The NextRNA Team
NextRNA Leadership
Dominique Verhelle, PhD, MBA
Dominique Verhelle, PhD is Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer of NextRNA. Dominique has over 20 years of industry experience, spanning key scientific leadership roles in biopharma and venture capital. Prior to joining NextRNA, Dominique served as Head of Academic Innovation at Takeda’s Center for External Innovation, where she led efforts to build partnerships for Takeda with leading academic investigators in the United States and globally. During that time, she also served as a Director on the Board of Bridge Medicines, a Takeda Ventures-backed company. Prior to joining Takeda, Dominique was a Principal at Third Rock Ventures, where she cofounded Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics. Before that, Dominique launched and led epigenetic drug discovery efforts in oncology at Celgene and Pfizer for over a decade.
Dominique completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Christopher Glass, MD, PhD at the University of California, San Diego, focusing on transcription regulation and chromatin remodeling. She holds a PhD in Life Sciences from Université Côte d’Azur, 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.
Jason Katz, PhD
Jason joined NextRNA in 2022 as VP, Head of Drug Discovery. His drug discovery experience prior to NextRNA spans an 18-year career, including 13 years at Merck & Co. followed by 5 years at IFM Therapeutics, where he was a Sr Director of Medicinal Chemistry. Jason is a scientific leader with a strong track record of recruiting, managing, and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams. At IFM Therapeutics, Jason worked on several programs targeting the innate immune system, including the team that developed a suite of NLRP3 antagonists that were acquired by Novartis and advanced into Phase 2 clinical trials. At Merck, Jason was one of the first scientists hired at the Boston site, where he developed a passion for drug discovery, working on multidisciplinary teams, and mentoring other scientists. He and his teams discovered and advanced into clinical development molecules addressing challenging oncology and immuno-oncology targets. Jason earned his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the direction of Michael Crimmins and then went on to study as a NIH postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine in the labs of Larry Overman. Jason received a BS in Chemistry from Union College.
Alejandra Raimondi
Alejandra joined NextRNA in 2022 as VP, Head of Biology. A highly accomplished scientific leader, Alejandra has over 25 years of small molecule drug discovery experience in the areas of cancer biology, epigenetics, and infectious diseases. Alejandra has a proven track record of leading biology teams throughout all stages of the discovery process from validation and uncovering of novel targets to drug candidate development and IND and NDA submissions.
Alejandra was previously Vice President and Head of Biological Sciences at Epizyme, where she worked for 11 years. Among other responsibilities, she served as preclinical project lead overseeing life cycle management of the EZH2 inhibitor program, tazemetostat, which won FDA-approval in 2020 as Tazverik®. Before that, she held roles at The Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, now Takeda Oncology. Alejandra is an expert collaborator who has successfully built multidisciplinary teams for the implementation of technology platforms and driving drug discovery programs.
Alejandra has a strong foundation in research, spending years at the MIT Center for Cancer Research, and the Luis Federico Leloir Institute (Argentina). Alejandra received a BS in Chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).
NextRNA Team
Scientific Advisors
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.
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.
Susan Carpenter, PhD
Susan Carpenter, PhD is an Associate Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). She received her BA and PhD from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland where she worked with Prof. Luke O’Neill. She completed her postdoctoral work at University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical School, under the mentorship of Prof. Kate Fitzgerald, and at the University of California, San Francisco, under the mentorship of Prof. Michael McManus. Dr. Carpenter’s current research focuses on the role of long non-coding RNAs in inflammatory signaling.
Rory Johnson, PhD
Rory Johnson, PhD is Associate Professor, University College Dublin (UCD), School of Biology and Environmental Science. Dr. Johnson received his PhD from the University of Leeds. He conducted his post-doctoral research at the Genomic Institute of Singapore, where he applied next-generation sequencing methods to mapping gene regulatory networks in embryonic stem cells. He completed a fellowship in Roderic Guigo’s lab at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, where he helped create maps of lncRNA genes with the GENCODE consortium. As a Junior Group Leader with the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) in RNA & Disease, Dr. Johnson established the laboratory for Genomics of Long noncoding RNAs in Disease (GOLD Lab). Dr. Johnson was appointed the NCCR’s Co-Delegate for Knowledge and Technology Transfer, responsible for securing funding for the annual Bench2Biz workshop and fostering industry-academic partnerships with Swiss RNA laboratories. GOLD Lab participated in the International Cancer Genome Consortium’s “PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes” (PCAWG) project, culminating in a landmark map of cancer driver mutations in the human genome.
In December 2019 GOLD Lab relocated to UCD, where Dr. Johnson and his team continue the quest to understand the noncoding genome in cancer.
John Mattick, PhD
John Mattick, PhD is Professor of RNA Biology at UNSW Sydney. He was previously the Chief Executive of Genomics England, Executive Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Director of the Institute for Molecular Biology at the University of Queensland, and Director of the Australian Genome Research Facility.
