Our Amazing Team
The Founders
Maria Luisa Pineda, PhD
Co-founder & CEO
- Dr. Maria Luisa Pineda is a biologist with over 10 years of research experience.
- For her undergraduate studies, Maria was awarded an endowment of $2 million dollars from the Goizueta Foundation and an NIH fellowship with the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC U*STAR) program.
- Maria received her Ph.D. from the prestigious Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an Arnold and Mabel Beckman graduate student and a William Randolph Hearst foundation scholar.
- After graduating, she acquired investment experience in technology and life-sciences startup companies at Canrock Ventures and Golden Seeds, LLC.
Martin Akerman, PhD
Co-founder & CTO
- Dr. Martin Akerman is a data scientist trained in biology and computer science with a PhD from Technion (Israel) and a post doctorate from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).
- As fellow at CSHL, he was part of Dr. Krainer’s laboratory, who developed Spinraza, the FDA approved RNA therapeutic drug to treat Spinal Muscular Atrophy.
- The software developed by Dr. Akerman at CSHL constitutes the core of Envisagenics’ proprietary technology to design antisense drugs that modulate RNA splicing.
- The predictive power of the computational tools developed by Dr. Akerman have been experimentally validated in the field of cancer research with over 20 scientific publications and more than 2000 citations in high impact journals
Scientific Advisory Board
Adrian Krainer, PhD
Professor & Program Chair
Cancer & Molecular Biology Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Michael Q Zhang, PhD
Professor & Director
Center for Systems Biology University of Texas at Dallas
Professor
Tsinghua University
Michael Schatz, PhD
Associate Research Professor
Johns Hopkins University
Omar I. Abdel-Wahab, MD
Hematologic Oncologist
Memorial Sloan Kettering
Sudhir Agrawal, D.Phil, FRSC
Founding Scientist
Idera Pharmaceuticals
Visiting Professor
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Our History
Envisagenics is a spinout of the world renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) from the laboratory of Dr. Adrian R. Krainer, an expert in the field of splicing. The Krainer laboratory was the first to perform in-vitro splicing studies, identify the regulatory proteins of alternative splicing, discover the involvement of spliceosomal proteins in cancer and genetic diseases and finally prove the efficacy of RNA therapeutics to cure disease with the FDA approval of Spinraza for treatment of Spinal Muscular Atrophy.
With a vision to leverage today’s advances in computing technology and power to accelerate development of RNA-therapeutics, Envisagenics was formed leveraging world-wide exclusive license to the bioinformatics software developed by Co-founder and CTO, Martin Akerman, PhD, as a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Krainer’s laboratory. Under the leadership of Dr. Akerman and Maria Luisa Pineda, PhD, Envisagenics Co-founder and CEO, the company has continued to further develop its proprietary database and machine learning drug discovery platform and has validated its capabilities through publications, proof-of-concept studies with academia and biopharma partners, and acquisition of private and non-dilutive funding.
