Raj Chopra, FRCP, FRCPath, FRSB, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Raj Chopra, FRCP, FRCPath, FRSB, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Raj Chopra is acting Chief Executive Officer of Aethon Therapeutics. He is also Head of Oncology and a Venture Partner at Apple Tree Partners (ATP). Raj brings to Aethon extensive experience leading cancer research and development in academia and industry. At The Institute of Cancer Research in London, as director of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit, he led one of the largest academic drug discovery groups in the world and focused on targeted protein degradation and complex 3D cell culture models. Raj also worked at Celgene from 2009 to 2016 as corporate vice president of Translational and Early Drug Development, leading an international team of more than 100 scientists. Before joining Celgene, he held leadership positions in AstraZeneca’s Oncology Therapeutics group in the UK and US.
Raj started his academic career as the director of Hematological Oncology at Christie Hospital and was group leader at the Paterson Institute of Cancer Research, both located in Manchester, UK. He was a non-executive director of Artios Pharma, established to develop a next-generation DNA damage response target pipeline of cancer therapeutics, and co-founder of Monté Rosa Therapeutics, a biotech focused on targeted protein degradation.
Raj trained in medicine at University College London, where he earned his Ph.D. in medicine, cell and molecular biology. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Royal College of Pathologists, and the Royal Society of Biology.
Paul Da Silva Jardine, Ph.D.
Chief Scientific Officer
Paul Da Silva Jardine, Ph.D.
Chief Scientific Officer
Paul Da Silva Jardine is acting Chief Scientific Officer at Aethon Therapeutics and a Venture Partner at Apple Tree Partners (ATP). Paul spent 25 years at Pfizer Research, first as head of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases (CVMD) Chemistry, then as vice president of the CVMD Biology Research Unit. Teams under Paul’s leadership discovered and developed more than 50 clinical candidates, two of which were licensed by the FDA and EMA as human medicines, and two of which were approved as veterinary medicines. In 2015, Paul left Pfizer to found and lead Staten Biotechnology, delivering into clinical development the only known anti-ApoC3 antibody for the treatment of coronary heart disease, which in 2018 Novo Nordisk acquired the option to buy for €430 million. Paul was a venture partner at ATP from 2017 to 2019, during which time he created a program that was incorporated into ATP portfolio company Chinook Therapeutics (NAS: KDNY). He then headed drug discovery efforts for Foresite Labs before returning to ATP.
Paul received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, and at Harvard University he earned a Ph.D. and conducted postdoctoral research in synthetic organic chemistry in the labs of Nobel laureate chemist E.J. Corey.
Christoph Rader, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Christoph Rader, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Christoph Rader is Chief Technology Officer at Aethon Therapeutics. Prior to joining the company, Christoph had a distinguished academic career at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA and Jupiter, FL), the National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, MD), and the University of Florida (Jupiter, FL). In addition, he served as Associate Dean of the Ph.D. Program of The Scripps Research Institute and as Instructor of the annual phage display course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. With more than two decades of funding by the National Cancer Institute, his laboratories focused on developing and applying antibody engineering and conjugation technologies to antibody drug and target discovery for cancer therapy. These efforts resulted in an extensive portfolio of publications and patents as well as the clinical translation of several novel antibody-based cancer therapies. Complementing his academic activities, Christoph consulted widely in the American and European pharma, biotech, and venture capital industries.
Christoph studied biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth in Germany and biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland where he received his Ph.D. for studies on immunoglobulin superfamily receptors. He completed his postdoctoral training with phage display and catalytic antibody pioneers Carlos F. Barbas III and Richard A. Lerner at The Scripps Research Institute in LaJolla.
Lauren Stopfer, Ph.D.
Executive Director of Proteomics & Innovation
Lauren Stopfer, Ph.D.
Executive Director of Proteomics & Innovation
Lauren Stopfer is Executive Director of Proteomics & Innovation at Aethon Therapeutics, focused on building and applying advanced, mass spectrometry-based workflows to support the identification and validation of novel MHC-I antigens within the HapImmune™ platform. Prior to joining Aethon, Lauren worked at BioNTech as a member of the Proteomics team, establishing specialized immunopeptidomics workflows to identify and quantify MHC-I targets for oncology and infectious disease programs.
Lauren received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was named a Siebel Scholar. Her thesis work focused on developing mass spectrometry-based platforms to enable relative and absolute quantitative measurements of the MHC peptidome, helping establish “quantitative immunopeptidomics” as an emerging field of research.
Sean Toenjes, Ph.D.
Executive Director of Chemistry & Innovation
Sean Toenjes, Ph.D.
Executive Director of Chemistry & Innovation
Sean Toenjes is Executive Director of Chemistry and Innovation at Aethon Therapeutics, focused on extending Aethon’s approach to new targets by using the HapImmune™ platform to guide chemistry design.
Sean received his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the San Diego State University (Gustafson Lab), where he developed methodologies to access atropisomeric compounds and leveraged atropisomerism to increase kinase inhibitor selectivity. During his postdoc at Stanford University (Gray Lab), Sean developed covalent E3 ligase binders and bivalent degraders.