Dr. Mattick has made several seminal contributions to molecular biology, including delineation of the architecture and function of the fatty acid synthase complex, development of one of the first recombinant DNA-based vaccines, and genetic characterization of bacterial surface filaments involved in host colonization. Dr. Mattick has also pioneered a new view of the genetic programming of humans and other complex organisms by showing that the majority of the genome, previously considered ‘junk’, actually specifies a dynamic network of regulatory RNAs that guide differentiation and development. He has published almost 300 research articles and his work has received coverage in Nature, Science, Scientific American, New Scientist and the New York Times, among others. In 2022, Dr. Mattick published a book titled, RNA, the Epicenter of Genomic Information.
Dr. Mattick obtained his BSc from the University of Sydney and his PhD from Monash University. He undertook his postdoctoral training at Baylor College of Medicine at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
Board Members
Lori Friedman, PhD
Dr. Friedman has served as a director of the Company since September 2023. Dr. Friedman has over 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in drug discovery and development and senior management positions. She is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of ORIC Pharmaceuticals, Inc, where she leads discovery research, preclinical development sciences and manufacturing. Prior to ORIC, Dr. Friedman spent 15 years at Genentech, where she held roles of increasing responsibility including head of translational oncology for Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED), where her team advanced more than 20 programs into clinical development. Dr. Friedman also sat on cross-functional leadership teams tasked with strategic and technical review of Genentech’s oncology pipeline projects as well as in-licensing opportunities. Prior to Genentech, Dr. Friedman held various scientific leadership roles at Exelixis. She is an inventor on 28 issued patents and author on 99 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Friedman earned a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge University in England. She was previously a director on the board of Jiya Acquisition Corp., an advisor on several scientific advisory boards, and is currently on the board of Project Scientist, a non-profit organization serving girls in STEM.
Christina Henderson
Ms. Henderson has served as a director of the Company since March of 2021. Ms. Henderson is the Head of the Family Office and General Counsel of Dubin & Company. Ms. Henderson also serves as the General Counsel of Haussmann Development, a real estate development company, and the Assistant General Counsel and Compliance Officer of Commodore Capital, a biotech fund focused on late stage private and small and mid-cap public companies. In addition, Ms. Henderson previously served as acting General Counsel of Engineers Gate, a proprietary quantitative trading company, and General Counsel of Untapped Labs (fka Jumpstart Ventures, Inc.), a tech recruiting software company. In addition to serving on the board of NextRNA, she is also a member of the board of directors of Untapped Labs and previously served as a member of the board of directors of Engineers Gate. Prior to joining Dubin & Company, Ms. Henderson was an associate in the Mergers & Acquisitions group of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. At Davis Polk, she represented public and private clients as well as individuals in domestic and cross-border public and private mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, corporate restructurings and advised on corporate governance and compliance issues. Ms. Henderson earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as Captain of the Championship Ames Moot Court Team. She graduated with honors from Harvard College. Ms. Henderson is admitted in New York.
William McKee
Mr. McKee has served as a director of the Company since March 2022. He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of MBJC Associates, LLC, a business consulting firm serving pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and serves as a part-time Venture Partner for Cobro Ventures, a private investment firm focused on software and biotechnology companies. Mr. McKee served as Chief Financial Officer of C4 Therapeutics, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, from July 2020 until June 2021. Mr. McKee served as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of EKR Therapeutics, Inc., from July 2010 until June 2012 when EKR was sold to Cornerstone Therapeutics Inc. From January 2009 until March 2010, Mr. McKee served as the Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, and the successor entity to Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which was acquired by Teva in December 2008. Mr. McKee was also Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc. from 1996 until 2008. Prior to joining Barr, Mr. McKee served as a Director of International Operations and Vice President Finance at Absolute Entertainment, Inc. from June 1993 until December 1994. From 1990 until June 1993, Mr. McKee worked at Gramkow & Carnevale, CPAs, and from 1983 until 1990, he worked at Deloitte & Touche. Mr. McKee serves as a director and chair of the audit committee of Aileron Therapeutics, Inc., a publicly-held biopharmaceutical company, and Assertio Therapeutics, a publicly held specialty pharmaceutical company. He also serves on the board of several privately held companies in the medical and biopharmaceutical industries. Mr. McKee holds a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame.
