Over the last couple of months, we’ve lost two of the most prominent people in biopharma. José Baselga and John Martin achieved wonderful things in their lifetimes, and richly deserved the many tributes offered after they exited from life far too early.

Their careers spanned the coming-of-age of biotech and drug hunting. And their discoveries and company-building efforts transformed therapeutic arenas, saved lives and restored hope, creating the very foundation of an industry that promises to create the next great tech revolution of mankind. They may not have been perfect, but they led by example, every day.

But there’s a whole generation of living pioneers who have been breaking new paths in R&D for decades. And we’re not going to wait to recognize at least a group of standouts who have earned recognition for a lifetime’s devotion to the field. What follows is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of everyone over the age of 60 who deserves recognition for what they’ve done in their lifetimes — their legacies. That’s a very big group. But they do represent a generation of the best and brightest who have given it their best shot, and still get up every day to continue the fight.

This is our tip of the hat for what they’ve done. And what they promise to do.

—John Carroll, 64
Highlights: Journeyman writer, editor and founder, Endpoints News

Jim Allison

Before there was the big commercial battle between Keytruda and Opdivo, Yervoy led the way in opening the door to a wave of checkpoint drugs. Jim Allison won the 2018 Nobel in science for his work on that. Allison’s relentless exploration into T cells and the role they play in human health will continue to influence the entire field of oncology R&D, which has been undergoing a revolution in part due to Allison’s work. When cancer is cured today, chances are he had a hand in it with his insights on T cells, whether the patient knew it or not. “These are cells that, to me, are just amazing,” Allison said in an interview. “They go all through your body looking for infection or cancer, we know now, and respond to it by generating an army of similar soldiers who can attack … in a way that doesn’t harm normal cells. I’ve been intellectually challenged by the wonderful complexity of that.” And the world is richer, and healthier, for it. — John Carroll

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Roy Baynes

Even before Roy Baynes helped spearhead the Keytruda freight train at Merck, he had a long and storied career in hematology-oncology and stem cell transplantation, ultimately authoring more than 150 articles across academia and industry. But it would be at Merck, which he joined in December 2013 under the leadership of then-novice CEO Ken Frazier and R&D head Roger Perlmutter, that Baynes would rise to his professional pinnacle as the clinical lead for I/O wonder drug Keytruda. Since its launch in 2014, Keytruda has racked up indications in at least 15 tumor types and hasn’t stopped growing since. As head of clinic, Baynes has overseen dozens of trials for Keytruda in his nearly eight years on the job — a remarkable workload for the former Amgen exec as he enters the back half of his 60s. Prior to Merck, Baynes spent two years as the senior VP of oncology, inflammation and respiratory therapeutics at Gilead, and before that worked for nearly a decade as Amgen’s VP of global development and area therapeutic head of hematology-oncology. While at Amgen, Baynes worked closely with Perlmutter, who helmed R&D for 12 years before making his own pivotal jump to Merck in March 2013 and poaching Baynes months later. — Kyle Blankenship

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Arie Belldegrun

Arie Belldegrun built Kite Therapeutics with a singular focus and in the process helped birth the cell therapy field that has spawned a multitude of players who think they can do better — including one chaired by Belldegrun. Gilead paid $12 billion for Kite, after the biotech had won an approval for the close second CAR-T. Arguably, Belldegrun’s early focus on manufacturing made it the market leader, but CARs are still known more for their potential than the reality — as impressive as the first 2 were. Since the buyout, Belldegrun and his longtime colleague David Chang (who at 61 deserves a prominent place here as well) launched Allogene, carrying on their strategy of staying laser focused on product development. And Belldegrun has gone on to direct a multitude of new ventures, from getting the family involved in new building projects for biotech to investing in startups through Vida Ventures. If anything, Belldegrun has become even busier post-Kite. — John Carroll

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Norbert Bischofberger

Don’t talk to Norbert Bischofberger about age. “I’m 62, I feel like 42 and behave like I’m 22… I’ve done it and seen it all, now I want to apply it to my own ideas,” he told me when he decided to jump on startup Kronos after a stellar run captaining R&D at Gilead. Bischofberger was in on the development of some of the most important drugs on the planet, and he’s determined to repeat that feat. Notably, Bischofberger appears alongside Arie Belldegrun, who partnered with the late Gilead founder John Martin in steering Kronos into existence. Getting Bischofberger to agree to jump on board lent major credibility to the effort as they lined up an IPO to back their platform as well as a late-stage drug they brought in from Gilead. Bischofberger speaks plainly about the hard facts of getting a biotech startup up and running these days. And he knows those hard facts inside and out. — John Carroll

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Jeffrey Bluestone

Jeffrey Bluestone is an expert on both sides of the immune system — from driving an immune response to attack cancer to the flip side hitting the brakes to prevent autoimmune activity that blights millions of lives. He played a major role in launching and initially running the Parker Institute of Cancer Immunology. And after decades of spawning drug programs at UCSF, he’s now decided to lay it all on the line and helm his own startup, Sonoma, ready to do what it takes to drive this particular biotech vehicle across the finish line. Bluestone is a relentless scientist. Long after Eli Lilly gave up on a late-stage rheumatoid arthritis drug, he helped steer it back to the clinic at a startup. And just setting out with a preclinical effort, it’s clear that he has plenty of longterm plans to complete as he launches a years-long quest to develop a drug. — John Carroll

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George Church

Before there was the red-hot gene therapy field — or even the first human sequence — there was George Church, a Duke dropout who found himself in Nobel prize-winner Walter Gilbert’s lab at Harvard University. Church, now 66 years old, was interested in crystallography, and he sought to apply what he had learned to the adjacent fields of DNA, RNA, proteins, and synthetic biology, he told The Journal of Clinical Investigation back in 2019. In 1984, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method, which resulted in the first genome sequence. Around that same time, he became one of the original scientists involved in the Human Genome Project. After completing his PhD at Harvard, Church followed Gilbert to Biogen, where he spent a short six months before entering a postdoc fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. The luminary found his way back to Harvard in 1986, where he’s still a professor today. In addition to inventing the broad concept of multiplexing, which takes strands of DNA and gives them chemical tags that allow multiple strands to be sequenced simultaneously, Church is known for research that verges on science fiction — like his project to program woolly mammoth traits into an Asian elephant. The scientist himself said it best in the JCI interview: “Nearly everything we touch seems to go swiftly from science fiction to normal.” — Nicole DeFeudis 

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Tony Coles

It would have been easy for Tony Coles to walk away after Amgen bought out his company, Onyx, for $9.7 billion. As CEO, he took home $58 million and, at 53, he could’ve bought his yacht and coasted into early retirement. Instead the Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck and Vertex vet popped up a year later as CEO and co-founder of Yumanity Therapeutics, a company that promised to use new technology to study protein folding and develop small molecules that can fix devastating neurodegenerative diseases, including ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. He has since made that hunt the focal point of his latter career, stepping into a chairman role at Yumanity in 2018 and agreeing in 2019 to become CEO of Cerevel, the biotech that Bain Capital built on Pfizer’s old neuroscience pipeline. Last year he took both companies public. “I would say that neuroscience drug discovery is really what HIV/AIDS and cancer were two decades ago,” he said when he joined Cerevel. “I have always enjoyed a big challenge, and this is certainly a big challenge.” — Jason Mast

