The NextRNA Team
NextRNA Leadership
Marc Cohen
Marc Cohen is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of NextRNA Therapeutics. He is a co-founder of C4 Therapeutics and has served as a member of the Board of Directors and as Executive Chairman since October 2015. Since December 2011, Marc has served as the Chairman and co-Chief Executive Officer of Bublup, Inc., an online knowledge-sharing and organization platform, and has served as co-Chief Executive Officer of Cobro Ventures, Inc., an investment management company for technology and biotechnology companies, since October 2013. Marc is also Chairman of Frequency Therapeutics, Inc., a regenerative medicine biotechnology company, and Executive Chairman of Mana Therapeutics, Inc., a cellular therapies biotechnology company focused on educating immune cells to target cancer, positions in which he has served since September 2016 and January 2018, respectively. He has also served as Executive Chairman of Regenacy Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company, focused on diabetic and other peripheral neuropathies, since January 2016, Executive Chairman of OncoPep, Inc., a cancer vaccine biotechnology company, since January 2010, and Executive Chairman of Raqia Therapeutics, Inc., a CAR-T cell therapies company for cancer and other diseases, since July 2020.
Marc is also the co-founder of the Dana-Farber Innovations Research Fund, a venture philanthropy fund focused on early stage research. He was co-founder and served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of OPNET Technologies, Inc., a software company that provided performance management tools for computer networks and applications, from 1986 through its acquisition in 2012.
Marc holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and an A.B. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University.
Dominique Verhelle, PhD, MBA
Dominique Verhelle is a co-founder of NextRNA, who has led the scientific and corporate strategy of the company since its launch in January 2021. She currently manages the scientific team, consultants, SAB, and oversees the broader business, finance, and operations of the company.
Dominique was formerly the Senior Director, Head of Academic Innovation, CEI at Takeda, where she was responsible for initiating and developing research alliances with Academic Institutes. She played a significant role accelerating innovation by building partnerships with investigators. She also contributed to creating Coho Therapeutics, a Takeda Ventures funded Newco, and was Director on the Board of Bridge Medicines.
Before her Takeda appointment, Dominique was a Principal at Third Rock Ventures. She joined in 2015 as a Strategic Advisor to focus on drug discovery and development across the portfolio of incubated companies. She played an instrumental role in building and launching Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics.
Dominique has more than 20 years of R&D experience, principally in oncology. She was a Director Epigenetics at Pfizer in the Oncology Research Unit. Before that, she held several positions at Celgene for over nine years. She contributed to the understanding of the mechanism of action of IMiDs. She later initiated the internal epigenetic effort, led the group, and participated in partnership / M&A initiatives.
Dominique completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Christopher Glass at the University of California, San Diego focusing on transcription regulation and chromatin remodeling. She holds a Ph.D. in Life Sciences from the University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France, and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego.
JS Cleiftie, MS, MBA
JS Cleiftie is NextRNA’s Chief Business Officer and Head of Finance. He is responsible for Business & Corporate Development and Finance. He joins us with 20 years of experience in Business and Corporate Development, Venture Capital, and Drug Development in Pharma and Biotech.
Most recently, JS served as Chief Business Officer of Erytech Pharma, a NASDAQ-listed clinical-stage oncology company, where he was responsible for Business Development & Licensing, External Innovation, and New Product Planning.
Prior to that, he was associate Vice-President, Global Business Development & Licensing at Sanofi, where he led and supported numerous sell-side and buy-side transactions across multiple therapeutic areas and development stages.
Before joining Sanofi, JS was a Principal at Innoven Partners, a life sciences and technology venture capital firm, where he executed numerous equity investments in private biotech and medtech companies.
He started his career in drug development in the US as a research scientist with Aventis (now Sanofi) in immunotherapy and gene therapy for cancer.
JS earned an MS in Biological & Medical Sciences and a MS in Immunology from the University of Paris V, and received his MBA from Cornell University.
Julia A Novina, Esq.
Julia Novina is one of the founding executives who helped launch NextRNA in January 2021. In her roles of Chief Legal Officer and interim Chief Administrative Officer, she oversees all legal, financial and administrative functions of the company. Prior to NextRNA, Julia served as General Counsel in three other biotechnology startup companies (Microbial Machines, Courage Therapeutics and Raqia Therapeutics) performing many of the same duties as for NextRNA, including corporate formation, founder and seed round financing, technology licensing, contracting and general company administration. Earlier in her career, Julia was a litigator, primarily in the areas of government contracts and consumer financial services. Before pivoting to her current biotechnology focus, Julia co-owned and ran small businesses and managed commercial real estate. She earned her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center and graduated magna cum laude from Connecticut College.
NextRNA Team
Founders
Carl Novina, MD, PhD
Carl D. Novina MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. His lab has made several discoveries into the fundamental biology of noncoding RNAs and their dysregulation in cancers. His lab has also developed platform technologies to discover and drug non-coding RNAs and build tools for epigenetic engineering and Boolean logic gated cell therapies. He has founded three companies to accelerate the translation of these tools to the clinic. Dr. Novina is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the W.M. Keck Distinguished Young Scholars Award, Department of Defense Idea Award, The NCI Director’s Provocative Questions Award, the National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Project Award and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.
