Mark Pykett is Chief Executive Officer of Orogen Therapeutics, bringing nearly 30 years of experience to his role. He was previously CEO of Myrtelle Inc., Chief Scientific Officer of PTC Therapeutics and CEO of Agilis (acquired by PTC). Prior to that, he was CEO of Navidea Biopharmaceuticals where he led multiple approvals for the cancer mapping agent Lymphoseek® (sold to Cardinal Health), President of Alseres Pharmaceuticals, President of Cygenics, and CEO of Cytomatrix (acquired by Cordlife). Over the course of his career, Dr. Pykett has worked across a range of therapeutic areas and medical modalities, including small molecules, biologics, gene therapies and diagnostics and on the approval of three healthcare products: Lymphoseek® lymphatic mapping agent in breast cancer, head and neck cancer and melanoma; Kebilidi®/Upstaza® gene therapy for AADC deficiency; and Evrysdi® splicing modifier for spinal muscular atrophy.

Dr. Pykett holds a PhD and VMD from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA from Amherst College and an MBA from Northeastern University. Dr. Pykett has served on the Boards of several private and public companies and is currently a Director of Pharming Group, InFlectis BioScience and MyoPax.

Artem Evdokimov is Head of Research at Orogen Therapeutics, bringing over 25 years of experience in pharma and biotech. He is passionate about leveraging cutting-edge science and strong teams towards the discovery of life-saving medicines.

Previously, Dr. Evdokimov served as VP of Biochemistry, Structure & Biophysics at Roivant, VP of Pipeline at Enko, and CEO of HarkerBio. He has also held key roles at Monsanto, Pfizer, and P&G Pharmaceuticals, contributing to the development of FDA-approved Vadadustat (Vafseo®) and the Phase II drug candidate Razuprotafib. His work has led to 30+ patents, 40+ peer- reviewed publications, and commercialized transgenic plant traits for insect resistance and herbicide tolerance.

Dr. Evdokimov earned his PhD in Chemistry & Structural Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He serves on multiple Scientific Advisory Boards and was recently a Board Member of the Hauptman-Woodward Institute, a nonprofit research organization.

Hajnalka E. Hartl is Head of Chemistry at Orogen Therapeutics and is a seasoned synthetic and medicinal chemist bringing over 20 years of experience in small molecule design and synthesis, and expertise in DNA Encoded Library technology.

She previously worked at X-Chem, Inc., where she led a small team of chemists working on DNA-Encoded Library design and synthesis as well as on-DNA chemistry development. Before that she held a medicinal chemistry position at AstraZeneca, where she worked on anti- infective projects targeting penicillin binding protein PBP3, bacterial NAD+-dependent DNA ligase, as well as bacterial DNA gyrase, contributing to the delivery of multiple drug candidates. Her work has led to patents and peer-reviewed publications, and presentations encompassing anti-bacterial research, DNA-Encoded Library technology as well as epidemiology.

Hajnalka holds master’s degrees in organic chemistry and public health from Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts, Lowell, respectively. She is also finishing up her doctorate in public health epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Alexander (Sasha) Litovchick is Head of DEL of Orogen Therapeutics. He brings over 25 years of experience in academia and industry. He worked previously at Animol Discovery, Relay Therapeutics, ZebiAI, X-Chem and X-Body. Dr. Litovchick is a startup veteran and over his career has extensively worked in the field of selection technologies including DEL and mRNA display, contributing to the development of the field from its inception.

Dr. Litovchick holds a PhD in Chemistry from Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel), and an MD with concentration in Medical Biophysics from Pirogov Russian State Medical University (Moscow Russia).

Chris Mulhern is the Head of Machine Learning and Data Science Computation at Orogen Therapeutics, bringing nearly a decade of small molecule discovery experience. he was previously with X-Chem Pharmaceuticals and continued into ML for the small molecule discovery spin-out ZebiAI, which was acquired by Relay Therapeutics. He continued to Terray Therapeutics before joining Animol Discovery where he headed the informatics and ML functions, before joining Orogen.

Through these experiences he has played a part in more than 200 DEL campaigns, and implemented a variety of Cheminformatics, machine learning, and computational chemistry tools to aid in the discovery and h2l processes. Chris received is bachelor's degree from Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

Dominique Potin is a Senior Principal Scientist at Orogen Therapeutics and his focus is to help the team in the design of innovative drug-like compounds using his extensive experience in medicinal chemistry.

Dr. Potin previously worked in the US at Photys Therapeutics and at the Broad Institute. Before that, he held medicinal chemistry positions in France at Inventiva Pharma, Abbott, Solvay Pharma, Cerep and Bristol Myers Squibb. Over his career, he has been involved in a wide range of therapeutic areas including oncology, pain, inflammation, cardiovascular diseases, cardiometabolic disorders and immuno-inflammation, through different types of targets including CNS targets, GPCRs, kinases, PPI interactions and nuclear receptors. He is co-inventor of 15 patents and is an originator of three clinical candidates.

He holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Paris VI and a master's degree in organic/bioorganic chemistry from ESPCI Paris Tech. He has served on the board of the Organic Division of the French Chemical Society.

Alex (Alessandro) Rizzo is a Principal Scientist and leads Protein Science & Structural Biology at Orogen Therapeutics. He previously worked at Roivant Sciences where he held several roles in Discovery before spinning out into a “vant” start-up where he led Structural Biology and Biochemistry with a focus on fragment-based drug discovery for targets involved in inflammation and oncology. Before its sale to Roivant, he worked at Silicon Therapeutics where, among other responsibilities, he led successful hit-finding efforts for a small molecule oncology program. Dr. Rizzo considers himself a leader in the modern style with all the entailing responsibilities thereof and is particularly proud to treat everyone with respect and fairness.

Dr. Rizzo holds a PhD from UConn Health and a BS/MS in Chemistry & Biochemistry from University of Connecticut.

Valentina Shchedrina, a Senior Research Scientist, has more than 25 years of experience in molecular biology, protein biochemistry, and cellular biology, focusing on the functional characterization of proteins. Previously, Dr. Shchedrina worked at Applied Molecular Transport (South San Francisco, CA) and SyntheX (San Francisco, CA) where her primary responsibilities were generating highly characterized proteins to support therapeutic candidate development, assay development, and antibody production. Through her academic and industrial career, Dr. Shchedrina contributed to the discovery of small molecules/ proteins targeting autoimmune/inflammatory and gastrointestinal diseases, chronic kidney disease, and cancer biology (KRAS mutations targeting). She has 11 peer-reviewed publications (six as a first author).

Dr. Shchedrina holds a PhD from M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

Harry Stern is a Senior Research Scientist at Orogen Therapeutics. He has expertise in theoretical chemistry, molecular simulation, bio- and cheminformatics, high-performance computing, data science, and machine learning. He comes to Orogen from the University of Rochester, where he was an assistant professor and staff scientist. His research has focused on modeling gene regulatory networks, RNA structure, and protein-small molecule binding, and has been reported in more than 50 publications.

Dr. Stern has a PhD in Chemical Physics from Columbia University and an AB in Physics from Harvard University.

Kevin Wielenberg is a Senior Research Scientist and a medicinal chemist at Orogen Therapeutics. He drives the internal synthetic chemistry efforts and brings over a decade of chemistry experience working on drug discovery projects in academic and biotech. Kevin earned a PhD in chemistry and chemical biology from Cornell University and holds degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

William Cho is a Machine Learning Engineer at Orogen Therapeutics. William specializes in cheminformatics and deep learning and has conducted research in genetic engineering and systems biology. Previously, William worked as a Full-Stack Software Engineer on CDD Vault at Collaborative Drug Discovery, and then as a Graduate Student in Prof. Eduardo Sontag’s lab at Northeastern University where he developed the partitioning algorithm for “Partitioning of a 2- bit hash function across 66 communicating cells,” published with the Voigt Lab at MIT.

William completed his MS in Bioengineering at Northeastern University and his AB in Biomedical Engineering at Harvard College.

Christina is a Lab Manager and Senior Research Associate (Biochemistry), working on molecular biology, cell culture and protein production, as well as lab maintenance and procurement. Previously, Ms. Lam held Research Associate and Lab Manager positions at Animol Discovery, Enko, Evelo Bioscience, Tscan and Seres Therapeutics. Christina's interest in managing laboratory and procurement activities dovetails with her deep affection for experimental science, making her a key member of the Orogen lab crew.

Christina has earned her associate’s degree in engineering science technology at Bristol Community college, followed by a Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering and a Master of Science in Biomedical engineering and Biotechnology at University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth).

Jane Dubrovsky is a Research Associate on the Biochemistry team at Orogen Therapeutics, where she works on cell culture, protein purification, and molecular biology. Before starting at Orogen, Jane led operations at several startup companies, where she specialized in early-stage company building and operations management. Jane began her research career at IOLR (Israel National Institute of Oceanographic and Limnological Research) performing longevity studies on the model organism, B. schlosseri. Her experience in both research and industry enables her to communicate clearly and work effectively across interdisciplinary projects.

Jane graduated from the JAS Biomedical Program in Cambridge, MA, and holds a BA in International Trade and Chinese from Sun Yat-Sen University.

Caleb Phillips is a Research Associate on the Biochemistry team at Orogen Therapeutics where he performs molecular biology, cell culture, protein purification, and structural biology. He also manages the compound inventory and performs assays. Before joining Orogen, Caleb worked at Resonance Medicine where he ran directed evolution campaigns to reprogram proteases to degrade difficult to drug targets for diseases with unmet need.

Caleb previously worked at UT Southwestern Medical Center and holds a BS in Biochemistry from the University of Texas at Tyler.