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Francis Collins

Throughout high school and college, Francis Collins had little interest in what he called the “messy” field of biology, according to a biography published by the NIH. But a biochemistry course at Yale University piqued his interest in DNA and RNA, leading him to enroll in medical school at the University of North Carolina. In 1993, he was tapped as director of the NIH’s National Center for Human Genome Research, succeeding James Watson (as in Watson and Crick). There he led the Human Genome Project, and upon releasing a draft of the human genome in 2000, he said: “It is humbling for me and awe inspiring to realise that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” The scientist scooped up the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, and the National Medal of Science in 2009. Barack Obama appointed him as 16th director of the NIH — a role which he was asked to continue by both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He’s currently the only presidentially appointed NIH director to serve more than one administration. — Nicole DeFeudis 

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Sue Desmond-Hellmann

For Sue Desmond-Hellmann, one common theme runs through all the roles she’s served in: Whether it’s treating AIDS-related cancer in Uganda, running product development at Genentech, taking on the chancellor post at the University of California, San Francisco or leading as CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she found meaning in her work. Some were very much visible: Avastin and Herceptin, two drugs that Desmond-Hellmann helped steered toward approval, were among the first targeted cancer therapies ever and continue to benefit multitudes of patients; At the Gates Foundation she championed development of new vaccines and other programs that directed top scientific talent to global health. Others were harder to measure, such as being the first woman to hold the top job at her alma mater, or earning a reputation as a disarming leader who can make the necessary tough calls. — Amber Tong

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Anthony Fauci 

Now a household name and celebrity, Anthony Fauci has been the voice of reason and the top government scientist during the pandemic for both the Trump and Biden administrations. A native of Brooklyn (who has kept his accent), Fauci has served as director of NIAID since 1984, overseeing a $6+ billion budget and advising seven presidents along the way. In addition to his work on Covid-19, he’s also served as the nation’s top infectious disease expert during multiple crises related to HIV/AIDS (he was one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), Ebola and Zika. A prolific author, he’s worked on or edited more than 1,000 scientific publications. According to the Web of Science, Fauci ranks 9th out of 2.5 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2021. He’s been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest honor given to a civilian by the president) and the National Medal of Science, among other major awards. Quite simply, he’s the consummate archetype of government service. — Zachary Brennan

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Karen Ferrante

For more than 25 years, Karen Ferrante has worked in oncology drug development for some of the most notable names in the business. Her past job titles include head of R&D and CMO at Tokai Pharmaceuticals, head of the oncology therapeutic area at Takeda and CMO at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and all of those came after holding roles in clinical development at Pfizer and BMS. In November 2020, she joined the Trillium Therapeutics scientific advisory board, in addition to Hutchinson China MediTech and Kazia Therapeutics. Her in-depth knowledge about hospitals and their ability to connect with patients, as well as FDA regulations, make her especially valuable to the companies she serves on the board for. — Josh Sullivan

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Mark Fishman

When Mark Fishman took the job as president of the newly founded Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in 2002 — hopping just across the Charles River from Massachusetts General Hospital to a leased building at MIT — he had a grand vision in mind: “I’m trying to merge academia with industry. There is a huge domain in which they overlap and in that domain, we can start a whole new culture of science.” And he did. Prior to joining NIBR, Fishman was known for pioneering zebrafish models to study human cardiovascular disease. He went far beyond that during his 14-year tenure, steering dozens of new drugs to the clinic in areas like cancer, multiple sclerosis and ophthalmics, while setting the stage for groundbreaking partnerships such as the CAR-T pact with the University of Pennsylvania. By the time he retired, what was once a small group had grown to a bustling research unit that fed into the pipeline of the world’s largest drugmaker by revenue. Now back in academia, Fishman is once again using zebrafish genetics to elucidate social behavior, but also finds time for biotech boards and venture projects with ex-Novartis CEO Joe Jimenez. — Amber Tong

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Jean-François “JF” Formela

Atlas Venture’s crew decided after the big meltdown more than a decade ago that they would buckle down and stick with biotech as their specialty. And Jean-Francois Formela would play a central role in helping shape a full generation of startups noted for their discipline and expertise. He joined the VC 28 years ago to shape the investment strategy in the US. And he’s been a core player through a tech boom that has transformed the industry during that tenure. He is a co-founder of IFM Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, Korro Bio, Triplet Therapeutics and Translate Bio; serves on the boards of Ikena Oncology, Scorpion Therapeutics, and Spero Therapeutics; and played a big role at companies like Adnexus, ArQule, deCODE and Exelixis. And he’s not done adding to that list. — John Carroll

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Ken Frazier

As Ken Frazier prepares to wrap his 29-year career in Kenilworth, NJ, he will perhaps be remembered best for his final year on the job. One of the few Black CEOs on the Fortune 500 — and the only one in Big Pharma — Frazier emerged as an elder statesman and moral lodestar in a 2020 marred by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a crippling Covid-19 pandemic. His role in spearheading initiatives across the industry to promote racial diversity and inclusion will stand the test of time, but it’s worth noting that Frazier’s 10 years at the helm also happened to coincide with the superstar rise of Keytruda. The checkpoint inhibitor wonder drug is Merck’s bestseller and second to only AbbVie’s Humira in terms of annual sales. It’s also the source of animus among investors worried that Frazier’s team hasn’t done enough to diversify the pipeline. Frazier, who took on the CEO role in 2011, was responsible for bringing on fellow 60 over 60 luminaries Roger Perlmutter and Roy Baynes to head R&D and clinical just months before Keytruda earned its initial approval. Since then, the drug has nabbed dozens of indications among a swath of tumor types and set a high bar for the rest of the immune-oncology field. Both Frazier and Perlmutter are out the door in 2021, though, turning over the keys to the Keytruda race car to younger hands. — Kyle Blankenship

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Michael Gilman

Michael Gilman had followed a long and winding road in the R&D side of this business in the 38 years since he picked up his PhD at Berkeley. His career has stretched from a stint as a scientist at Cold Spring Harbor through the CSO spot at Ariad and on to become the top discovery exec at Biogen. Now he’s best known as a serial entrepreneur who understands the science perfectly. It was at Biogen that his thoughts turned to startups, picking up a fibrosis drug out of the pipeline and using it to launch Stromedix before handing it back to Biogen in a buyout. After a brief run back in early development at Biogen, he was off and running again, this time with Padlock, before Bristol Myers stepped up with an offer. Then came 2 back-to-back startups — Obsidian and Arrakis — before the money guys poured in cash and persuaded Gilman to devote his full-time attention to the Arrakis crew out to pioneer the field of drugging RNA. With that kind of background, it was no wonder that Gilman had quickly become aware of the potential of drugging RNA after running back into contact with Jennifer Petter, who he worked with at Biogen. His scientific contacts are legion — and now he’s complemented that with a host of close ties with the VC side of the business. — John Carroll