Barry Polisky, PhD
Dr. Polisky has served as a director of the Company since March 2021. Dr. Polisky was a Full Professor of Biology at Indiana University, where his lab studied the molecular circuitry involved in control on DNA replication initiation in plasmids. As an academic, Dr. Polisky won several awards, served on NIH study sections and Chaired the Microbial Genetics and Physiology Study Section. He also chaired scientific meetings including Gordon Conferences, served on the editorial board of multiple journals, and consulted for many companies including Eli Lilly and Cetus Corporation. Dr. Polisky left academia to become Director and Vice President of Research at NeXagen in Boulder, CO. NeXstar (formerly NeXagen) was acquired by Gilead in 1998. He then joined Ribozyme Therapeutics as Vice President of Research, which became Sirna Therapeutics, focused on development of siRNA therapeutics. Sirna was acquired by Merck Research Laboratories. He then became a Research Vice-President at Merck and directed siRNA development work until he left Merck to return to biotech at Marina Biotech, as Chief Scientific Officer. At Marina, he was involved in the acquisition of Cequent Inc., which had pioneered the use of bacteria as delivery agents. He is currently the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of Marina Biotech, Inc. Dr. Polisky received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Malcolm Salter
Mr. Salter has served as a director of the Company since February 2021. Professor Salter is the James J. Hill Professor, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School. Since joining the Harvard Business School faculty in 1967, his teaching and research has focused on issues of corporate strategy and governance. Professor Salter is author of Innovation Corrupted (Harvard University Press, 2008), which addresses the origins and legacy of Enron’s collapse; co-author of Changing Alliances (HBS Press, 1987), a comparative study of business-government-labor relations the U.S., Japanese, and German auto industries; Diversification through Acquisition (Free Press, 1979), a study of how real economic value can be created through corporate diversification; and many other articles and papers addressing, most recently, matters of corporate purpose and governance in a post-Covid world. In addition to his scholarly activities, Professor Salter served as the School’s Senior Associate Dean for External Affairs, Chair of the Advanced Management Program and the International Senior Managers Program and Chair of the of the General Management Area.Professor Salter also served as president of Mars & Co., a strategy consulting firm with offices in Greenwich (CT), London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Professor Salter is a graduate of Harvard University where he received his AB, MBA, and DBA degrees.
Bobby Sandage, PhD
Dr. Sandage has served as a director of the Company since June 2022. Dr. Sandage has almost 40 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in drug development and senior management positions and venture capital. He currently is the Managing Director of the Paula and Rodger Riney Foundation and Lightchain Capital, LLC, and General Partner in Cultivation Capital Life Sciences Fund II, a St. Louis venture fund. Previously he was President and CEO of Coronado BioSciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: CNDO), an immunotherapy company where he took the company public in 2011. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Covidien (Mallinckrodt) Pharmaceuticals’ oncology research and development program. For 19 years, Dr. Sandage was the Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development, Quality and Manufacturing at Indevus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: IDEV) (successor to Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.), which was acquired by Endo Pharmaceuticals in 2009. Prior to Indevus, he held senior drug development positions at DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company, DuPont/American Critical Care, Merrell Dow and Dow Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Sandage is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of Immunophotonics, Inc., a private oncology company and director at Endevica Biotech, Inc., a private biotech company focusing on the treatment of cachexia and Geneoscopy, a private diagnostic company for detecting colorectal cancer. He was previously served as a member of the boards of Mateon (NASDAQ: MATN), a publicly traded oncology company; Arch Oncology, Inc. a private oncology company; Gentium S.r.l. (NASDAQ: GENT) a Italian biotech company; Osteologix, Inc. (NASDAQ: OLGX) a Danish biotech company; Genta Inc. (NASDAQ: GNTA) a public oncology company. Dr. Sandage is an adjunct Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Pharmacy and has published over 50 scientific articles. Dr. Sandage earned a B.S. in pharmacy from the University of Arkansas College of Pharmacy and a Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacy from Purdue University College of Pharmacy.
Dominique Verhelle, PhD, MBA
Dominique Verhelle, PhD is Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer of NextRNA. Dominique has over 20 years of industry experience, spanning key scientific leadership roles in biopharma and venture capital. Prior to joining NextRNA, Dominique served as Head of Academic Innovation at Takeda’s Center for External Innovation, where she led efforts to build partnerships for Takeda with leading academic investigators in the United States and globally. During that time, she also served as a Director on the Board of Bridge Medicines, a Takeda Ventures-backed company. Prior to joining Takeda, Dominique was a Principal at Third Rock Ventures, where she cofounded Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics. Before that, Dominique launched and led epigenetic drug discovery efforts in oncology at Celgene and Pfizer for over a decade.
Dominique completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Christopher Glass, MD, PhD at the University of California, San Diego, focusing on transcription regulation and chromatin remodeling. She holds a PhD in Life Sciences from Université Côte d’Azur, France, and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego.
Marc Cohen
In memoriam, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman, and CEO Emeritus
Marc Cohen was a co-founder, CEO, and Executive Chairman of NextRNA Therapeutics who passed away in June 2022. Marc was a pioneer who sought out and invested in innovative ideas with the goal of bringing transformative therapies to patients. Marc believed in the untapped potential of non-coding RNAs and how our approach could revolutionize the RNA therapeutic space. Marc’s passion and vision catalyzed the launch and early success of NextRNA.
Marc believed in “doing well by doing good,” and was known for his endless energy to translate novel ideas into medicines. The numerous biotechnology companies he founded over the course of his career are a testament to his passion for using his gifts to help advance breakthrough science to treatments for patients. In addition to co-founding NextRNA Therapeutics, Marc also co-founded and/or served in leadership roles at C4 Therapeutics, Frequency Therapeutics, Acetylon Pharmaceuticals, Regenacy Pharmaceuticals, OncoPep, Mana Therapeutics, Dynamic Cell Therapies and AI Proteins. He also served as Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive of Bublup, Inc., co-CEO, of Cobro Ventures, Inc., and co-founder and CEO of OPNET Technologies. Marc was also a long-time supporter of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where he co-founded the Dana Farber Innovations Research Fund.