Lorenzo Maso, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist II
Lorenzo Maso, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist II
Lorenzo Maso is an inventor of the proprietary HapImmune™ platform exclusively licensed to Aethon Therapeutics. His expertise is the de novo discovery and affinity maturation of antibodies, for which he combines protein engineering and structural biology techniques, such as yeast display and cryo-EM.
Lorenzo received his B.S. in Biotechnology, M.S. in Industrial Biotechnology and Ph.D. in Biosciences (Biochemistry and Biotechnology) at the University of Padova (Italy), where he also spent his first years as postdoc. During that time Lorenzo worked on different topics developing his structural biology skills and beginning his journey in protein engineering which he continued at New York University in Shohei Koide’s lab, where he participated in the development of the HapImmune™ platform.
Weifeng Liu, Ph.D.
Senior Principal Scientist
Weifeng Liu, Ph.D.
Senior Principal Scientist
Weifeng works on antibody discovery and engineering at Aethon Therapeutics. He leads a team to build Aethon’s proprietary AEthena antibody discovery platform, which includes a trillion-size human naïve antibody phage display library. Before joining Aethon Therapeutics, Weifeng worked at Pfizer for six years in biologic discovery and development serving as a project and group leader, supporting a portfolio in immuno-oncology, inflammation, and vaccines. Weifeng is a seasoned protein engineer with rich experience in antibody discovery and engineering, as well as cytokine and antigen engineering.
Weifeng received his Ph.D. and postdoctoral training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in structural immunology. His academic research focused on the mechanistic understanding of immune regulation, combining methods in structural biology, protein engineering, and functional studies. He has authored more than 20 papers and patents.
Seth Harrison, M.D.
Board Chairman
Seth Harrison, M.D.
Board Chairman
Seth Harrison is founder and Managing Partner of the life sciences venture capital firm Apple Tree Partners (ATP), the co-founder and lead investor in Aethon Therapeutics. Seth began investing in life sciences in 1991 as a venture partner at Sevin Rosen Funds and went on to be a general partner at Oak Investment Partners before starting ATP in 1999. Some of his earlier investments include Aileron Therapeutics, Akero Therapeutics, ArQule, Coelacanth, Corvidia Therapeutics, Cyrano Sciences, Gloucester Pharmaceuticals, HeartWare International, Informed Access, SGX Pharmaceuticals, Stoke Therapeutics, Syntimmune, Tendyne, Ultracision, and ViroPharma.
Seth currently serves on the boards of Akero Therapeutics and Stoke Therapeutics as well as the boards of all portfolio companies created within ATP’s current fund to date. From 2002 to 2010, he was a member of the board of the International Partnership for Microbicides, a nonprofit product development partnership focused on women’s health and HIV prevention.
Seth received an A.B. from Princeton University and an M.D. and MBA both from Columbia University. He completed a surgery internship at the Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York.
Shohei Koide, Ph.D.
Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor
Shohei Koide, Ph.D.
Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor
Shohei Koide is co-founder of Aethon Therapeutics and a scientific advisor to the company. He is an inventor of the proprietary HapImmune™ platform exclusively licensed to Aethon. A synthetic protein scientist, Shohei conducts research into the creation of novel protein functions. He integrates mechanistic biochemistry and directed evolution to produce highly functional but still simple proteins. He is the inventor of the Monobody technology, and he has made important contribution to synthetic antibody technologies. He has pioneered many applications of synthetic binding proteins to biology, chemistry and medicine.
Shohei is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU School of Medicine and a member of Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. Previously he was a professor at the University of Chicago and at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the National Academy of Inventors.
Benjamin Neel, M.D., Ph.D.
Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor
Benjamin Neel, M.D., Ph.D.
Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor
Benjamin Neel is co-founder of Aethon Therapeutics and a scientific advisor to the company. He is an inventor of the proprietary HapImmune™ platform exclusively licensed to Aethon. Ben is Professor of Medicine at NYU Langone Health in New York City. His research focuses on cellular signaling, with a particular interest in the biology and regulation of protein-tyrosine kinases and protein-tyrosine phosphatases, the role and regulation of the RAS/ERK pathway in pancreas and lung cancer, and the biology of ovarian cancer. He is the discoverer of SHP2 and generally viewed as one of the founders of the tyrosine phosphatase field.
Ben earned his Ph.D. in viral oncology from The Rockefeller University in 1982 and his MD from Cornell University Medical School the following year. His graduate work on oncogene (Myc) activation by slowly transforming RNA tumor viruses established the paradigm for oncogenesis by this class of viruses. He previously held positions as the William B. Castle Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Hematology-Oncology Research and Head of the Cancer Biology Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, as Director of Research at Princess Margaret Cancer Center, and as Canada Research Chair and Professor of the Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Ben has authored more than 260 primary papers and 35 reviews, many in leading journals, and his work has been cited over 55,000 times.
Ben is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, former Program Chair of the Annual Meeting and Member of Board of Directors of AACR, recipient of the initial Gertrude Elion Award of the AACR and the Premier of Ontario Summit Award, and co-founder of Northern Biologics, Navire Pharmaceuticals, and Lighthorse Therapeutics.
