We’re building a more vibrant
world for patients everywhere.

Allen has a passion for medicine and being able to assist in the development of drugs to positively impact the lives of those in need. Previously in his career, he was a part of teams specializing in antineoplastics and radiopharmaceuticals. He obtained a Master’s degree at Rush University, where he studied the role of periostin on gene gene expression in bone regeneration.

Jamie is a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota where she received her B.S. in Environmental Science. While in school, she worked at a veterinary office where she developed her inventory and bookkeeping skills. She is looking forward to assisting the Creyon team with their laboratory inventories, the move to the new Carlsbad location, and help wherever assistance is needed.

Madeleine enjoys working in drug discovery because it offers the opportunity to positively impact patients’ lives. Madeleine has previous experience executing experiments both in vivo and in vitro as a Peripheral Nervous System Research Associate. Madeleine obtained her Bachelor’s of Science Degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Chemistry: Chemical Biology Concentration, from University of California Irvine in 2021. During her undergraduate years she worked in neuroscience research labs where she applied her programming skills as well as executed traditional wet lab assays.

Maureen is a patient advocacy, public policy, and communications leader focused on structuring biomedical research collaborations with engagement of multiple stakeholders, accelerating biomedical innovation, ensuring ethical conduct of research, and developing outreach materials to varied audiences. Prior to Creyon, she was a strategic advisor with Global Genes, working with the Medical & Scientific Advisory Board on projects focused on science and technology issues related to rare disease research and therapy development, developing content for major patient advocacy meetings, and leading efforts to connect rare disease researchers and patient advocates. Prior to joining Global Genes, she served as a researcher with the Science and Technology Policy Institute on strategic planning projects for translational research, bioinformatics, and clinical trials, and on program evaluation for the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. She also has led the development of policies to protect human research subjects and public outreach projects on biomedical research at the University of Kentucky. She earned a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University, an M.S. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and a B.S. in Biology from University of California, Los Angeles.

Linsley is a molecular biologist and biochemist with experience in nucleic acid chemistry. She obtained her PhD in biomedical sciences from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The focus of her graduate work was on characterizing and utilizing aptamers as targeting agents for therapeutics via cell surface receptors. Through this work she gained experience and insight into SELEX, bioconjugation strategies, nucleic acid synthesis, and flow cytometry. Linsley did postdoctoral research in the lab of Dr. Bruce Sullenger at Duke University. At Duke she focused on characterizing the anti-inflammatory properties of cationic polymers in influenza and lupus mouse models. As a scientist at Creyon, Linsley is excited to work with a multidisciplinary team to deliver scientifically sound and effective OBMs.

Steven joined Creyon with the goal of understanding how to manipulate complex regulatory pathways with oligonucleotide-based medicines. He has extensive experience finding the mechanisms, structure, and engineering principles behind gene networks regulating growth and homeostasis fascinating. Steven previously worked with Ionis Pharmaceuticals to reshape and expand their next-generation sequencing pipeline. With a foundation in Bioengineering from the University of California San Diego, he pursued his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology where he studied how evolution shapes the function of gene regulatory networks in development, covering both the conservation of cis-regulatory elements and inherent robustness of differentiation networks. As a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, Steven tracked the temperature-dependence of development, discovering the coherent maintenance of disparate developmental processes by a few critical regulators.

Jonathan has spent over a decade modeling, developing automated pipelines for, and automating analyses for laboratory data. Well experienced with high throughput screening, automated liquid handling systems, and data-driven applications and data architecture, he uniquely spans the gap between the laboratory and software and data systems for the laboratory. After graduating with a degree in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Jonathan began his career at a biotech startup focused on intensified laboratory automation and was responsible for developing both the laboratory experiment protocols, and data systems and pipelines that underpin that startup to this day. He continued working as a software engineer and chemical engineer at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, developing automated high throughput screening techniques, data storage systems, and statistical analysis pipelines for process development. After a short stint as a cloud data infrastructure software engineer, Jonathan joined Creyon Bio in March 2022 to maximize his talents and support the oligonucleotide-based medicine development efforts through software, data infrastructure, and automation.

