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TeamThe Ligon team consists of experienced industry management and leading scientific talent, including Dr. Angela Koehler, the inventor of Ligon’s Small Molecule Microarray technology, and Errol De Souza, a veteran of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Christian Bailey, Chief Executive Officer Christian Bailey is co-founder and CEO of Ligon where he leads corporate and business development and serves on the Board of Directors. Prior to Ligon, Christian was the co-founder and CEO of multiple private companies in the technology sector. Christian is a serial entrepreneur and Managing Partner at incTANK Ventures, which has backed life sciences companies such as Agrivida and AgaMatrix. He holds a BA and MA in economics and management from Oxford University, and completed studies in molecular biology and solid state chemistry as a Fellow at MIT. Patrick Kleyn, PhD, President and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Kleyn is a founder of Ligon. As CSO, he leads internal research & development, external collaborations, and operations. Formerly, he served as Director of Scientific Planning at the Broad Institute where he raised over $40M in research funding primarily from pharmaceutical partners. Before joining the Broad, Dr. Kleyn was Chief Scientific Officer at Gemini Genomics, where he participated in an IPO which raised $96M prior to its $238M merger with Sequenom in 2001. He was also one of the initial scientists at Millennium Pharmaceuticals where he led the cloning of an obesity gene, one of the company’s first major scientific achievements. He subsequently held multiple senior research-management positions at Millennium and Millennium Predictive Medicine. He was a Postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, has a PhD in Genetics from the University of London (UK), and received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University (UK). Angela Koehler, PhD, Technology Advisor Dr. Koehler is a founder of Ligon and guides Ligon’s SMM platform development and screening operations at Ligon. She is a Fellow in the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute and is an inventor of the Ligon microarray technology. Dr. Koehler’s current research activities include the use of microarrays for the discovery of small-molecule ligands for a variety of disease-relevant proteins and the development of next-generation small molecule microarray technologies. Her group has screened more than 100 human transcription factors against SMMs to date and has identified functional small molecule ligands for various transcription factors including NF-YB, NF-κB, and TFIID. Dr. Koehler is also a group leader in the National Cancer Institute’s Initiative for Chemical Genetics. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University, and received a BA in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Reed College. Benjamin Ebert, MD, PhD, Chair, Scientific Advisory Board Dr. Ebert is a founder of Ligon and, as SAB Chair, guides the initial disease focus strategy, and assists in the establishment of key academic collaborations. Dr. Ebert is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His laboratory focuses on the genetic basis of hematologic malignancies, molecular predictors of therapeutic response, and the development of novel small molecules for the treatment of sickle cell anemia. Dr. Ebert is board certified in both hematology and oncology. He was a Postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute and did a Fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute after completing a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Ebert holds a PhD from Oxford University (UK) where he was a Rhodes Scholar and has a BA from Williams College. |