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Laurie Glimcher

Five years ago, when the Dana-Farber Institute announced Laurie Glimcher as CEO, several Harvard Med School faculty members were up in arms; it’s not that they had critiques — they wanted her to be dean at HMS instead. Several attributes made Glimcher a stellar candidate. There was, of course, the scientific acumen: The daughter of a pioneer in artificial limbs who refused to ask anything but the biggest questions, Glimcher identified key signals that determined which immune cells became which, elucidated a new potential immuno-oncology pathway and isolated a gene that, when knocked out, could spur bone growth. Intrigued by the possibilities, Merck sponsored her research. But there was also the work she had done to put women on an equal playing field in the sciences, hiring research assistants so postdocs with kids could go home at 6 p.m. and establishing paid maternity leave and a daycare center while dean of Cornell Medicine. And there was the experience with industry those agreements had given her. Since joining Dana-Farber, she has worked to boost their drug development efforts, hiring back Leena Gandhi to run a new translational center for experimental immuno-oncology approaches and signing an $80 million partnership with Deerfield Management, to launch companies around discoveries in the Dana-Farber labs.  — Jason Mast

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George Golumbeski

Almost exactly 3 years ago George Golumbeski quietly slipped out the back door at Celgene after leading an epic charge on the BD front for the most optimistic bull biotech in the industry. Under CEO Bob Hugin, Golumbeski — partnered with Tom Daniel — was charged with building an entire pipeline. And he did it in style — specializing in their you-stay-in-charge approach with partners that supplied money and help without a lot of the soul-crushing dictates that can come from a giant partner in drug development. “I’m in a good place,” he told me about his departure, with plans to lend a hand at the next generation of up-and-coming biotechs. “I want to help to the extent I can these young companies.” Celgene had its own problems after a management handoff, but Golumbeski nevertheless helped deliver a string of new drugs that Bristol Myers is now championing. As for the BD wiz, he’s gone on to a host of insider positions, mentoring companies around the world as chair or board member. Golumbeski remains the best connected player in biotech, an industry where connections are crucial. — John Carroll

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Corey Goodman

There are few individuals in the West Coast biotech scene that are better known than Corey Goodman. His long career has covered a brilliant arc from academia to the business side of the industry. He’s held a number of chairmanships at biotech startups, and his role as founder of Pfizer’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center and a member of Pfizer’s executive leadership team cemented his rep ahead of his new role kick-starting drug hunters into existence. Just a few months ago, that role included spinning out a new biotech out of the pipeline at ALX Oncology, which he chairs. You can make out Goodman’s high profile in a number of big syndicates these days. And he looms ever larger as the numbers in this business keep growing. — John Carroll

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Kathy High

Kathy High first got into gene therapy because she thought it would offer an answer for the hemophilia patients she was seeing. But when investment dried up in the aftermath of Jesse Gelsinger’s death, the deal she made with her boss at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to keep her team pushed her to go beyond the blood disorder. That’s how she ended up co-founding Spark Therapeutics and becoming one of the first, and still only, people in the world who had ever shepherded a gene therapy from the lab to approval. For a select group of patients with an inherited retinal disease, Luxturna could keep them from going blind. She never left hemophilia behind, though, making that a centerpiece of the followup pipeline now in the hands of Roche. Her next destination? AskBio, the North Carolina outfit where she will work alongside two longtime colleagues to push the field she helped pioneer through an inflection point. — Amber Tong

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Sandra Horning

While Sandra Horning’s legendary career in the C-suite came to an end in 2019, the current Gilead board member was instrumental in heading the clinic and driving the pipeline at Roche during a critical phase in the ancient company’s life cycle. Between her 10-year tenure at Roche, Horning served as both CMO and global head of product development and drove 15 new drugs ahead to approvals, including bestsellers Ocrevus and HER2 breast cancer drug Perjeta. She also helped set the stage for PD-(L)1 drug Tecentriq’s approval in early 2020. The pipeline refresh she helped kick off has all been part of a larger effort by Roche to set itself up for success in the aftermath of the arrival of biosimilars for oncology troika Avastin, Rituxan and Herceptin. Prior to Roche, Horning spent 25 years as a practicing oncologist, investigator and tenured professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and is still with the school as a professor of medicine emerita. Meanwhile, Horning has held down board seats at some of the biotech industry’s most buzzy firms, including Moderna and Olema Pharmaceuticals. She is also a co-founder and advisor at EQRx, a disruptive drugmaker looking to bring price competition to a range of competitive therapeutic modalities, including PD-(L)1. — Kyle Blankenship

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Pearl Huang

You don’t see people like Pearl Huang often in biopharma in the 1980s. An Asian woman scientist who’s also shy, she has however impressed with her quiet thoughtfulness ever since her first job on Merck’s cancer research team. Having led oncology discovery there and at GlaxoSmithKline — devising the assays and experiments that paved the way for new medicines including Mekinist and Tafinlar — Huang interrupted her pharma career in 2010 and hopped on a plane to Beijing to help get BeiGene off the ground. What was then a risky idea of developing drugs in China for China has now grown into a prominent biotech leader with 6,000 employees, building off of the foundation that Huang had laid with co-founders John Oyler, Xiaodong Wang and Peter Ho. Her biggest passion, though, remains unearthing new biology. After a brief stint back at GSK and then Roche, she is once again at the cutting edge with Flagship Pioneering and exoneural biology specialist Cygnal — all with an almost intuitive adeptness at picking out the right technology to aid her group’s scientific pursuit from the burgeoning toolbox. — Amber Tong

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Carl June

Carl June has never worked at a biotech, but for a while in the mid-2010s, he was the biggest name in the industry. A Vietnam veteran who became an oncologist because the Navy needed scientists who could prepare for nuclear fallout, June switched over to HIV after the Berlin Wall fell. Then his wife got diagnosed with cancer and he left the Navy for the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked on a new field called CAR-T therapy, which held the promise of fixing both HIV and cancer by replacing diseased cells in the bone marrow with re-engineered healthy ones, designed to kill any remaining cancerous or infected cells. Although his wife tragically passed away in 2001, he kept working on the technology and in 2010, began implanting it into leukemia patients. The first handful saw dramatic results and by 2017, the first CAR-T therapy was approved. Three others have since followed for various blood cancers, while companies spend billions to expand the technology into solid tumors. June continues to work on next-generations CAR-Ts, such as those made with CRISPR gene editing. — Jason Mast