Matthew is a nucleic acid chemist, biochemist, molecular biologist, and biotechnologist with more than 20 years of experience with leadership roles in academia as a Principal Investigator and head of laboratory work and industry in his roles as Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer, and co-founder. He is an expert in engineering nucleic acids, proteins, and other functional oligonucleotides, particularly in developing aptamers for targeting cell surface receptors. Before joining Creyon, Matthew served as the Head of Discovery at Vitrisa Therapeutics. Prior to that, he held a position as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he ran a successful research program for 10 years focused on developing new technologies and approaches using nucleic acid aptamers as well as engineered proteins for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and has 9 issued patents. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry and his M.S. in Chemistry at the University of California San Diego, and went on to obtain his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Matthew also currently serves as Scientific Advisor to Drive Therapeutics, a company he co-founded, and Oak Bay Bio, two aptamer companies focused on developing ocular therapeutics.

Chungwen has more than 15 years of experience as a computational scientist in the field of biomolecular modeling/simulation. He has strong expertise in a wide range of molecular modeling and simulation techniques, including ab-initio/classical molecular dynamics simulations, quantum chemistry/electronic structure calculations, computational spectroscopy, small molecule design, and protein-ligand docking and screening. Before joining Creyon, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He spent a few years in academia for his postdoctoral research, at the University of Basel, EPFL Switzerland and the University of California, San Diego. He recently served as director of the Computational and Modeling Core Facility in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he provided expert consulting and modeling and simulation services to both academic and industrial partners and collaborators.

Rita’s work at Creyon focuses on understanding how oligonucleotide-based medicines can tackle brain disorders. Her previous work has focused on the development of a range of new rodent models with progressive Alzheimer’s disease, induced by genetic modifications, as well as leading the effort to identify new fluid biomarkers to better diagnose neurodegenerative disorders. She also developed new methodologies to isolate and detect small vesicles from human blood and measure the levels of aggregated proteins from distinct patient samples. Her research contributed to solving several practical issues that present a significant challenge in both discovery and clinical development phases. Rita obtained a Masters degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology, with a specialization in Neuroscience, from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and a Ph.D. in Natural Sciences and Neuroscience from the University of Duesseldorf, Germany. Later, she went on to a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, where she applied her expertise in neuroscience and work in the research topic of prion accumulation as the pathological marker for neurodegenerative diseases.

Sankha is an Organic Chemist/Chemical Biologist with interdisciplinary expertise in Synthetic Nucleic Acid and Small-molecule Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Developmental Biology. Prior to joining Creyon, he served as a Principal Investigator of Oligonucleotides Process Development at Syngene, Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. in Bioorganic Chemistry from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, developing cell-penetrating morpholino antisense oligonucleotides, and identifying small-molecule inhibitors for Hedgehog Signaling Pathway. He subsequently moved to the University of Colorado Boulder for his postdoctoral studies and developed a new type of oligonucleotide class named as Click Nucleic Acids (CNAs). His second postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine was focused on inventing new optochemical (caged bicyclic morpholino oligonucleotides, and caged RNA) and optogenetic (LOV domain-based systems) technologies to study zebrafish mesoderm development. Sankha’s research interests leverage the power of synthetic chemistry to invent new molecules for treating a broad range of previously ‘undruggable’ diseases.

David is a quantum physicist and computational scientist currently on leave from his position as Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. He has extensive research experience in the areas of quantum matter and chemistry, dynamics of quantum systems, quantum computation and fluid dynamics. After earning his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, David worked as a postdoc at Harvard University and was the Lee A. DuBridge Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He is also one of the founding principal investigators of the Quantum Biology program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Meenakshi joined Creyon as a scientist to help design effective therapeutics based on oligonucleotides as a part of a multi-disciplinary team. She obtained her masters in cell biology and PhD in translational biomedicine from ETH Zurich. During her PhD, she investigated novel genetic regulators of healthy aging and the downstream mechanisms underlying longevity through adaptive stress response. Subsequently, she did her postdoctoral research at Stanford University pursuing her interest in understanding age-related and epigenetic changes to muscle and its stem cell niche. She focused on the eicosanoid prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) in rejuvenating muscle function and helped identify translational therapies that improve muscle strength in the aged.

At Creyon, Rafael works toward understanding how oligonucleotide-based medicines affect neural function. He obtained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin where his work was focused on understanding neuroadaptations in synaptic transmission and plasticity that occur with chronic alcohol exposure. Rafael went on to pursue a post-doctorate program at the University of California, San Diego where he could apply his expertise in neurophysiology and receive training in mouse behavior and in vivo calcium imaging. His work as a postdoc uncovered input- and cell-type specific alterations in synaptic transmission that contribute to maladaptive alcohol induced behaviors.

