NCI Emerging Technologies Seminar Series (Overview)

Dr. Adam Margolin is the CEO and co-founder of Flashpoint Therapeutics. With over 20 years of experience in cancer research and technology development, he has led some of the largest and most successful research organizations in these areas.

Before starting Flashpoint Therapeutics, Dr. Margolin was a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he led efforts in therapeutic platform company creation, investment diligence, board level strategic guidance, and served as CEO of the cancer cell therapy company NextVivo.

Dr. Margolin has held various prestigious positions throughout his career, including Chair and Professor of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Director of the Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology, and Senior Associate Dean of Precision Medicine at Mount Sinai. In these roles, he led an organization that rose to become the #3 ranked genetics department in the country, encompassing over 700 people and over $100M annual revenue. Concurrently, Dr. Margolin served as Chief of Data Science of Sema4. Prior to Mount Sinai, he was the Founding Director of the Computational Biology program at Oregon Health & Science University, where he was also promoted to the rank of Tenured Full Professor.

Dr. Margolin is also an internationally recognized researcher who has developed methods ranked among the most influential algorithms in the field of cancer computational biology. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University and performed his postdoctoral research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from the Wharton School of Business and a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Juliane Nguyen is Professor, Vice Chair, and Director of Graduate Admissions in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics at UNC at Chapel Hill. She leads an interdisciplinary lab that develops personalized biotherapeutics for cancer, myocardial infarction, colitis, and other diseases by merging cutting-edge molecular engineering with pharmaceutical sciences and bioinformatics. To date, Dr. Nguyen has secured over $18 million in research funding. She is also a biotech key opinion leader with several of her patents licensed to biotech. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards including the CMBE Young Innovator Award (Biomedical Engineering Society), the New York STAR Faculty Award, the Emerging Leader Award from AAPS, the Pioneering Pharmaceutical Sciences by Emerging Investigators Award, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She was also awarded the Guest Professorship at ETH Zuerich by the Galenus Foundation. In 2023, she was elected to the College of Fellows of the Controlled Release Society underscoring her international leadership in the field. Dr. Nguyen received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Philipps-University of Marburg (Germany). She then trained at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) under Dr. Frank Szoka as a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Postdoctoral Fellow. She is a standing member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Drug and Biologic Therapeutic Delivery study section. Moreover, Dr. Nguyen serves as the Executive Editor of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews and holds the role of Associate Editor at Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, both of which are internationally recognized journals in the field of drug delivery and biomedical engineering.

Daniel J. Siegwart is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biochemistry, and the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He holds the W. Ray Wallace Distinguished Chair in Molecular Oncology Research and serves as the Director of the Program in Genetic Drug Engineering, Director of the Drug Delivery Program in Biomedical Engineering, and Co-leader of the Chemistry and Cancer Program in the NCI-designated SCCC. He received a B.S. in Biochemistry from Lehigh University (2003), and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University (2008), studying with Professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski. He also studied as an NSF EAPSI Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo with Professor Kazunori Kataoka (2006). He then completed an NIH NSRA Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT with Professor Robert Langer (2008-2012). He has received awards including a CPRIT Scholar Award, an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, the Young Innovator Award in Nanobiotechnology, Biomaterials Science Emerging Investigator Award, and election to the Controlled Release Society (CRS) College of Fellows and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. His research laboratory utilizes materials chemistry to enable targeted nanoparticle delivery of genomic medicines. Their efforts led to an understanding of the essential physical and chemical properties of synthetic carriers required for therapeutic delivery of siRNA, miRNA, tRNA, pDNA, mRNA, and gene editors. His lab has been at the forefront in the design of synthetic carriers for gene editing and has applied these technologies for correction of genetic diseases and treatment of cancer. They reported the first non-viral system for in vivo CRISPR/Cas gene editing. Recently, they developed Selective ORgan Targeting (SORT) lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which was the first strategy for predictable tissue specific mRNA delivery and gene editing. They ultimately aspire to utilize chemistry and engineering to make a beneficial impact on human health.

Dr. Tam obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has held several senior academic and industry positions, including being one of the founding scientists of Acuitas Therapeutics in 2009. He is now Chief Scientific Officer at Acuitas, a biotech company in Vancouver BC, Canada with a leadership position in the development and application of lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology for delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics, in particular, messenger RNA therapeutics. Dr. Tam has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals relating to LNP technology and development of pharmaceutical products.

Dr. Weinberger is an expert on viral evolution and in the development of nucleic acid platform technologies to enable broad-spectrum and variant-agnostic efficacy against evolving disease targets. In 2017, Dr. Weinberger founded Autonomous Therapeutics, Inc. (“Autonomous”), a synthetic immunology company developing first-in-class precision RNA medicines from COVID-19 to cancers in New York. Now the company is based in Rockville, MD. Autonomous has developed new classes of RNA that enable targeted and resistance-proof therapeutic efficacy against rapidly evolving viral pathogens and cancers, and has been funded by: DARPA, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Blue Knight, and venture capital.

Dr. Weinberger completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his postdoctoral training as an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellow at Harvard. Prior to founding Autonomous, Ariel was a Principal Investigator and Wyss Institute Technology Development Fellow at Harvard Medical School.