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Ed Kaye

You don’t have to believe that eteplirsen is a great drug to appreciate Ed Kaye’s stellar reputation in the Boston/Cambridge biotech hub. He was a longtime vet at Genzyme before he jumped to Sarepta — an expert in lysosomal storage diseases, among other things — and he took the helm at the company in incredibly choppy waters, steering through a regulatory tempest and onto the market. When it came time to step aside in favor of a replacement with marketing chops, he intended to take a significant break from the action. Instead, his phone began to ring off the hook with new offers. And in a matter of weeks, he was back, running a startup called Stoke Therapeutics, where the lead RNA drug in the pipeline is in clinical studies. Everything hasn’t been perfect for Kaye and his companies, of course. That doesn’t happen in biotech. That’s all part of coming of age in this business. And no one appreciates that more than the money execs looking for an experienced player to run the show.  — John Carroll

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Rick Klausner

You can’t squeeze a lifetime of Rick Klausner’s accomplishments in a short piece like this. Tapping out the high points, you’d touch on his role as NCI chief from 1995 to 2001, his work as a founder and director at Juno and Grail, his work at Illumina as CMO and his current role as chairman of Lyell, which he also founded. But his greatest legacy may well get down to the intricate network of relationships and alliances he’s created in the Bay Area biotech hub, where Klausner looms large. An active investor, Klausner has enjoyed the role of a deeply experienced mentor to up-and-comers like the team at Orca. And everything he does revolves around completing the cell therapy 2.0 revolution, a movement in which he’s enlisted longtime friends and colleagues like Hal Barron at GSK. When that history is written, Klausner will deserve a chapter of his own. — John Carroll

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Art Krieg

If there’s something that Art Krieg doesn’t know about oligonucleotides, I’d be surprised. He’s spent the bulk of his adult life in this field, patiently blazing a path that led him to found Checkmate Therapeutics 6 years ago. Krieg — now CSO — has had a prolific past: co-founder, CSO of Coley Pharmaceutical, co-founder and CEO at RaNA Therapeutics with a brief stop at Sarepta along the way. When he’s not tramping up and down mountains — the scientist once arranged a $27 million round on a ski trip to Utah — Krieg likes to do things like teach at the University of Massachusetts RNA Therapeutics Institute. His focus: Oligonucleotides, of course. There will be plenty of more work to be done by the next generation, but they’ll have Krieg to thank for showing the way. — John Carroll

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Robert Langer

I doubt that even Robert Langer can give you an exact count on the number of biotech companies he’s co-founded. There have been big efforts and small. He joined the board of Moderna early on, and made an investment that has made him a billionaire, right alongside Tim Springer at Harvard. But his most cherished role may well be lending a helping hand to the students that have come through his lab and picked up the entrepreneurial itch that has inspired a multitude of upstarts. You could see that just days ago, when he lent his name to Omid Farokzhad’s SPAC — where we’ll see what they get up to. Langer is unquestionably a legend on the MIT campus, as well as the biotech industry he helped establish. And he shows not the slightest sign of slowing down. — John Carroll

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Jeremy Levin

The son of a political journalist from South Africa, Jeremy Levin rose to become one of the most influential people in all of biopharma. He holds degrees from both of Britain’s preeminent universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and for years led the business development team at Bristol Myers Squibb. Levin became known for his “String of Pearls” strategy, aiming to snap up as many promising compounds or smaller companies in acquisition deals. During his time at BMS, the pharma made 17 such deals, headlined by the $2.4 billion buyout of Medarex in July 2009. Levin moved on to become the CEO of generic drugmaker Teva Pharmaceuticals and subsequently joined Ovid Therapeutics, also as CEO. His time at Ovid has been marked by setbacks in its Angelman syndrome program, where Levin insisted for two years analysts had misunderstood the results of a failed Phase II study. The experimental drug went on to flunk Phase III as well, and Ovid cut bait in April. — Max Gelman

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Mark Levin

If there’s a biotech company in Boston, there’s a significant possibility that Mark Levin has been involved in its launch. The VC veteran is the co-founder of Third Rock Ventures, and has had a hand in investing in more than 50 companies with $2.7 billion. A few notables: Agios, Foundation Medicine and bluebird bio. His slow-and-steady approach to investing has proved successful for 14 years now, as the methodical path has allowed him and his team up to 4 years to find the right team to tinker with an idea. Levin met his Third Rock co-founders Bob Tepper and Kevin Starr while serving as the CEO of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, a company which he co-founded and later was acquired by Takeda. Third Rock’s inception was thanks to a session lamenting the death of biotech startups around a blackjack table, when the trio decided to do something to help bankroll companies in need. Widely heralded, he’s also perfectly willing to tell you what he thinks about the events of the day. In April, he co-signed a letter from a long list of biotech executives calling for the opposition to laws that reduced the voting rights of US citizens. — Josh Sullivan

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Art Levinson

Art Levinson is the kind of boss people rave about on Glassdoor. In 2008, the former Genentech CEO topped the website’s list of “nicest chief executives,” based on anonymous reviews left by employees. And prior to that, Institutional Investor magazine named him “America’s Best CEO” four years in a row. But before he was a biotech legend, Levinson was just a kid from Seattle who read a lot, thanks to a librarian uncle. As an undergrad at the University of Washington, Levinson was fascinated by Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii’s book Intelligent Life in the Universe, according to a piece in Columns, the university’s alumni magazine. With a newfound focus on genetics and molecular biology, he studied under professor Leland Hartwell, who later directed the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. After graduating from UW, Levinson earned his PhD in biochemical science at Princeton, then took a postdoc lab position at the University of California, San Francisco working with Nobel Prize winners Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus. When offered a job as a research scientist at Genentech in 1980, he only expected to stay one or two years, according to Columns. But that one or two years quickly turned into decades — and in 1995, he was named CEO of the company. In addition to chairing the board of Apple, Levinson now heads Calico, a buzzy startup bankrolled by Google to find new therapies for aging. Back in June, Calico and partner AbbVie put what appears to be their first drug in the clinic — an oncology candidate being tested on its own and combined with a PD-1 checkpoint. — Nicole DeFeudis

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Ted Love

Ted Love came out of retirement in 2013 after he got an offer to lead a new company Third Rock launched to go after sickle cell disease, called Global Blood Therapeutics. Although sickle cell would later become a leading target for gene therapy, the disorder, which largely affects African Americans, had been overlooked by biotech and pharma for decades. As a young Black medical student at Yale and Harvard, Love had watched sickle cell patients mistreated and offered few options, and he jumped at the chance to lead a company that could change the situation. Having led Genentech’s R&D strategy during its heyday developing Herceptin and Rituxan and done the same for Onyx before Amgen bought it out for $9.7 billion, he set about developing GBT-440, the first pill that could treat the root cause of sickle cell. GBT won approval in 2019 as Oxbryta, and Love has built a pipeline he hopes will show even stronger effects. Although gene therapies are nearing approval, Love, who has pushed for better diversity and more ethical industry practices on the board at BIO, notes those won’t be widely accessible around the world, where most patients live, making the hunt for better oral drugs crucial. – Jason Mast

