Alexis Borisy is a successful biotechnology entrepreneur with 20 years of experience building and operating innovative science based organizations. Alexis is a Partner at Third Rock Ventures, where he focuses on the formation, development and strategy of new companies, including Foundation Medicine for which he served as the Founding CEO and is currently Chairman, and for Blueprint Medicines for which he was a Founder and serves on the Board. Prior to joining Third Rock Ventures, Alexis founded CombinatoRx in 2000, serving as its CEO, and bringing the company public on the NASDAQ in an IPO. He has raised $750 million in financing and business development deals, and has authored numerous scientific papers and patents. Trained in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard where he was a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow, Alexis was honored as the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year. He was also chosen as the New England Entrepreneur of the Year in Life Sciences and was honored as a Presidential Scholar. Alexis's undergraduate degree in chemistry is from the University of Chicago, and he did his graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University. Alexis serves on the Board of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, is an Overseer at the Boston Museum of Science, and is the Chairman of Forma Therapeutics.

Dr. Michael L. Penn, Jr. is responsible for diagnostics and small molecule drug discovery transactions within Genentech’s Business Development group. His efforts help advance innovation in personalized medicine and drug development and result in getting the right medicines to the right patients. In 2003, he launched his career at Genentech as a marketing product manager for Herceptin--the groundbreaking personalized therapy for women with HER2+ breast cancer. Over the next 3 years, in roles of increasing responsibility, Dr. Penn leveraged his technical background and business acumen to explore and develop new areas of growth for Herceptin. During his tenure on the Herceptin team, the brand’s revenues tripled from $400M to over $1B. Dr. Penn was also appointed by former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to the Health Commission, the policy-making board for the Department of Public Health, and served as a Commissioner from 2002 to 2004. Michael graduated from Morehouse College with a BS in Biology and received his MD-PhD at the University of California, San Francisco in 2003. His graduate research in HIV pathogenesis was completed at the Gladstone Institute for Virology and Immunology under the guidance of Dr. Mark A. Goldsmith.

Ryan Phelan started DNA Direct in 2003 as a company that provides direct-to-consumer genetic testing and related consumer oriented genomic services. Phelan has been a strong consumer health advocate for the past 25 years, having started the first medical library for consumers in 1978. As Founding Director of Planetree, a nonprofit consumer health care organization, she helped create a national model for humanizing hospitals and a national model for providing health information to the public, the Planetree Resource Center. In 1995 she founded Direct Medical Knowledge (DMK). DMK was an extensive consumer health web site highly regarded for its unique content depth and innovative search interface. DMK developed proprietary software that enabled users to drill down through the most current medical literature and retrieve personalized health and medical information. As CEO of DMK, Ms. Phelan forged alliances with major medical institutions, national health care plans, publishers, and consumer groups. In 1999 Direct Medical Knowledge was acquired by WebMD, and DMK's content became the backbone of WebMD's consumer health site. Phelan is also a co-founder of the ALL Species Foundation, a global science initiative to discover all life on Earth in the next 25 years. In 2002, Phelan served as CEO for the ALL Species Foundation and continues her involvement today by serving on the Governing Board of Directors. She graduated from UC Berkeley.

Dr. Shuster provides strategic intellectual property legal services to biotechnology and chemical/pharmaceutical companies. His practice includes patent prosecution, portfolio analysis, due diligence, litigation and opinion work. His clients include start-up and established biotechnology companies, venture capital firms and research universities and hospitals. Dr. Shuster’s career experience has included graduate research in the laboratory of Professor Eric Kandel at Columbia University as part of a team focused on discovery of mechanisms by which short-term memories are stored, research for which Professor Kandel was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Dr. Shuster then moved to the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where he pursued his interests in ion channel biophysics and protein structure. Dr. Shuster received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1981, magna cum laude and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1986. He received his J.D. cum laude from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1997. In 2009, Dr. Shuster was listed as one of the Daily Journal's Top 25 Intellectual Property Portfolio Managers.