, Buck Institute for Research on Aging
Director, QB3@UCSF, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences
Director, Thermo Fisher Scientific Proteomics Facility for Disease Target Discovery

Dr. Krogan’s lab at UCSF focuses on developing and applying quantitative, systematic proteomic and genetic approaches to study complex biological and biomedical problems.

Anil Jegga, DVM, MRes

Anil’s work is focused on developing and applying methods to integrate the heterogeneous omics and biomedical big data to build better predictive models of disease, drug discovery and repurposing, and drug response. Specifically, the research areas he pursue include translational bioinformatics - computational drug discovery and drug repositioning for rare diseases. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals and mentored more than 25 Ph.D. students. Independently, and collaboratively, he has developed several bioinformatics applications that are widely used and cited. Notable among them is the ToppGene Suite of applications, a one stop portal for gene list enrichment analysis and candidate gene prioritization, and Orphan Diseasome for rare disease network analysis.

Dr. Robert Booth

Adjunct Professor, Stanford
30+ years as R&D leader (Roche, Celera), CEO of Virobay
Expert in Pharmacology, Immunology, p38 Kinase Inhibitors

Dr. David Young

Founder and CEO of Processa Pharma
Founder of GloboMax  and CSO Questcor Pharmaceuticals 
Previously tenured Associate Professor at the School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland

Dr. Andrew Mulberg

Ex Deputy Director FDA, GI Division
Portfolio Leader (J&J)

Dr. Mehdi Bouhaddou

Postdoctoral Scholar, Cellular Molecular Pharmacology School of Medicine, UCSF

Dr. Kevin Grimes

Director, SPARK program, Stanford
Professor, Department of Chemical and Systems Biology

Mridul Mehta, PhD

15-year leader solving problems using data science and algorithms, including AI/ML

Jacqueline Fabius

Jacqueline is the Chief Operating Officer for the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at UCSF, where she heads multiple initiatives, including orchestrating domestic and international relationships and collaborations in academia, government and industry as well as directing media and communication strategy for the institute.

At the onset of the pandemic in February of 2020, Jacqueline, with the Director of QBI, established and implemented the QBI Coronavirus Research Group (QCRG), an interdisciplinary program involving hundreds of scientists from around the world that aims to understand SARS-CoV-2 and identify therapies for COVID-19 and other related diseases.

ARDS Specialists

Dr. Carolyn Calfee

Professor in Residence of Medicine and Anesthesia at UCSF
Expert in ARDS Adaptive Clinical trials

Dr. Michael Matthay

Critical Care, Allergy and Sleep Medicine
Expert at ARDS Clinical Studies

Dr. Robert Fishman

Stanford trained, Pulmonary & Critical Care Physician 
2 FDA Approvals

Dr. Ijlal Babar

Board Certified Pulmonologist
Medical Director, Pulmonary and Critical Care

Dr. Danny McCauley

Queens University, Belfast

Investors

Our investors include Khosla Ventures, Clear Ventures, SV Latam, Stanford-StartX, Y Combinator and Inflect Health / Vituity (a network of 3500+ Physicians in 400 hospitals).

Khosla Ventures

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Clear Ventures

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SV Latam Capital

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Y Combinator

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Stanford StartX

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Inflect Health

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BoxOne

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Get in touch with us!

We are based in Palo Alto, CA, and have a laboratory in Mountain View, CA.

We look forward to joining forces with you to cure rare and inflammatory diseases, fast!

Contact Us
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