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Dan Lynch

Dan Lynch was the right guy at the right place at the right time when ImClone was in need of a turnaround, as he’ll tell you himself. It was Lynch that captained the team at a scandal-hit ImClone following the original CRL for Erbitux — a bit of legacy that matters in this industry. His years on the finance side of the business helped provide the steady, knowledgeable hand that would go on to quietly steer a whole generation of biotechs — from the board room. Those decades of experience would set the stage for the next chapter in his storied career, jumping to GV as an executive venture partner, where once again he’ll be offering advice to the next generation of biotech executives. You don’t get to serve on as many boards as Lynch has without understanding the ins and outs of running a biotech. And he’s had enough winning teams to earn the title of a great coach. — John Carroll

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Katalin Karikó

After frustratingly toiling in obscurity for decades, Katalin Karikó has become one of the most prominent mRNA researchers in the world with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman invented a key piece of the technology that made mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna possible, creating a way for the synthetic messenger to safely evade the body’s immune system. The invention came after years of Karikó being passed over for promotions while working at the University of Pennsylvania and countless rejections in grant funding. Originally discovered in the mid-2000s, the invention has catapulted the pair into the spotlight, with a Moderna co-founder even calling for Karikó to win the Nobel Prize. She has even more visions for mRNA-based medicines in the future, including their use as a potential therapeutic for bruises and scrapes. Similar to Neosporin, Karikó hopes one day there can be a spray utilizing mRNA to help boost tissue repair for such injuries. Karikó now works as a senior vice president at BioNTech and has been profiled in several outlets as a result of her work, including the New York Times, STAT and even Endpoints News. — Max Gelman

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Jeff Leiden

Jeffrey Leiden was the kind of wunderkind who goes to college at 15, has a PhD by 21, an MD by 23 and then after a decade at the University of Chicago and Harvard, decides that you can’t have enough impact in academia and goes to run science at a Big Pharma, Abbott, where he leads the development and launch two blockbuster and transformative drugs: Humira, a powerful and then-novel treatment for immune disorders; and Kevzara, one of the first combo regimens for HIV. After Abbott, Leiden went to the VC side, but he got pulled back into the C-suite after Vertex, one of the industry’s most storied biotechs, lost the hepatitis C race and faced disaster or dissolution. Convincing his board of a new strategy, Leiden doubled down on the company’s nascent cystic fibrosis program, laying off sales staff and investing everything in Vertex’s ability to develop a powerful drug to treat most patients with CF, a goal they achieved with Trikafta in 2019, his last year as CEO. At the same time, he built the groundwork for Vertex to repeat the CF success, signing an early collaboration with CRISPR Therapeutics that has since seemingly cured a handful of patients with sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. They are now trying to do the same for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and type 1 diabetes, among other diseases, while working toward a final cure for CF.  — Jason Mast/Josh Sullivan

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Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

The daughter of a brewmaster, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw dreamed of becoming a brewer herself — an unconventional enough career choice for a woman in India at the time. What she ended up blazing was a whole other trail that took her back from Australia to India, where she would become known as the mother of invention. Over four decades her company, Biocon, went from an enzyme extraction setup in her garage to one of the largest manufacturers of generics. In those early days, everything was a struggle: securing investors, employees and the right infrastructure all took considerable time and drive. But that never stopped Mazumdar-Shaw from looking ahead. Today, Biocon has its sights on everything from biosimilars to new drug R&D, as the CEO leverages her extensive connections around the world to bring homegrown — such as antibodies and bispecifics — medicines to global markets while trying to pioneer new business and delivery models that would make CAR-T much more accessible in India. — Amber Tong

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Luigi Naldini

As the director of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy and professor at the San Raffaele University in Milan, Luigi Naldini has played a big role in birthing the gene therapy field that we know today. But he didn’t just pioneer the use of lentiviral vectors, Naldini continues to play a direct role in the latest cutting-edge research involving cell and gene therapy, including new tech like epigenome editing. He is a scientific founder at Epsilen Bio, a co-founder of Genespire — a spinout of the institute — and he led the preclinical effort for Genenta. Eloquent and urbane, Naldini can still hold a room like few scientists can. And he knows more than a bit about the company creation side of biotech. — John Carroll

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Stelios Papadapoulos

Stelios Papadopoulos turned a long and fruitful career in academia and on Wall Street into an incredibly well-connected second chapter in biopharma. He first started as a faculty member at NYU’s cell biology department, and then turned to finance. Papadopoulos primarily worked as an analyst covering the biotech industry, first at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette and then at Drexel Burnham Lambert. He jumped to PaineWebber in 1987, where he spent 13 years as an investment banker and ran the firm’s biotech division. He then joined the well-known Cowen as vice chairman from 2000 to 2006, after which he retired. But he signed on to Biogen’s board of directors in 2008 and was elected chairman in 2014, where he’s served since. Along the way, he co-founded his own biotechs in Exelixis and Anadys. He also serves as executive chairman at Regulus Therapeutics and launched a $100 million SPAC last October. — Max Gelman

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Rick Pazdur

Spurred on by his wife’s fatal bout with cancer, Rick Pazdur has, almost single-handedly over the last decade, completely overhauled the way the FDA reviews new cancer drugs, speeding up the approvals from years to just a few months, and providing patients with many new options. In doing so, he’s made the Oncology Center of Excellence the envy of just about every other FDA division. While leading FDA’s work on oncology since 1999, Pazdur has successfully made the process better suited to the needs of the individual treatments as they progress, which can mean not requiring the use of placebo or standard of care in some trials. In addition, he’s coordinated all related cancer activities across the agency and with the National Cancer Institute, and other cancer-related organizations. Like Fauci and other government officials that have made a lasting impact, Pazdur is not afraid to say what he feels during advisory committee meetings or in response to companies running thousands of studies with PD-1/L1 checkpoint therapies.  — Zachary Brennan

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Roger Perlmutter

Roger Perlmutter, one of the masterminds behind blockbuster wonder Keytruda, made a big change when he stepped away from his eight-year stint at Merck this year to head a small biotech dubbed Eikon Therapeutics using microscopy for drug discovery. But if Perlmutter’s history has taught us anything, it’s that his instincts are usually right. After joining as president of Merck Research Laboratories in March 2013 after 12 years at Amgen, Perlmutter whipped Keytruda into shape for its initial foray with regulators. It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2013 Keytruda — and the checkpoint inhibitor class on the whole — was an unknown quantity. With Perlmutter’s vision and the help of fellow 60 over 60 awardee Roy Baynes in the clinic, the drug has since racked up dozens of indications in a growing number of tumor types. Now, with Perlmutter set to step down, he’s handing the reins over to former discovery R&D head Dean Li, a sign that Merck may be ready to diversify past its Keytruda workhorse into a future with a more diverse pipeline. Since announcing his departure, Perlmutter was appointed head at Eikon and science advisor at CBC Group and has been nominated to the board of NGM Bio. Back in October — just one day before his retirement announcement — Perlmutter was named as an independent director at Daphne Koller’s insitro. — Kyle Blankenship

