Scientific
Advisory Board

Dr. James Larrick is the Founder, Managing Director, and Scientific Director of the Panorama Research Institute and Managing Director and Chief Medical Officer of Velocity Pharmaceutical Development.

Dr. Larrick holds M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Duke University School of Medicine. He is a pioneer of the biotechnology industry and an outstanding biomedical entrepreneur with an international reputation in cytokines, therapeutic antibodies, molecular biology and pharmaceutical drug development. He has written or coauthored eight books, over 250 papers/chapters and over 30 patents. He has also served on the editorial boards of six journals. In 1991, Dr. Larrick founded the Panorama Institute of Molecular Medicine (PRI). The institute has incubated more than 20 life science projects, which spurred more than a dozen new companies. To date, PRI-initiated projects and/or companies have led to five IPOs and numerous successful acquisitions.

Dr. Ram Sasisekharan is an Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Biological Engineering and Health Sciences & Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Sasisekharan received his Ph.D. in medical sciences from Harvard Medical School. He has been a professor of biological engineering at MIT since 1996 and served as the Director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology from 2008-2012. Dr. Sasisekharan’s laboratory employs multidisciplinary strategies to develop and integrate technologies to further study complex biological systems important to a host of disease processes. He has co-authored five books, over 210 papers/chapters and over 85 patents. He has also served on the editorial boards of four journals. Technologies developed in the Sasisekharan Lab have resulted in the founding of multiple local biotechnology companies, including Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Cerulean, Visterra and Tychan. Dr. Sasisekharan has received numerous awards, including the National Institutes of Health Merit Award, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow, and Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.

Dr. David D. Ho is Scientific Director and CEO of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, as well as the Irene Diamond Professor at Rockefeller University.

Dr. Ho received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1978 and has a long, distinguished academic career including stints at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 1985-1986, UCLA School of Medicine from 1986-1990, and NYU School of Medicine from 1990-1996. Since 1990, Dr. Ho has been Scientific Director and CEO of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center; he is also Professor and Physician at Rockefeller University. Dr. Ho has also been a reviewer, an editorial board member, and an editor of many scientific journals. Dr. Ho has received over 40 awards and honors, including Man of the Year, Time Magazine in 1996; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Member of National Academy of Medicine; Member of Chinese Academy of Engineering; 14 honorary doctorates; and a US Presidential Medal.

Dr. Wei-Shou Hu is a distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Hu received his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pioneered the bioprocess technology field and initiated the Engineering Foundation Conference on Cell Culture Engineering 28 years ago that has had a great impact on the biotech industry. Dr. Hu’s current research efforts emphasize exploiting genomics and proteomics in advancing bioprocess technology and applying systems analysis to generate new understanding of metabolic and gene expression regulation. Over the past quarter century, Dr. Hu helped train thousands of scientists and engineers in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries around the world and authored several widely used textbooks on bioprocess engineering. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions in the biochemical engineering field.

Dr. David R. Liu is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, Richard Merkin Professor and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, as a member of its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

Dr. Liu’s research and teaching have earned distinctions including the Ronald Breslow Award, the Pure Chemistry Award, and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award. In 2017, he was named to Nature’s 10, an annual list of ten people who influenced science. That same year, Dr. Liu’s paper on base editing, a next-generation genome editing technology, was one of four finalists for Science Magazine’s 2017 Breakthrough of the Year. Dr. Liu has published more than 160 papers and is the inventor of more than 60 issued patents. He is also the founder or co-founder of five biotechnology companies, including Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, and Beam Therapeutics.