Our highly experienced and diverse board is instrumental in driving our strategy forward
Youn Bok Lee is Co-Founder and Head of Discovery as AviadoBio. Youn Bok has a career spanning over 25 years of research in molecular biology of neurodegenerative disease. In 2001, he Joined the molecular neuroscience research group at the University of Bristol, where he investigated the neuro specific regulatable system using virus technology. His study focused on the protective role of RNA binding proteins and microRNAs on neuronal cell death. In 2010, Youn Bok moved to King’s College London, where he continued pre-clinical research on the role of RNA binding protein TDP-43 and FUS in ALS and FTD. He discovered toxic gain of G4C2 RNA repeat expansion function and demonstrated the pathogenic mechanism of di-peptides in C9orf72 ALS/FTD. During this research career, he has conducted Lenti and AAV projects for pre-clinical research and translational science. In 2018, Youn Bok established his gene therapy group in King’s College London and conducted pre-clinical research for ALS/FTD. At AviadoBio Youn Bok is responsible for leading the innovative pre-clinical research and developing the gene therapy programmes.
Youn Bok holds a BSc in Biology and MSc in Animal Physiology and Biochemistry from Dongguk University, South Korea and a MSc and PhD in Molecule Neuroscience from University of Bristol, UK.
Dr Graeme Fielder is Vice President /Head of Operations and was part of founding management team at AviadoBio. Graeme brings over 10 years of experience in the life science industry holding roles in strategy, business development, program and alliance management. He joins AviadoBio from Audentes Therapeutics Inc., (now Astellas Gene Therapies), a neuromuscular gene therapy company, where he oversaw the company’s corporate development activities including the acquisition to Astellas Pharma Inc., for $3 billion. Prior to Audentes, he held roles at BioMarin Pharmaceutical and Mesopharm Therapeutics.
Graeme holds a BSc. (Hons) degree in Biotechnology and a Ph.D. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Graeme also has a M.B.A from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business, USA.
Tim Funnell is a London Partner of Monograph Capital. Originally trained as a Pharmacologist with a PhD in lysosomal biology, Tim gained commercial experience at the Boston Consulting Group, before moving into Venture Capital. He has investing and operating experience via his roles at Syncona, Third Rock Ventures and Oxford Science Innovations. He has worked across small molecules, antibodies, gene and cell therapies and he has a particular interest in AAVs.
Jeanne Bolger has served as the Vice President, Venture Investments at Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc. (JJDC) since 2013. Jeanne’s responsibilities are focused on investing in and managing portfolio investments in start-up and early stage life science companies in areas of strategic interest to J&J’s business sectors in Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology, Medical Devices and Consumer. She represents or has represented JJDC on the Board of Directors of over a dozen companies, including Aelix Therapeutics, Asceneuron SA, Aviado Bio, Biocartis, Calypso Biotech, Caelus Health, Dreem, Inivata, Merus, Pulmocide, S-Biomedic, Syndesi, Topivert and TRexBio. She has also represented J&J / JJDC’s LP position in multiple VC Funds and other financing vehicles.
Jeanne has nearly 35 years of pharmaceutical industry experience in management roles across R&D, Commercial and Business Development. She spent 11 years in Licensing and Acquisition, most recently as Global Head of Scientific Licensing for Johnson & Johnson’s Pharmaceutical business, having joined the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies in 2005 from the Business Development group at GSK.
Jeanne received her medical degree from University College Dublin. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Ireland. She has served as the sole pharmaceutical industry representative on two Irish government taskforces seeking to enhance the commercialization of IP from Irish academic centres and is on the industry advisory board of CURAM. She is a visiting lecturer on the MSc Pharmaceutical Medicine curriculum at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
Matt McAviney joined NEA in 2018 and is currently a Partner on the healthcare team. He focuses on biopharma investments. Prior to NEA, Matt was a Principal at F-Prime Capital Partners. During his five years at F-Prime, he was responsible for closing investments in more than 20 private biopharma companies, and served on the board of more than 10 portfolio companies. Prior to F-Prime, he was a management consultant in the health and life sciences practice at Oliver Wyman, a biotech equity research analyst at Robert W. Baird, and a healthcare investment banker at JP Morgan. He also conducted lipid metabolism research at the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Disorders. Matt is a board member of AviadoBio and Recludix Pharma, and works closely with Korro Bio.