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Steve Rosenberg

An encounter with a patient who had a spontaneous, almost miraculous, regression of all his metastatic cancer in the late 1960s set a young Steven Rosenberg on a lifelong pursuit of a dream. Convinced that the patient’s own immune system had fought off the cancer, he began an arduous search for the cells behind that attack and a way to replicate it for many others. Over the next decades, he led multiple clinical trials involving everything from IL-2 to tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes extracted from tumors, generating some of the first evidence supporting the idea of adoptive immunotherapy. It is now widely accepted that one can educate and train endogenous immune cells, such as T cells, to recognize and kill cancer. Now the chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, Rosenberg’s TIL approach is but one of many cell therapy concepts being tested in the clinic — which may actually be the strongest proof of his lasting legacy. — Amber Tong

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Martine Rothblatt

In college, Martine Rothblatt read an article by physicist Gerald O’Neill and decided that the future of humanity lay in space colonization, even joining the society O’Neill set up to make it happen. By that point, Rothblatt had already fallen in love with satellites after she briefly dropped out and found herself gazing at the stars from an airforce base in Seychelles, but O’Neill cemented her belief in the future of space and space law. Not exactly the usual genesis of a biotech legend, no? But here’s the thing: Rothblatt used her satellite expertise to found a company you may have heard of, called Sirius XM, or Sirius Satellite Radio as it was known then, and after her daughter was diagnosed with a rare bleeding disorder with only one not-so-good treatment called PAH, she used the Sirius money to found a company called United Therapeutics to develop better treatments. When she founded it, Rothblatt had just transitioned, at a time when openly transgender executives were even less common or accepted than they are today. Nevertheless, United successfully developed a new drug, called Remodulin, that helped Rothblatt’s daughter survive and at one point made Rothblatt the highest-paid CEO in America. The company is now developing new drugs for PNH and other rare diseases, while maintaining the most bad-ass website in biotech, building the world’s largest carbon-zero office space, researching lab-grown organs and contracting with electric-powered helicopter companies for lung transplants. In addition to being CEO, Rothblatt has built an interactive robot model of her wife called Bina48 and promotes technologies for uploading minds into computers. — Jason Mast

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Vicki Sato

After more than four decades, Vicki Sato’s career came full circle. The scientist’s story began in Paul Levine’s lab at Harvard University, where she studied the genetics of photosynthesis. After graduating with her PhD in 1972, Sato sought to continue that work in a postdoc program at UC Berkeley. But after realizing she didn’t want to spend all her time in the dark and the cold, she switched to immunology in the Stanford lab of Leonard Herzenberg and Irv Weissman, according to a piece published by Harvard’s molecular and cell biology department. She later returned to Harvard as an assistant and then associate professor — but she became intrigued by the excitement going on in bustling Kendall Square. In 1984, after taking a sabbatical, Sato joined Biogen, where she stayed for roughly 8 years and worked her way up to VP of research. After that, she landed a gig as CSO at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which had under 100 employees at the time. “Vertex thought the time was ripe for a small entrepreneurial organization to jump into the scientific arena of big pharma, which had grown inefficient through size and a failure to use the new emerging technologies well,” Sato said, per the Harvard piece. She became president in 2000, and watched Vertex grow into the roughly 3,500-employee giant it is today (according to the company’s LinkedIn). After retiring from Vertex, Sato returned to her old Harvard roots, where she taught until 2017. She’s currently on the board of directors at Vir, Bristol Myers Squibb, BorgWarner, and Denali Therapeutics. — Nicole DeFeudis

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George Scangos

George Scangos spent the first 15 years of his C-suite biotech career building the small cancer company Exelixis, when he got a call from a recruiter. They wanted to know if the then 63-year-old Scangos, who had by then built a pipeline at Exelexis and had a drug nearing approval, would be interested in a CEO position. The recruiter didn’t say who it was, but it was obvious: Biogen, the legendary biotech that was getting publicly ravaged by Carl Icahn for have turned itself into a bureaucratic mess. Scangos turned it down — and then turned around and took it, talked into the belief that he might revive the company’s long-buried soul. Cutting programs and refocusing the R&D on neuroscience, he helped push the multiple sclerosis blockbuster Tecfidera across the finish line and then made a risky bet to team with Ionis on what would become Spinraza, the first treatment for the deadly disease spinal muscular atrophy. Although some critics questioned how stable the pipeline was when he left — a question that may hinge on whether the FDA approves the controversial Alzheimer’s candidate aducanumab — their stock had quadrupled by 2016, the year he left. Some saw a retirement when he stepped down, but Scangos emerged the following year at the helm of Bob Nelsen’s monstrously-backed infectious disease startup Vir, hoping to tackle diseases that affected hundreds of millions of people and been neglected by the rest of the industry. They are now waiting to hear back from the FDA on authorization for a Covid-19 antibody, while treatments for hepatitis B and flu and a vaccine for HIV are in the clinic. — Jason Mast

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David Schenkein

David Schenkein never lost his love for a blank sheet of paper. After spending 10 years filling the sheets at Agios with new drug development projects, he’s gone on to help steer the life sciences group at GV, where they specialize in companies that like to get started at the intersection of big data and new drugs. The last time we talked was when Dan Lynch of ImClone fame had jumped on board. “There isn’t anything in the biotech industry that he hasn’t seen,” Schenkein said of Lynch, but he could just as easily said it of himself. Schenkein sees that experience as a key asset that comes into play as he mentors others going through the whole journey from a blank sheet to FDA approval. And I can tell you from years of covering the industry that he’s had a big impact on the next wave of biotech CEOs coming through the pipeline. A working oncologist for decades, Schenkein has seen first hand the impact his drugs have had on patients. And his stretch at Genentech, and Millennium as well, provided the kind of bedrock expertise that helped season him in every aspect of the business. — John Carroll

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Len Schleifer

As part of a team with fellow 60 over 60 pioneer George Yancopoulos, CEO Len Schleifer has guided New York’s Regeneron to one of the true biotech success stories, marked in many ways by Schleifer’s bulldog mentality. Started back in 1988 when Schleifer was a young neurologist and professor at Cornell, Regeneron has grown to a $52 billion giant based largely on the success of wet AMD drug Eylea. In the past few years, however, the company has looked to expand beyond the drug that made it famous. As part of a lucrative partnership with French drugmaker Sanofi, Regeneron has helped drive immunology blockbuster Dupixent to higher ground while the drugmaker has worked to boost its oncology offerings, starting with partnered checkpoint inhibitor Libtayo. During Covid-19, Regeneron has been at the forefront of the industry’s response, developing an antibody cocktail that received the FDA’s emergency use authorization back in November. — Kyle Blankenship