Amanda has an immense passion for biology through the lens of helping people. Previously in her career, she performed experiments and led a team of scientists for a contract research company specializing in pharmacokinetic assays. She obtained a Master’s degree from the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she focused on characterizing amino acid and ion transport in euryhaline animal models.

George is an organic medicinal chemist with expertise in nucleic acid and nucleoside analogues chemistry. In 2013, he obtained a pharmacy degree from Cairo University in Egypt. His passion for drug discovery led him to pursue medicinal chemistry research. In his Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University, he focused on the design and synthesis of nucleoside analogues targeting a specific bacterial enzyme. He also developed one of the brightest fluorescent nucleoside analogues to be used as tools to study the structures and functions of nucleic acids. In January 2022, George joined Creyon Bio to develop novel therapeutic oligonucleotides against difficult-to-drug biomolecular targets.

JP is a Medicinal Chemist by training and an experienced scientific leader in pharmaceutical discovery and development with business acumen and more than 17 years of project leadership. JP has extensive experience in design and execution of drug discovery projects from hit to the clinical candidate stage with management of resources in CRO set-up. Before joining to Creyon, JP served as research director in Syngene International Ltd (a Biocon company) in Bangalore where he was leading discovery chemistry teams (>250 chemists) working for big and medium pharma and small and virtual biotech collaborations in different domains. At Syngene, he was also involved in setting up and managing the larger collaborations for big pharma by establishing infrastructure, budget, recruiting top talents, other business, and scientific operations. JP has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and has 10 patents.  He received his Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and subsequently received his postdoctoral training at Arizona Cancer Center, Tucson in identifying structures and designing drugs for multi-stranded oligonucleotides (G-quadruplexes and i-motifs).  At Creyon, JP will be heading all the scientific and other operations in India.

Megan’s recurring goal for her career would be to improve the life of one sick child, and hopefully, by extension, many more. She focuses on using in vitro and cell culture methods to investigate potential treatments for children. As a scientist at Creyon, she is confident that the unique and accomplished multi-disciplinary team can work together to attain the vision of creating effective treatments through innovative science. Working with a pediatric surgeon at the University of Bristol, she started pursuing this line of research with a Ph.D. focused on creating tissue engineered constructs for babies born with heart defects. This work led to more technical post-doctorate work, using differentiation of pluripotent cells and bioprinting to create three-dimensional models of early cardiac development. Her knowledge of cells led to continuing her research at a non-profit where she studied potential methods of extending the health and viability of donated tissue. This expanded her expertise by introducing her to the FDA approval process and to physician and patient-oriented services.

Ruben has over 20 years of experience analyzing genomic data and has worked as both a software engineer and a bioinformatics scientist for several biotechnology start-ups. He recently led the development of oligo design tools at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, designing antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) for hundreds of gene targets. He is passionate about designing OBMs that modulate gene activity with precise control. Caught between the computer science and biology departments at Carnegie Mellon University, an internship at the Human Genome Sequencing Center set his path to walk the line between those fields. His Ph.D. work at University of California San Diego was focused on integrating many different genomic data sources to understand the tree of life. His post-doctoral training at the J. Craig Venter Institute focused on using next-generation sequencing to analyze microbial ecosystems.

Zavain serves as a Managing Member for Lux Capital where he invests at the intersection and union of cutting-edge biotech and software. Zavain has led Lux’s investments in Primer, a machine intelligence startup and many other companies, including Clarifai, Auransa, Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), Tempo Automation, Rigetti Computing, Braid, Visor, Computable Labs, Cryptonumerics, The Stacks Foundation, Runway, and more. Previously, he was an investor at Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. where he sourced and led the firm’s investments in early-stage technology companies including Zymergen and BlockStream. He also drafted the firm’s theses in Genetics, Synthetic Biology, and the Blockchain. Prior to VC, he engineered machine learning and AI systems across a proprietary distributed computing framework to build web scale-ranking algorithms at Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter).He was also a cofounder of Fountainhop, one of the first hyper-local social networks. He received a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University where he was a researcher in Stanford’s AI Lab. He is currently a Lecturer there and has taught quarter long seminars in Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy, and Venture Capital.

David is an Assistant Professor of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment and Laboratory, and Associate Director of Patient Impact at the Penn Orphan Disease Center. He is Co-Founder and President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network (CDCN), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating research and treatment for Castleman disease and developing innovative processes to support and advance biomedical research to cure many more diseases. He described his journey to a precision treatment for his disease in his 2019 national bestselling memoir Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action. As a leading expert on cytokine storms and drug repurposing, David launched the CORONA Project in March 2020 to apply the models for drug repurposing and accelerating research for rare disease to finding new treatments for COVID-19. He is Co-director of the advisory committee for the CURE Drug Repurposing Collaboratory, which is a FDA/NIH/C-Path public-private partnership, and a Board Member of the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA.

