LifeMine CEO and leadership

Gregory Verdine is a leader in the discovery, development, and commercialization of new drug modalities. A passionate and accomplished inventor of novel approaches and drug classes to engage targets widely believed intractable, Greg coined the phrase “drugging the undruggable” to describe his life mission. LifeMine is the brainchild of Greg, who as a venture partner of WuXi Healthcare Ventures, led the founding team that brought the company from concept to reality. In his role as President, CEO, and CSO of LifeMine, Greg is leading the company through its ramp-up and march toward the clinic.

Greg is highly regarded for having moved seamlessly between roles as an academic scientist, biotech entrepreneur, investor, and company executive. As Erving's Professor at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, he made seminal contributions to understanding mechanisms of DNA repair and epigenetic DNA methylation and he invented a new drug modality called stapled peptides. As an entrepreneur, Greg has founded multiple, public biotech companies including Variagenics, Enanta, Eleven Bio, Tokai, Wave Life Sciences, and Aileron, and a private company, Gloucester Pharmaceuticals, that was acquired by Celgene. These companies have succeeded in achieving FDA approval for three marketed drugs.

Greg has served on the board of directors of Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Wave Life Sciences, Warp Drive Bio, and FOG Pharmaceuticals. Having led the formation and financing of Wave Life Sciences, Warp Drive Bio, and FOG, Greg took a role in managing these companies as their president, chief executive officer, and chief scientific officer.

Greg earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University, a B.S. in chemistry from St. Joseph’s University, and served as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at MIT and Harvard Medical School.

WeiQing Zhou is a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of LifeMine Therapeutics where she oversees and drives corporate development and communications, finance, operations and human resources. As an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at WuXi Healthcare Ventures, WeiQing co-led the team that developed LifeMine from a concept to a seed-stage company to a fully operational biotech company financed by a powerful international investor syndicate.

Prior to LifeMine, WeiQing co-founded FOG Pharmaceuticals with Gregory Verdine and Sir David Lane, and continues to serve as FogPharma’s Chief Operating Officer. Prior to FogPharma, WeiQing spent much of her career in corporate strategy, business development and product development at MedSkin Solutions Dr. Suwelack, Germany, having risen through positions of increasing responsibility to General Manager, with responsibility for global marketing, business development and commercialization. She holds an M.B.A. from the University of Dortmund, Germany.

Iain McFadyen is a computational scientist who combines demonstrated leadership and strategic vision with an exceptionally broad technical wingspan ranging from genomics, transcriptomics, and protein structure analysis to structure-based drug design, chemoinformatics, deep learning, and translational bioinformatics. Prior to LifeMine, Iain held positions of increasing responsibility at Moderna, Inc., where he headed up Computational Sciences and Next Generation Analytics. He built a department applying bioinformatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, non-clinical statistics, data science, and NGS to meet the needs of groups and programs across the company. Prior to Moderna, Iain led the development of a big data analytics framework to extract commodity futures trading signals from real-time global geospatial data on maritime cargo movements as an Associate Director at CargoMetrics Technologies, LLC. Before that, Iain was a Principal Research Scientist and Group Leader at TransForm Pharmaceuticals where he led a $10M Grand Challenges in Global Health grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Iain started his career in increasing roles of responsibility at Genetics Institute/Wyeth Research where he ultimately served as a Senior Scientist focused on rational, structure-based drug design and chemoinformatics applied to a variety of protein targets.

Iain earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Loughborough University (UK) and the University of Michigan in the Traynor Lab and a B.S. in medicinal and pharmaceutical chemistry from Loughborough University (UK). He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Minnesota where he focused on the structural basis of opioid receptor ligand selectivity in the Ferguson Lab.

Gregory Verdine is a leader in the discovery, development, and commercialization of new drug modalities. A passionate and accomplished inventor of novel approaches and drug classes to engage targets widely believed intractable, Greg coined the phrase “drugging the undruggable” to describe his life mission. LifeMine is the brainchild of Greg, who as a venture partner of WuXi Healthcare Ventures, led the founding team that brought the company from concept to reality. In his role as President, CEO, and CSO of LifeMine, Greg is leading the company through its ramp-up and march toward the clinic.

Greg is highly regarded for having moved seamlessly between roles as an academic scientist, biotech entrepreneur, investor, and company executive. As Erving's Professor at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, he made seminal contributions to understanding mechanisms of DNA repair and epigenetic DNA methylation and he invented a new drug modality called stapled peptides. As an entrepreneur, Greg has founded multiple, public biotech companies including Variagenics, Enanta, Eleven Bio, Tokai, Wave Life Sciences, and Aileron, and a private company, Gloucester Pharmaceuticals, that was acquired by Celgene. These companies have succeeded in achieving FDA approval for three marketed drugs.

Greg has served on the board of directors of Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Wave Life Sciences, Warp Drive Bio, and FOG Pharmaceuticals. Having led the formation and financing of Wave Life Sciences, Warp Drive Bio, and FOG, Greg took a role in managing these companies as their president, chief executive officer, and chief scientific officer.

Greg earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University, a B.S. in chemistry from St. Joseph’s University, and served as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at MIT and Harvard Medical School.

WeiQing Zhou is a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of LifeMine Therapeutics where she oversees and drives corporate development and communications, finance, operations and human resources. As an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at WuXi Healthcare Ventures, WeiQing co-led the team that developed LifeMine from a concept to a seed-stage company to a fully operational biotech company financed by a powerful international investor syndicate.

Prior to LifeMine, WeiQing co-founded FOG Pharmaceuticals with Gregory Verdine and Sir David Lane, and continues to serve as FogPharma’s Chief Operating Officer. Prior to FogPharma, WeiQing spent much of her career in corporate strategy, business development and product development at MedSkin Solutions Dr. Suwelack, Germany, having risen through positions of increasing responsibility to General Manager, with responsibility for global marketing, business development and commercialization. She holds an M.B.A. from the University of Dortmund, Germany.