John C. Chabala, PhD earned a B.S. degree in chemistry at Bucknell University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975.  He joined Merck Sharp & Dohme Research laboratories in 1974 and rose to the position of Executive Director of Basic Chemistry where he supervised the research of three departments of medicinal chemistry, as well as natural products chemistry and biophysical chemistry.  He is the co-inventor of ivermectin, a highly successful parasiticide, for which he was awarded the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 1987 and the New Jersey Institute of Chemistry Award in 1992.  In 1991 he joined Bristol-Myers Squibb where he was Senior Vice President and worldwide head of medicinal chemistry.  In 1993 he was a co-founder of Pharmacopeia, Inc., a pioneer in combinatorial chemistry and its application to the discovery and optimization of novel drugs.  At Pharmacopeia he was President, Chief Scientific Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors, and oversaw the growth of the company from a privately held concern to a publicly traded company.  Since 1997 Dr. Chabala has served as member of the Scientific Advisory Board of 15 biotechnology companies and as an independent consultant for 17 biotechnology companies, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the Hereditary Disease Foundation and three venture capital groups.

Marie-Françoise Chesselet, MD, PhD is the Charles H. Markham Professor of Neurology and the Chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received her MD and PhD degrees from the University of Paris VI, France, where she completed her PhD thesis in the laboratory of Jacques Glowinski and became a Charge de Recherches at the CNRS, the National French Research Agency. She was a Visiting Scientist in the laboratories of Ann Graybiel at MIT and of Michael Bronstein at the NIH before joining the Faculty of the Medical College of Pennsylvania and then the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996, she moved to UCLA were she directs the APDA Advanced Center for Parkinson’s Disease Research, the NINDS-funded UCLA Morris K. Udall Center of Excellence for Parkinson’s Disease Research and the NIEHS-funded Center for Gene Environment in Parkinson’s Disease. Her laboratory conducts research on the molecular mechanisms of disorders of the basal ganglia and new treatments for Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease.

Jeffrey L. Cummings, MD is the director of the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research at UCLA. The Center has an active drug discovery, drug development and clinical trials program and fosters imaging, genetics, clinical and neuroscience research.  Dr. Cummings also directs the Deane F. Johnson Center for Neurotherapeutics (JCNT) at UCLA.  This unique enterprise supports clinical trials across CNS diseases and provides education and training programs for academicians and pharmaceutical personnel.  Dr. Cummings’ research and leadership contributions in the field of Alzheimer’s disease have been recognized through the Henderson Award of the American Geriatrics Society (2006), the Research Award of the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Research Foundation (2008), and the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Award of the national Alzheimer’s Association (2008). In 2010, he received the Legacy Award from the Ticki Wilkerson-Kassel Movement Therapy Foundation and was honored by the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry with their Distinguished Scientist Award.

Doug W. Hobbs, PhD received his Bachelors degree from the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1984, followed by his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1989.  After working at Merck Research Laboratories for five years on the development of peptidomimetics for use as hormone antagonists, he joined Pharmacopeia Inc., where as Executive Director of Chemistry he focused on emerging technologies, such as combinatorial chemistry and ultra high-throughput screening, and the integration of those approaches with lead optimization programs.  His efforts contributed to the introduction of several compounds to the clinic, in diverse therapeutic areas including oncology, metabolic disease, cognitive disorders, immunology, and infectious diseases.  After leaving Pharmacopeia in 2006, he directed his efforts at consulting, and teaching at various universities, including the Washington University School of Medicine, where he was a research faculty member in the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics.

Elizabeth B. Vadas, PhD received her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from McGill University in Montreal. She obtained her undergraduate degree in colloid and surface chemistry in Budapest, Hungary. She joined Merck Frosst, the Canadian subsidiary of Merck & Co. in 1980 as a senior research scientist in the department of Pharmaceutical Research and Development.  From 1991 to 2002 Dr. Vadas was head of Pharmaceutical Research and Development at Merck Frosst The department, under her leadership, was responsible from early compound characterization to formulation and process development of new chemical entities including the supply of clinical trial materials from phase I through phase III as well as technical transfer from research to manufacturing.  Notable accomplishments of her department were several products developed in the leukotriene and Cox-2 programs for worldwide introduction. One of the most important of these products from the leukotriene program, leading to worldwide regulatory approval, was SINGULAIR®, Merck’s once a day oral asthma therapy for both adult and pediatric patients.

Janet Wolfe, PhD is President and Founder of Wolfe Laboratories (WLI), a biopharmaceutical development services company located in Watertown, Massachusetts.  Dr. Wolfe’s scientific and business career has focused on the intersection of the critical path activities in CMC, DMPK, preclinical and clinical development.  Hundreds of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies seek the expertise of WLI’s scientific team to facilitate the translation of their compounds from late-stage discovery into the clinic.  Dr. Wolfe has designed and directed early stage development programs for small molecules and biologics across therapeutic areas such as CNS, cardiovascular, metabolic diseases, immunology, and oncology.  WLI has contributed to the advancement of molecules through all stages of development and commercialization. Prior to starting Wolfe Laboratories in 1999, Dr. Wolfe was on the faculty of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, which followed her postdoctoral fellowship in the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center Pharmacy at the National Institutes of Health.  Dr. Wolfe has over fifteen years experience in pharmaceutical research and development and is the author of numerous articles and presentations.  She has mentored undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows over the course of her career.  Dr. Wolfe received her bachelor of science from the University of Sciences in Philadelphia and doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Kansas.

Nolan Sigal, MD PhD — Founder, President.

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.