CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nvelop Therapeutics, a biotechnology company engineering programmable, non-viral vehicles for the in vivo delivery of therapeutic cargo, today announced the members of its scientific advisory board, bringing together a world-class group of experts from across the fields of gene therapy, gene editing and drug delivery.
“It’s a privilege to have this distinguished group of visionary leaders join our scientific advisory board as we work to advance two potentially breakthrough platforms for the delivery of genetic medicines, and develop our own pipeline of new treatments,” said Melissa Bonner, Nvelop’s chief scientific officer. “The board’s collective expertise and experience will be invaluable in our efforts to develop in vivo genetic medicines for a wide range of diseases.”
Inaugural members of the scientific advisory board include:
- Aravind Asokan, Ph.D. : Dr. Asokan is a professor and director of gene therapy at Duke University, with appointments in the departments of Surgery, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. His research group has pioneered several viral and RNA platform technologies to enable the translation of gene therapies. He is the director of the Danaher-Duke Beacon for Gene Therapy Innovation, a Novartis Global Scholar and has co-founded multiple biotech start-ups, including StrideBio (now part of Ginkgo Bioworks), Torque Bio and Lucidigm Therapeutics.
- Keith Joung, M.D., Ph.D. : Dr. Joung is co-founder of Nvelop Therapeutics, and a pioneer in the development of targeted gene and epigenetic editing technologies. He is currently a lead translator at Arena BioWorks, and a professor of pathology (on leave 2023-2024) at Harvard Medical School. He was previously the Robert B. Colvin, M.D. Endowed Chair in Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has co-founded multiple additional biotechnology companies, including Beam Therapeutics, Chroma Medicine, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, SeQure Dx and Verve Therapeutics.
- Sadik Kassim, Ph.D. : Dr. Kassim is the chief technology officer (CTO) of genomic medicines for Danaher Corporation. Previously, he was CTO of Vor Bio, where he built the teams responsible for process development, analytical development, and supply chain and manufacturing support of a gene-edited product. Prior to Vor Bio, Dr. Kassim spent time at Kite Pharma, Mustang Bio and Novartis, where he directly contributed to the development of several first-in-human CAR T-, TCR- and TIL-based programs, and to the launch of KYMRIAH®, YESCARTA® and TESCARTUS®.
- David Liu, Ph.D. : Dr. Liu is co-founder of Nvelop Therapeutics, and the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice-chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. His laboratory pioneered base editing, prime editing, phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) and DNA-encoded small-molecule libraries. He is also the founder or co-founder of several biotechnology and therapeutics companies, including Beam Therapeutics, Prime Medicine, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, Exo Therapeutics and Chroma Medicine.
- Jacob Giehm Mikkelsen, Ph.D. : Dr. Mikkelsen is a professor in the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University in Denmark. His research lab focuses on developing innovative viral and nonviral gene delivery technologies, along with novel protein delivery techniques to make in vivo gene editing safer. Dr. Mikkelsen is a frequent collaborator with clinicians and biopharma companies.
- Luigi Naldini, M.D., Ph.D. : Dr. Naldini is a professor of cell and tissue biology and gene and cell therapy at the San Raffaele University School of Medicine, and scientific director of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy. He is a pioneer in the development and applications of lentiviral vectors for gene therapy, and co-founder of several biotechnology companies, including Genenta, Epsilen Bio (now part of Chroma Medicine) and Genespire.
- Gabor Veres, Ph.D. : Dr. Veres is the senior vice president of translational research at Mammoth Biosciences. He has more than 25 years of experience leading gene therapy research and development for biopharma companies, including Vedere Bio II, BioMarin Pharmaceutical and bluebird bio. His experience includes guiding some of the first genetic medicines from preclinical research to clinical development, such as ZYNTEGLO® and SKYSONA™.
The company also announced today the appointment of Luca Biasco, Ph.D., as its head of translational research. Dr. Biasco brings nearly two decades of experience in the field of genetic medicine, and is recognized as a pioneer in clonal tracking of genetically engineered cells in vivo. He was previously executive director of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) gene therapy at Sana Biotechnology, where he led the development of approaches for the in vivo delivery of genetic payloads to HSCs. Prior to Sana, he was the director of research and development at AVROBIO. Dr. Biasco will lead the particle development team at Nvelop.
“I’m very excited to be part of the Nvelop team during this time of growth and innovation,” said Dr. Biasco, “and to work with this exceptional group of talented and driven people to help overcome the limitations of today’s in vivo delivery approaches to ultimately meet the promise of genetic medicines for many patients that, today, have few or no treatment options.”
About Nvelop Therapeutics
Nvelop Therapeutics was founded in 2022 to address the challenge of efficiently delivering therapeutic cargoes to target cells in vivo. Nvelop’s next-generation platforms enable highly efficient and cell-specific in vivo delivery of a wide range of cargoes to many types of target cells. The two platforms were independently developed in the labs of scientific co-founders and gene editing pioneers Dr. David Liu of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Dr. Keith Joung at Massachusetts General Hospital. With its own pipeline of therapeutics and through strategic collaborations, Nvelop aims to use these programmable, non-viral platforms to transform delivery for a broad range of genetic medicines and modalities in order to treat many previously undruggable diseases. Based in Cambridge, Mass., Nvelop is backed by top life science investors including Newpath Partners, Atlas Venture, F-Prime Capital, 5AM Ventures, GV, and ARCH Venture Partners. For more information, visit www.nveloptx.com or follow us on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and Instagram.
