Nolan Sigal, MD PhD — Founder, President. Dr. Sigal, a serial entrepreneur, has spent over 25 years in the academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology communities. His biotechnology experience includes President of Trellis Bioscience, Inc., Executive Vice President, Research and Development, and CSO at Cytokinetics, Inc. (CYTK) and Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery for Pharmacopeia, Inc. (PCOP), where he was one of Pharmacopeia’s founders. Prior to joining Pharmacopeia, Dr. Sigal held several management positions during a 10 year period with Merck & Company Inc, including Executive Director of Immunology Research. Following completion of an M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania and a pediatric residency, Dr. Sigal was on the faculty at the University of Toronto before moving to Merck.

Gal Bitan, PhD — Founder, Acting CSO. Dr. Bitan did his graduate studies in organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, on unnatural amino acids and non-conventional peptide cyclization. His patented inventions provided the core technology of Peptor, Inc. Dr. Bitan did postdoctoral studies on the structural biology of ligand-receptor systems at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School and continued to tackling the problem of protein misfolding and aggregation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bitan has made fundamental contributions to the study of early events in the pathologic cascades that cause Alzheimer’s disease introducing the use of novel photochemical protein cross-linking techniques for investigation of amyloid ß-protein assembly and discovered one of the earliest oligomers in the assembly cascade, the paranucleus. In 2004, Dr. Bitan joined UCLA where he is currently an Associate Professor of Neurology in the David Geffen School of Medicine.