Matt received a BA with Honors in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago, an MD from the University of Illinois, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
After serving as Aviado’s start-up CEO, Jonathan is currently responsible for the company’s business and financial activities. He is an experienced biotechnology executive and brings over 20 years of experience spanning company formation, business development and venture capital. Most recently he was part of the foundational management team at CRISPR Therapeutics initially leading the company’s business development activities before, more latterly, helping build the company’s technical operations and collaborations. Before this Jonathan worked for Janssen pharmaceuticals with regional business development responsibility for Immunology and EMEA emerging markets. Prior to Janssen spent time at Nomura Phase4 Ventures, completing investments in both private and public biotechnology companies whilst observing on several boards.
Jonathan hold a DPhil and MA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford.
Lisa Deschamps is Chief Executive Office and Executive Board Member at AviadoBio.
Prior to joining, Lisa served as Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer of Novartis Gene Therapies, a unit of Novartis where she was responsible for strategic planning and worldwide commercialization of the pipeline and in-line assets across the extensive gene therapy portfolio; including the world-wide commercialization of Zolgensma. Her career at Novartis spanned for more than twenty-five years, during which she brought products from the clinic to commercialization across many therapeutic areas, including highly Specialized, Rare and Ultra-Rare disease areas and has led teams across U.S, Europe, LatCan and Asia/Pac in Strategic, Functional and General Management roles.
Lisa served on several executive teams across commercial and development within Novartis and serves as a Non-Executive Director for VERONA Pharma and is a Strategic Advisory and Non-Executive Director for Reset Pharma.
Lisa is a visionary and passionate leader driven by a strong belief that those rallied around a common vision can achieve the extraordinary together – and has proven that throughout her career. She and her teams have fostered a strong, People-and Purpose driven culture built on productive curiosity, courage, collaboration and transparency, while serving patients and delivering growth far exceeding expectations.
She has garnered many industry awards and honors and has a number of philanthropic interests. Lisa has an MBA in General Management from NYU Stern School of Business and a BBA in marketing from IONA College, Hagan School of Business.
Amber Salzman began her career at GlaxoSmithKline where she served as a member of the R&D Executive team. She was responsible for clinical trials globally with 30,000+ active patients, directing a budget of $1.25B and 1,600 employees worldwide. She then served as CEO of Cardiokine, where she successfully negotiated the sale of the company to Cornerstone Therapeutics (NASDAQ:CRTX). After Cardiokine, Amber launched Annapurna, a gene therapy company with rare disease assets that merged with Avalanche (NASDAQ:AAVL) to create Adverum Biotechnologies (NASDAQ:ADVM). Amber took on the CEO role, and while CEO Adverum’s stock price doubled and a secondary offering brought in additional funding. Amber returned to the east coast to lead Ohana Biosciences, a Flagship Pioneering company, establishing the industry’s first sperm product platform. Amber recently took on leadership of epic bio, a stealth company that regulates the epigenome to suppress and activate multiple genes simultaneously. Amber served on the Board of Akcea (NASDAQ:AKCA) until its sale to Ionis (NASDAQ: IONS) and currently serves on the Board of Osler Diagnostics (UK) and AviadoBio (UK).
For a variety of personal and professional reasons, Amber developed depth in the gene therapy space. Concurrent with industry positions, Amber leads a non-profit medical research foundation focused on accelerating the development of therapies for adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). In that capacity, she was a catalyst to establish a novel gene therapy approach for treating ALD, resulting in the treatment moving towards registration via bluebird bio (NASDAQ: BLUE).
Laurence Barker is a Partner in the Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) and has supported the funding and formation of numerous DDF companies developing transformational new medicines for dementia. He joined SV Health Investors in 2016 having played an active role in setting up DDF. Prior to joining the DDF, Laurence was Head of Investment Management in Worldwide Business Development at GSK where he was responsible for managing GSK’s venture investment portfolio, covering both direct equity positions as well as a venture fund-of-funds portfolio. In addition, he led licensing transactions for the pharma R&D business. Prior to GSK, Laurence worked in business development at biotech companies Syntaxin and MorphoSys. Laurence received his Masters degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and an MBA from Cambridge.
Nihal Sinha is a Partner at F-Prime based in London and focuses primarily on biotech. Nihal has been an early-stage investor in several gene and gene therapy companies including as a founding team member of Orchard Therapeutics. Prior to joining F-Prime in 2013, he worked as a strategy consultant at BCG and as an academic physician at Oxford University and UCL Hospitals. Nihal holds a MB BChir with distinction from the University of Cambridge and is a Member of the Royal College of Physicians.