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Lynn Seely

Lynn Seely has a longtime track record as a drug developer, but before that, she was a med school student at the University of Oklahoma, a resident at Yale and a postdoc at UC-San Diego. She kicked off her biotech career at Chiron Corporation in the mid-1990s, and spent the next decade or so bouncing around various R&D roles in the industry. Seely first stepped into the C-suite at Medivation, working as chief medical officer from 2005 until the company’s $14 billion acquisition by Pfizer in 2015. Serial biotech launcher Vivek Ramaswamy then recruited her to be the founding CEO of Myovant Sciences, where she shepherded the drug Orgovyx to its groundbreaking FDA approval for advanced prostate cancer in late 2020. The drug is the first oral hormone therapy approved for the indication and is also being tested in women with uterine fibroids and endometriosis, using the same pathway to lower testosterone in men as it does to lower estrogen and progesterone in women. The approval also scored Myovant a $4.2 billion partnership with Pfizer. Shortly after that win, however, Seely stepped down from her post. — Max Gelman

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Phil Sharp

When Phil Sharp was a child, he helped his family with their Kentucky farm, gaining interest in biology from the corn they planted, and helped with the harvest of tobacco. Ironically, in 2020, he received the AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research. Sharp is a professor of biology at MIT and the last director of MIT’s Center for Cancer Research, before it became the Koch Institute. In 1993, he took home the Nobel Prize, and co-founded Biogen, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and Magen Biosciences. He investigated microRNAs, and discovered RNA splicing in 1977. Years later, that technology is present in Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines. In January, Sharp published “RNA-Mediated Feedback Control of Transcriptional Condensates” in the National Library of Medicine. — Josh Sullivan

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Pascal Soriot

When biotech companies around the world were announcing their own stab at a vaccine for the Covid-19 pandemic, AstraZeneca stormed out of the gate with a partnership with the University of Oxford and a vaccine of their own. Soriot’s taken some heat on execution, but he has always favored forward motion over crippling inaction. Yes, he’s taken heat on everything from the vaccine to his annual pay to, well, you name it. That seems almost part of the job now. But he stuck with the company through one of the most grueling turnarounds in biopharma history and ended up with a winning strategy built around enduring drug franchises and a careful focus on R&D projects. In the process, he fended off a destructive Pfizer takeover attempt and created a legacy for himself and the tens of thousands of staffers at AstraZeneca. Soriot has been working out of his adopted home of Australia during the pandemic, underscoring a somewhat maverick approach to life and jobs that’s allowed him to do things like tap the late José Baselga as head of cancer R&D after a brouhaha over Baselga’s formal acknowledgment of ties with the industry. No doubt Soriot got some heat for that, too. But who can argue that it wasn’t the right decision? — Josh Sullivan

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Timothy Springer

Academics by and large aren’t noted for their financial acumen, but we have 2 prominent individuals on this list who bucked that trend in style. The first is Bob Langer, and the second is his fellow Moderna board member Tim Springer. The Harvard scientist had already made at least one fortune out of Millennium. Moderna made Springer a billionaire. And he’s putting that money to use at the Institute for Protein Innovation — as well as in backing new startups. Those missions combined recently with the launch of Tectonic, backing the scientific work that his fellow IPI co-founder, Andrew Kruse, did on GPCRs. “Andrew Kruse is a real star,” said Springer at the time. And Springer made sure to retain a controlling interest in the biotech when the A round came together, to make sure it could get a chance to do the science that was needed to succeed. And he’s done groundbreaking science along the way, earning a rep for incites into lymphocytes and leukocytes that inspired a raft of startups. In addition to Moderna, he’s backed Selecta and Editas and played a big role in launching Scholar Rock and in Morphic Rock Therapeutic. There’s not enough space here to recognize all his work, and he clearly has plans to go much, much further. — John Carroll

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Nancy Thornberry

After graduating with her bachelor’s in chemistry and biology from Muhlenberg College in 1979, Nancy Thornberry set out to help find new medicines at Merck. But it wasn’t until Januvia — the first approved dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor — was proven successful that she realized how “absolutely thrilling” it would be, according to a statement. Back in 2011, she and Ann Weber were awarded PhRMA’s Discoverers Award for their leadership on the project — a once-daily pill that helps patients with type 2 diabetes control glucose. “It’s pretty unusual in the pharmaceutical industry to have the opportunity to be involved in a program from program inception through clinical development, launch, and life cycle management, and it was a great privilege for me to have this experience with the Januvia program,” Thornberry told Forbes in 2016. The scientist worked her way up to senior VP and franchise head of diabetes and endocrinology before leaving Merck in 2013 to explore new options. In 2016, she took the helm at Kallyope, a biotech looking to target the gut-brain axis — the “information highway” between the gut and the brain — to treat metabolic and CNS disorders. Last March, the company nabbed a $112 million Series C round to help advance their weight loss drug toward the clinic. — Nicole DeFeudis 

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Eric Topol

While serving as the medical community’s stalwart Twitter wizard and racking up more than 400,000 followers, Topol made a name for himself as a cardiologist. At just 36, he was named chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, where he’s credited as elevating that program nationally, and acting as one of the first researchers to question the cardiovascular safety of the drug Vioxx, which was later withdrawn from the market. In 2002, he founded the first new medical school in the US in two decades, before taking over at Scripps and serving as editor-in-chief of Medscape. — Zachary Brennan

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Jan G.J. van de Winkel

When Jan G.J. van de Winkel left Medarex Europe back in the late 1990s to found Genmab, he was looking for a change in focus. Particularly, one focus: It’s all about the product. More than 20 years later, van de Winkel continues to head up Genmab, the EU’s largest biotech, and has made good on that product-focused promise. Van de Winkel became CEO in 2010 after spending 11 years as president of R&D and CSO at the company. He spent years studying human antibodies as has used that biology know-how to build a transgenic mice platform at Genmab that has turned drugs as diverse as J&J-partnered Darzalex and Horizon’s thyroid eye disease med Tepezza. Along the way, Genmab has become the gold standard of EU biotech companies, walking a fine line between being product-focused and also being fiercely independent. On top of its three approved molecules, Genmab also has a broad pipeline with 23 homegrown products in pipeline development and another 20 or so in-house and partnered preclinical programs. Van de Winkel holds a professorship of immunotherapy at Utrecht University and is the chairman of the board of directors of Hookipa Pharma, and a member of the board of directors of LEO Pharma and Omega Alpha SPAC. — Kyle Blankenship

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Roy Vagelos

The Merck scientists and engineers whom Roy Vagelos met as a high schooler working at his family’s Greek restaurant in Rahway, NJ shaped his choice of university and major. In turn — after finishing medical school and several research stints at the NIH and the Washington University — he would write some of the most remarkable pages of Merck’s history. As the president of research, he oversaw a bumpy campaign to develop the first-ever commercially available statin for patients with high cholesterol or coronary heart disease. While he was CEO, he pushed for supply ivermectin for free when scientists discovered that the livestock antiparasitic could cure river blindness, ultimately reaching millions and essentially eradicating the disease. The philanthropic streak continued following his retirement (passing the torch to Ken Frazier, whom Vagelos had hired and mentored) through donations to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, funding life sciences and medical education for the next generation of researchers. “I don’t know what I would have done had it not been medical science,” he reflected in 2014. “I can’t understand why anybody would work in any other field.” — Amber Tong

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Michael Varney

Dubbed a rational drug design guru, Varney was the executive vice president of Genentech for nearly 6 of his 15 years with the company. But long before that, he was 1 of the original 15 employees at Agouron, where he led research and helped spur the process of rational drug design. That team launched Viracept, an HIV protease inhibitor, and a few anticancer drugs. Viracept earned $350 million in its first year of sales alone, good enough for the highest launch of any biotech, at the time. Agouron was later acquired by Pfizer, and Varney led the drug discovery. Varney received his BS from UCLA and a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from CalTech, leaving California for a postdoctoral fellowship with the American Cancer Society at Columbia. For the past year, he’s worked as a consultant for pharma and biotech companies focused on drug development and discovery. Most recently, he and a team of Genentech alumni invested in Interline Therapeutics, in hopes of studying variants of the LRRK2 gene. — Josh Sullivan

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Craig Venter

Craig Venter is best known as the man who, alongside NIH Director Francis Collins, first mapped the human genome in 2000. He also assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. And when, in 2007, a team of researchers published one of the first genomes of an individual human, it was Venter’s own genome that they published. He’s also since founded a genetic sequencing company now owned by Quest Diagnostics, as well as companies that seek to lengthen the human lifespan, and use modified microorganisms to produce clean fuels and biochemicals. — Zachary Brennan

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Greg Verdine

Greg Verdine once told me that with his connections, he could raise a billion dollars if he asked for it. And I didn’t doubt him for an instant. He is credited as an inventor of stapled peptides during his long stretch at Harvard, but he’s best known now for his starring role in launching FogPharma and LifeMine, leading both simultaneously as CEO. Verdine been behind multiple startups, including  Enanta, Eleven Bio, Tokai, Wave Life Sciences, and Aileron. Wave Life Sciences and Warp Drive Bio are also on the creation list. Verdine is known for swinging for the fences in science. He also told me one time that the only thing he was concerned with was mastering the hardest undruggable targets in biotech. He isn’t about to go for a biotech bunt. — John Carroll.

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Irv Weissman

Rather than taking summer jobs similar to other boys, Weissman spent his teenage years as a lab assistant taking care of laboratory mice growing up in Montana. At Stanford, Weissman has long been considered a stem cell pioneer. He was the first to identify blood-forming stem cells in humans and isolate them while working at the university, and championed efforts to create the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in 2004 after stem cell funding was restricted at the federal level. More recently, he led the efforts to develop anti-CD47 drugs at the biotech aptly named Forty Seven, which was acquired by Gilead in March 2020 for nearly $5 billion. The company focused on attracting macrophages to tumor cells, suppressing those that hacked the body’s “don’t eat me” signal to fight the cancer. His close relationship with CIRM helped launch the biotech thanks to a $20 million government-backed grant. Weissman often talks about how his first job in science paid only $25 per month, but following the Forty Seven acquisition, his wallet’s been just a tad thicker: the buyout netted him personally $194 million thanks to his 4.2% stake. — Max Gelman

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James Wilson

Jim Wilson nearly decimated the entire gene therapy field in 1999 after a patient, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, died in a trial for a therapy he designed; Wilson himself was stripped of his titles and his gene therapy center and barred from clinical trials for 11 years amid an investigation over whether he had missed key safety signals. Over the next decade, though, the one-time superstar scientist worked — largely alone, with the one or two grad students who ignored warnings not to study under him — to develop safer approaches for gene therapies. In the 1990s, Jude Samulski and a handful of other researchers had used a much safer group of viruses called AAV to deliver genes inside patients. Wilson discovered new AAVs, developing the vectors that helped the field climb back out of obscurity and which led to the second gene therapy, Zolgensma. The University of Pennsylvania now estimates that ⅔ of gene therapy trials use technology from Wilson’s Gene Therapy Center, which has now grown again to nearly 400 people. He has founded two companies to develop therapies directly: Passage Bio, for rare, genetic CNS disorders, and G2 Bio Companies, for more common and polygenic diseases. — Jason Mast

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Janet Woodcock

Even if Janet Woodcock isn’t nominated and confirmed as the permanent FDA commissioner under President Biden, her legacy over the last four decades at the FDA has been cemented. A rheumatologist by training, Woodcock led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research since 1994 before taking over as deputy commissioner and CMO. Then she returned to lead CDER before becoming the head of therapeutics for Operation Warp Speed last year. Although she’s well-known for taking slack on several contentious drug approval decisions (e.g., Sarepta’s eteplirsen), she’s also modernized risk management at the agency and been a fierce and steadfast advocate of continuous manufacturing and master protocols. Woodcock will always be remembered as a straight-shooter, sticking to the facts, and injecting her experience and knowledge as necessary.  — Zachary Brennan

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Tadataka “Tachi” Yamada

Jim Wilson, the renowned Penn investigator who you’ll also find on this list, is fond of calling his friend and colleague Tachi Yamada the “Beyoncé of biotech.” That’s because of all the people Yamada met along the way who now only refer to him by his one biopharma celebrity name. Born in Tokyo, educated at Stanford and NYU Med, Yamada gravitated to the top of the R&D chain, working as chairman of R&D at GSK and CSO at Takeda — at a time the company was still deeply rooted in Japan. That experience made him an excellent pick as president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Global Health Program in Seattle. He’s won numerous awards across multiple continents, holding down board positions in biotech and elsewhere.  And Yamada — a venture partner at Frazier — seems just as ready to throw down with a startup biotech as he has been for decades. Particularly if Jim Wilson has something to do with it, as we saw this week with the launch of G2. — John Carroll

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George Yancopoulos

Over more than 30 years as the scientific brains behind New York drugmaker Regeneron, CSO George Yancopoulos has made his name for his brilliant mind for the science as well as his unusual co-top billing with CEO Len Schleifer, a fellow 60 over 60 awardee. Yancopoulos’ work has guided Regeneron from a small-time player to a major pharma with multiple blockbuster drugs in the portfolio. Along the way, Yancopoulos hasn’t been shy about why he made the move from academia to industry — joining Regeneron in 1989 near the company’s first birthday to escape the bureaucracy of academic labs. Unlike at many drugmakers, where the CEO reigns supreme, Schleifer and Yancopoulos have been all but equals for years in everything but pay. Schleifer has a great quote about Yancopoulos that could serve as both a mantra for the high regard in which Yancopolous holds his science as well as what has made Regeneron so successful: “What George needed, in my opinion, was someone that could work for him and someone he could trust. And that turned out to be me. That’s sort of how he viewed me: that I was working for him because I was doing my job so he could do his job.” — Kyle Blankenship

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