Breaking new ground in immunology to help patients around the world

Eliot Charles has more than 20 years of biopharma experience in management and operations, venture investing and business development. Eliot is a venture partner at SR One and has prior venture experience at Apax Partners and New Leaf Venture Partners. Eliot has been involved in the creation of several successful start-ups and spin-outs including Principia Biopharma where he also served as COO. Eliot began his career at Genentech and later served as the head of external research and development affairs at Amgen. He holds a PhD in systems neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Whittaker Fellow, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Srinivas (Srini) Akkaraju is the Managing General Partner at Samsara, a firm that he founded in 2017. Srini brings over 20 years of experience in biotechnology venture investing at JPMorgan Partners, Panorama, New Leaf, Sofinnova Ventures and Samsara, and in-house business development experience at Genentech. He currently serves on the boards of Chinook Therapeutics, Intercept, Syros and a number of private biotech companies. Srini received his MD and PhD in immunology from Stanford University.

Shahzad Malik is a general partner at Advent Life Sciences. He brings over 20 years of venture capital and industry experience. Prior to joining Advent Life Sciences in 1999, he worked at McKinsey & Company, and originally combined clinical practice as an interventional cardiologist with basic scientific research. Shahzad currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees at MQ: Transforming Mental Health. He holds an MD from the University of Cambridge.

Debbie Harland is a venture partner at SR One. She brings both venture capital and sector experience, having established SR One’s European operations in 2005 after 17 years in an accomplished career across multiple operational roles in the pharmaceutical industry. She also serves as an independent director on the board of Cancer Research Technology and is a member of the advisory board of the University of Cambridge Maxwell Centre’s ‘Impulse’ program for young entrepreneurs. Debbie has a PhD in pharmacology from the University of London and an MBA from Henley Business School.

Katya Smirnyagina has been senior partner life sciences at Oxford Science Enterprises since September 2021, bringing two decades of experience in biotech. Katya started her VC career in 2002 with Alta Partners, a life sciences focused US fund, followed by Capricorn Partners in Belgium. She has been a director of several public and private companies in Europe and is the former vice-chair of InvestEurope.  Katya holds a PhD in cellular & molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed her scientific training with postdoctoral studies in microbiology & immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Richard Cornall is a co-founder of MiroBio and supports the research team and provides overall strategic scientific guidance. He has been the Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and head of the Nuffield Department of Medicine (NDM) at the University of Oxford since 2019. The NDM is the largest research department of medicine in Europe and includes centers such as the Jenner Institute and the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. Richard is a clinical nephrologist and immunologist whose research interests have focused on the positive and negative selection of lymphocytes, self-tolerance and immune regulation. He studied biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and medicine and genetics at the University of Oxford before training as a junior doctor in London. Richard was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the Laboratory of Chris Goodnow before he returned to the University of Oxford as a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow and professor of immunology.

Simon Davis is a co-founder of MiroBio and serves as a key scientific advisor to the Company. As a professor of molecular immunology at the University of Oxford for over 15 years, he has been mapping the surface of T-cells and exploring and examining the structures of surface proteins while determining how to manipulate specific immune signaling. This work includes the seminal proposal of the kinetic-segregation model of receptor triggering. In 1995, Simon established his own laboratory in what is now the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Here he discovered the structural basis of weak, specific recognition at the cell surface, determined the composition of the T-cell surface and overturned the received idea that G protein-coupled receptors are always oligomeric. Simon holds a PhD from Flinders University, Adelaide.

Jason Cyster is a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Maryland. Jason is an internationally recognized immunologist and has led the way in defining how cells emigrate from lymphoid organs, a process essential for immune function. Jason received a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry and Microbiology from the University of Western Australia and earned his PhD from the University of Oxford at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. He later became a post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford University Medical Center.

Tomas Mustelin has been a full professor since 1999 (at 38 years of age) and has published 250 papers. He has over 10 years of industry experience as vice president at Amgen, MedImmune/AstraZeneca and Gilead, where he led research and the preclinical development of novel therapeutics in autoimmune, inflammatory/respiratory diseases and immune-oncology. During that time, he served as the site head for Amgen’s Washington site and head of research at MedImmune. He is now the Herndon and Esther Maury Endowed Professor in Rheumatoid Arthritis, professor of medicine, and interim chief of the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Washington, Seattle. His current research is focused on deciphering the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. Tomas received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Helsinki, Finland, held a post-doctoral research position at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, and has been a licensed physician in the EU since 1991.

Robert Stein is a deeply experienced R&D leader who has played a significant role in the discovery and development of several marketed drugs, including Promacta, Sustiva and Eliquis. Robert is currently executive vice president, R&D, for Mimedx, a venture partner at Samsara BioCapital and an advisor to universities and companies, including Agenus where he was formerly president of research and development. He serves as a Director for a number of public and private companies and has held various senior leadership positions including head of pharmacology for Merck & Co., chief scientific officer and senior vice president, research for Ligand Pharmaceuticals, executive vice president, research and preclinical development for Dupont Merck, president and chief scientific officer for Incyte Pharmaceuticals, president of Roche Palo Alto and chief executive officer of KineMed. Robert holds an MD and a PhD in physiology & pharmacology from Duke University and is Board certified in anatomic and clinical pathology.