Marc Cohen
Marc Cohen is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of NextRNA Therapeutics. He is a co-founder of C4 Therapeutics and has served as a member of the Board of Directors and as Executive Chairman since October 2015. Since December 2011, Marc has served as the Chairman and co-Chief Executive Officer of Bublup, Inc., an online knowledge-sharing and organization platform, and has served as co-Chief Executive Officer of Cobro Ventures, Inc., an investment management company for technology and biotechnology companies, since October 2013. Marc is also Chairman of Frequency Therapeutics, Inc., a regenerative medicine biotechnology company, and Executive Chairman of Mana Therapeutics, Inc., a cellular therapies biotechnology company focused on educating immune cells to target cancer, positions in which he has served since September 2016 and January 2018, respectively. He has also served as Executive Chairman of Regenacy Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company, focused on diabetic and other peripheral neuropathies, since January 2016, Executive Chairman of OncoPep, Inc., a cancer vaccine biotechnology company, since January 2010, and Executive Chairman of Raqia Therapeutics, Inc., a CAR-T cell therapies company for cancer and other diseases, since July 2020.
Marc is also the co-founder of the Dana-Farber Innovations Research Fund, a venture philanthropy fund focused on early stage research. He was co-founder and served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of OPNET Technologies, Inc., a software company that provided performance management tools for computer networks and applications, from 1986 through its acquisition in 2012.
Marc holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and an A.B. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University.
Leon Wert-Lamas, PhD, DVM
Leon Wert Lamas is currently a Scientist II at NextRNA.
He earned his License in Veterinary Medicine at Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, including clinical training at Hannover Veterinary School (Germany), where he completed his thesis on allergies in the laboratory of Prof. Wolfgang Leibold.
After finishing Veterinary School, where he specialized in the therapeutics of parasitic diseases, Leon completed a PhD on non-coding RNA medicine in thyroid cancer in the Laboratory of Pilar Santisteban at Sols Biomedical Institute and Autonoma University Medical School, Madrid. In his thesis work, he pioneered the use of microRNA mimics and modulators as thyroid cancer therapeutics. During his PhD he did a 4-month internship at Boston Children’s Hospital in Boston in the laboratory of Richard Gregory.
Leon was awarded prizes for best communication in Genetics at the 17th Congress of the European Society of Endocrinology (2015, Dublin), the ”Best Published Work on Thyroid Disease Award“ by the Spanish Endocrinology Society (2015), and the Best Poster in Genetics and Disease Biology at the 15th Annual Retreat of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT (2019).
After completing his PhD, Leon accepted a Research Fellow position in the laboratory of Carl Novina, where he led the development of platform technologies that was foundational work for NextRNA. Leon is excited to continue his work identifying and drugging disease-relevant RNA-protein interactions at NextRNA.
Dominique Verhelle, PhD, MBA
Dominique Verhelle is a cofounder, who has led the scientific and corporate strategy of NextRNA since its launch in January 2021. She currently manages the scientific team, consultants, SAB, and oversees the broader business, finance, and operations of the company.
Dominique was formerly the Senior Director, Head of Academic Innovation, CEI at Takeda, where she was responsible for initiating and developing research alliances with Academic Institutes. She played a significant role accelerating innovation by building partnerships with investigators. She also contributed to creating Coho Therapeutics, a Takeda Ventures funded Newco, and was Director on the Board of Bridge Medicines.
Before her Takeda appointment, Dominique was a Principal at Third Rock Ventures. She joined in 2015 as a Strategic Advisor to focus on drug discovery and development across the portfolio of incubated companies. She played an instrumental role in building and launching Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics.
Dominique has more than 20 years of R&D experience, principally in oncology. She was a Director Epigenetics at Pfizer in the Oncology Research Unit. Before that, she held several positions at Celgene for over nine years. She contributed to the understanding of the mechanism of action of IMiDs. She later initiated the internal epigenetic effort, led the group, and participated in partnership / M&A initiatives.
Dominique completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Christopher Glass at the University of California, San Diego focusing on transcription regulation and chromatin remodeling. She holds a Ph.D. in Life Sciences from the University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France, and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego.
Kenneth Anderson, MD
Dr. Anderson is the Kraft Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as Director of the LeBow Institute for Myeloma Therapeutics and Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Over the last four decades, he has developed laboratory and animal models of myeloma in its microenvironment which have allowed for both identification of novel targets and validation of novel targeted therapies. He has then rapidly translated these studies to clinical trials culminating in FDA approval of novel targeted therapies, which have markedly improved patient outcome. He received the American Society of Hematology William Dameshek Prize, the American Association for Cancer Research Joseph H. Burchenal Award, the American Society of Clinical Oncology David A. Karnofsky Award, and the Harvard Medical School Warren Alpert Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and past President of the International Myeloma Society and the American Society of Hematology.
Robert Langer, PhD
Robert Langer is one of 10 Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. He has written over 1,500 articles, which have been cited over 334,000 times; his h-index of 285 is the highest of any engineer in history and tied for the 4th highest of any individual in any field. His patents have licensed or sublicensed to over 400 companies. He served as Chairman of the FDA’s Science Board (its highest advisory board) from 1999-2002. His over 220 awards include both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation (he is one of 3 living individuals to have received both these honors), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (often called the Engineering Nobel Prize), Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Albany Medical Center Prize, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Kyoto Prize, Wolf Prize for Chemistry, Millennium Technology Prize, Priestley Medal (highest award of the American Chemical Society), Gairdner Prize, and the Dreyfus Prize in Chemical Sciences. He holds 35 honorary doctorates and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors.