Digital Biotech

Leslie Loveless of Slone Partners

Leslie brings nearly 20 years of healthcare industry and executive search experience to Slone Partners. She joined the firm in 2007, became Chief Operating Officer in 2014 and CEO in 2016. At Slone Partners, Leslie acts as the leader of the organization as well as the head of the Executive Search team. Her involvement with clients and candidates enables her to understand the key motivations of each. As Chief Executive Officer, Leslie’s focus extends to cultivating new business partnerships and expanding relationships with existing clients. Dedicated and results-driven, Leslie assists Slone Partners’ clients in establishing clear objectives and developing customized hiring strategies to meet their unique recruitment needs. Leslie’s thorough knowledge and understanding of life sciences and business give her the ability to deliver exceptional counsel to clients and keep Slone Partners on the leading-edge of the industry. Prior to becoming CEO and Head of Recruitment at Slone Partners, Leslie had a successful career in healthcare sales. She used her background in education as National Sales Trainer with Quest Diagnostics and later Director of Training and Development for AmeriPath. Early in her career, Leslie spent more than five years as an educator where she honed effective communication skills and a passion for helping others realize their full potential. Leslie graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English from Indiana State University and with honors, earning a Master of Arts in English from Butler University.

Andy Scharenberg of Casebia Therapeutics

Andy Scharenberg is Chief Scientific Officer at Casebia. Before joining Casebia, Scharenberg was an attending physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Principal Investigator in the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapies at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In addition, he served as Co-Director of the Program for Cell and Gene Therapy at Seattle Children’s Hospital, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and adjunct professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and a member of the Transplantation Biology Consortium Program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. As Chief Scientific Officer at Cellectis, Scharenberg helped implement a gene-editing partnership with Pfizer. He earned his Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from Indiana University and his medical degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Michael Johnson of Visikol

Dr. Michael Johnson is a 2017 and 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and the CEO and Co-Founder of Visikol Inc., which is a bio-imaging company that spun out of Rutgers University in 2016 and that Michael founded along with his fellow Ph.D. candidate Thomas Villani and colleague Nick Crider. Michael has a diverse background with experiences in both the technical and business considerations of running a biotech business.

Arvind Nallakkan of Five Prime Therapeutics

Arvind joined Five Prime Therapeutics in 2009 and currently serves as Senior Vice President, Strategic Technology Operations. He is responsible for Systems Engineering (Robotic Automation & Automated Data Integration), Information Technology, Process Development, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain functions. Technology innovations at Five Prime include our robotics platform to produce, starting from our cDNA library, almost all of the proteins in the human extracellular proteome (about 6000 proteins) and robotic processes to agnostically screen the proteins in different disease models to discover novel biological functions leading to the first-in-class therapeutics.Five Prime has also built an innovative data integration platform that, using a unique database architecture, can automate data integration across all R&D functions from clone to clinic (from early-stage discovery, through process development, manufacturing, and clinical trials). Arvind holds an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and Nanotechnology from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Brian Jones and Andres Tellez of Cedilla Therapeutics

Brian Jones has more than 25 years of drug discovery experience and has led the molecular discovery behind more than 20 INDs across several therapeutic areas. Most recently he spent 11 years at Novartis, where he was head of discovery chemistry for NIBR in Cambridge, Mass. Prior to that, Brian was at Merck for 16 years, initially as director of medicinal chemistry in Rahway, N.J. and subsequently as senior director at the Neuroscience Research Centre in the UK. Brian holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Imperial College, London. He was a NATO post-doctoral fellow at Yale University. Andres Tellez comes to Cedilla from Syros Pharmaceuticals, where he served as senior director of business development and helped secure the company’s partnerships with Incyte and Johnson and Johnson. Before joining Syros, Andres worked for several years at Cerulean Pharma, rising to director and acting head of business development. At Cerulean he served in a broad role, advancing strategic collaborations and supporting the company’s clinical development and fundraising efforts. Andres has a Ph.D. in biomedical informatics from Stanford University and an SB and M.Eng in EECS from MIT.