Shahzad Malik is a General Partner at Advent Life Sciences. Since joining Advent in 1999, Shahzad has been actively involved in over 30 portfolio companies in Europe and the USA in all sectors of Life Sciences . Prior to Advent he worked at McKinsey & Company, and originally combined clinical practice as an interventional cardiologist with basic scientific research. He has an MA in Physiological Sciences from Oxford University and a MD from Cambridge University . Shahzad currently also serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees at MQ: Transforming Mental Health.
Professor Shaw had trained as a Neurologist in New Zealand before coming to Cambridge, UK on a Wellcome Trust Fellowship and moving to King’s College London in 1995. He is Director of the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute, and Centre Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at King’s. His research team have discovered more amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) genes than any other laboratory, enabling gene testing for patients and at-risk family members. They have generated a large number of stem cell and transgenic mouse models that recapitulate key features of the human disease and have revealed important mechanistic insights. Their focus for the future is to develop gene therapies for a wide range of neurodegenerative disorders using adeno-associated viral gene vectors. Award highlights include the “Forbes Norris Award” for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Care and Research (2009), “Sheila Essey Prize” for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Research (2012) and “Kea World Class New Zealander Award” (2019). He remains clinically active, running an ALS clinic at King’s College Hospital and leading clinical trials of antisense oligonucleotide therapies.
Carlos Miranda is the head of preclinical research at AviadoBio. Carlos brings over ten years of preclinical research in gene therapy gained in academic and industrial settings. During this period, Carlos worked in various AAV product development, including Zolgensma®, an FDA-approved gene therapy product to treat spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Before Aviado’s, Carlos worked for Freeline Therapeutics (Stevenage, UK), leading the preclinical work on lysosomal storage disorders. Before that, Carlos gained his experience in AAV gene therapy at the Centre for Gene Therapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus (Ohio, USA).
Carlos holds a PhD in Neuroscience and MSc in Human Genetics from the University of Porto, Portugal.
Do Young Lee is Co-Founder and Head of Vector Sciences at AvaidoBio. Do Young has over 15 years’ experience in the clinical translation of gene therapies. Her initial research interest at University College London was in the discovery and translation of gene therapy for the treatment of Haemophilia and lysosomal storage disorders. Earlier in her career, she specialised in vector design and AAV capsid development – two key components of potent and safe gene therapy vectors. In 2015, Do Young joined Freeline therapeutics where she successfully led the research vector core as well as early preclinical programme designs.
In 2018, Do Young moved to the Department of Basic and Clinical neuroscience (Wohl Institute – King’s College London), where she led the UK-DRI vector core facility. Together with Professor Chris Shaw and Dr Youn Bok Lee, she co-founded AviadoBio. At AviadoBio Do Young is responsible for vector manufacture, discovery and pre-clinical activities.
Do Young holds a dual degree, a BSc in Biological engineering and Clinical pathology, MSc in Epidemiology from the Korea University and a PhD in Haematology from the Cancer institute in University College London.
John Lavarino is Senior Director, People and Facilities at AviadoBio. John has over 15 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry in the HR field. His HR career began in talent acquisition, but he rapidly gained experience in all areas of HR. He spent over two years at BioMarin where he supported an exciting period of growth in EMEA.
After his time at BioMarin, John joined Orchard Therapeutics as employee number 14, and during his five years there, he helped the company to grow and develop enormously. He was again involved in the company’s expansion into different territories, and saw the company grow from a startup into a publicly held company. This role allowed John to work in multiple areas of HR such as organisational design, organisational development, employee relations, learning and development, performance and reward, and talent planning.
Alex Bloom is SVP Technical Operations at AvaidoBio and heads up the technical operations and enabling functions (CMC, Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs). Alex brings over 15 years of operational excellence in biologics, with over 10 years spent dedicated to cell and gene therapy development. In this time, Alex has worked on over 25 clinical-stage gene therapy programs. Previously, Alex led quality and regulatory activities at Gyroscope Therapeutics, supporting the development of gene therapies and innovative delivery devices for retinal disease. Before Gyroscope, Alex held CMC technical leadership and regulatory roles of increasing responsibility at Kuur Therapeutics and Chiesi Farmaceutici, where he played a pivotal role in the development and approval of Holoclar®, the first tissue engineered product to be approved in Europe or the US. Earlier in his career, he spent time at Parexel, the Institute of Cancer Research and Meridian Life Sciences.
Alex holds a PhD and MSc from Sheffield University.