Chris is an experienced leader of interdisciplinary teams with decades of experience leveraging computational methods, machine learning and AI, and deep biological insights to solve problems. Prior to creating Creyon Bio, he built the functional genomics department at Ionis Pharmaceuticals. He was responsible for the company-wide genomics and bioinformatics efforts, including the development, running, and processing of all next-generation sequencing assays, development of research software informatics, and execution and strategic leadership of translational ‘omics and exploratory drug discovery programs that included programs in rare and common diseases. As a tenure-track faculty member at New College of Florida and a researcher at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, he researched and taught bioinformatics and computational biology. Prior to his work in the pharmaceutical industry, he worked at the Science and Technology Policy Institute advising the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on matters ranging from personalized medicine to international health research funding. Chris earned his Ph.D. in Biology and Computer Science Applications in Biotechnology from the California Institute of Technology and conducted post-doctoral training at Yale University.

Denis has over 40 years of leadership experience in the pharmaceutical industry, developing and/or commercializing more than 60 products during his career. He currently holds many leadership roles for various public and private biotechnology, specialty pharmaceutical, and diagnostic companies. He serves as Independent Director for Corporate Boards and also as Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Georgetown University Medical Center. Previously, he was a Managing Partner for Pheonix IP Ventures, LLC. and President of North American Operations at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories. Earlier in his career, he was Senior Vice President of many departments for GlaxoSmithKline. Denis was also Chief Executive Officer, President and Director for Neose Technologies (NASDAQ: NTEC). He received his M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine, his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his B.A. in Biology from Columbia University in New York City.

Swagatam is a theoretical physicist by training with a decade of experience and leadership in quantitative thinking in biology. He has extensive research experience, both in academia and industry, applying/advancing computational methods in biological datasets. After earning his doctorate degree in Condensed Matter Theory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he did a post-doctoral fellowship within the physics department at University of California, Santa Barbara on glassy and disordered media. He then moved to Rutgers University, where he worked at the crossroads of theory and experiments on epigenetic gene silencing and higher-order chromatin organization. He joined Cold Spring Harbor Lab and worked as a Computational Scientist in the field of Autism Genomics, computational neuroanatomy, and RNAi. After a brief stint in investigating the role of non-coding variants in large-scale human genomics at Human Longevity Inc., he joined the functional genomics team at Ionis Pharmaceuticals where he optimized and helped create some of the high-throughput assays used to understand both antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) pharmacology and disease models. Swagatam was instrumental in demonstrating the value of using quantitative methods to unravel ASO sequence-function relationships that helped explain oligonucleotide chemistry experimental observations. His work also led to dramatic improvements in lead-identification screening efficiencies.

Kiersten is a Managing Partner at DCVC Bio, where she focuses on investing in life science companies that have a deep-tech advantage, principally in therapeutics, agriculture, and synthetic biology. She holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology & Genetics and an MBA in Finance. At DCVC Bio, Kiersten works with entrepreneurs to help them launch their businesses at the foundational stage as well as leading first institutional rounds of funding. She has been involved at the formation or early investment stage of companies like Abcellera (Nasdaq: ABCL), Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere), Umoja, Mycoworks, Novome and Plexium. She also serves as a director for several non-profit sports & scientific organizations.

  Ryan is Vice President of Scientific Research at Illumina, where he leads the development and deployment of genomic technologies for patients worldwide, especially the use of whole genome sequencing as platform for genetic testing. He is also the co-founder of iHope Genetic Health, a philanthropic program with more than $120M in support that provides genetic disease patients across the globe pro bono clinical whole genome sequencing. Ryan has helped describe more than a dozen novel genetic disorders, published more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles, and is credited with being one of the first to use whole genome sequencing to resolve an undiagnosed genetic disease. He acts as the Illumina representative at the US National Academy of Medicine’s Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health and as an advisor to three rare disease non-profits. His work with rare disease patients has been featured in WIRED, Forbes, Scientific American, the television series Chasing The Cure and the documentary series Australian Story. He obtained his PhD in Genomics and Computational Biology from the University of Queensland on a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California, Davis on a Regent’s Scholarship.