Alan Crane

Founder & Chairman

Alan joined Polaris Partners in 2002 and serves as an entrepreneur partner. In this role, he focuses on building and investing in healthcare companies.

He has served as founder, chairman and/or CEO in building ten Polaris companies.  Prior to founding Seismic, Alan co-founded Dyno Therapeutics along with Harvard Professor George Church and scientist Eric Kelsic. Dyno is using insights from computer science and biology to design better viruses for delivery of gene therapies. Prior to Dyno, Alan founded Pandion Therapeutics to focus on tissue-specific immunomodulation for autoimmune disorders and transplantation. In four years from the Polaris seed funding, Pandion became a clinical-stage, public company and was acquired by Merck for $1.85B. Alan’s past portfolio companies have collectively been involved in 12 IPOs and M&A exits.

His current and past portfolio includes: Momenta Pharmaceuticals (acquired by J&J), Pandion Therapeutics (acquired by Merck), Visterra (acquired by Otsuka), Dyno Therapeutics, KSQ Therapeutics, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals (acquired by GSK), Adnexus Therapeutics (acquired by BMS), Ocular Therapeutix, T2 Biosystems, Arsia Therapeutics (acquired by Eagle Pharmaceuticals), and Navitor Pharmaceuticals. From 2002 to 2006, Alan was president and CEO of Momenta Pharmaceuticals. He joined Momenta as the fifth employee and built it into a public company, creating an advanced and diversified pipeline. Momenta was acquired by J&J for $6.5B.

Prior to Polaris, Alan was senior vice president of global corporate development at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for leading Millennium’s strategic partnering, mergers and acquisitions, and licensing activities, generating over $2B in partner funding to help fuel the company’s growth and acquiring 19 development stage products. Among these products was Velcade®, which became the main basis of the company’s $9B acquisition by Takeda.

Alan received Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award for New England while serving as CEO of Momenta. His current and former non-profit positions include: selection committee for the Harvard Life Lab, expert-in-residence at the Harvard School of Engineering, board member of the Boston Children’s Hospital Trust, founder of the Autism Consortium, and president of the board of Gann Academy.

Alan earned a BA in biology, summa cum laude, from Harvard College, an MA in biology from Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He also spent two years studying towards an MD at Harvard Medical School.

Jo Viney, PhD

Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer

Jo Viney is an experienced biotech executive and entrepreneurial scientist who has taken 13 drugs to clinic.

Dr Viney is Founder, President and CEO of Seismic Therapeutic, the machine learning immunology company. Prior to founding Seismic, she founded Pandion Therapeutics in 2017 and served as President and CSO until the acquisition by Merck for $1.85B in 2021. Prior to founding Pandion, she worked at Biogen, Amgen, and Immunex.

Jo is an independent board director for Finch Therapeutics, Harpoon Therapeutics, Graphite Bio and Lab Central. Jo was featured in Endpoints’ 2019 Special Report on 20 Extraordinary Women, and in FiercePharma’s 2020 Fiercest Women in Life Sciences.

Jo is an advocate for workplace inclusiveness. She has served on the board of WEST, a non-profit organization supporting early to mid-career women, including as President 2017-18.

John Sundy, MD, PhD

Chief Medical Officer and Head of R&D

John is a rheumatologist and immunologist with over 25 years of experience in academic medicine and the biotechnology industry. His research career has focused on developing novel therapies for patients with inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Prior to joining Seismic John was the Chief Medical Officer of Pandion Therapeutics, which was acquired by Merck in 2021 for $1.85 billion. He previously was Senior Vice President and Inflammation Therapeutic Area Head at Gilead Sciences. John led Gilead’s entry into inflammation and immunology and oversaw the clinical development of over a dozen new drug programs including Jyselica, which is approved in Europe and Japan for rheumatoid arthritis and/or ulcerative colitis.

Before moving to industry, John was a tenured Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University and Associate Professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. While at Duke he was instrumental in the Phase 1-3 development of Krystexxa which is approved for patients with refractory gout. In addition, he served as Associate Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute and Director of Duke’s Global Proof of Concept Research Unit Network in the US, Singapore and India.

An undergraduate from Bucknell University, John received his medical and scientific education at Drexel University, and residency and fellowship training at Duke. He is a fellow of the American College of Rheumatology, the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology, and the American College of Physicians. John is an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Duke University and has clinical privileges in rheumatology at the Duke-affiliated Durham VA Medical Center. He has authored over 100 scientific publications, and also serves on the board of directors of CARRA, the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance.

Maude Tessier, PhD

Chief Business Officer

Maude Tessier has over 16 years of company building experience with a multi-disciplinary background in business development, corporate strategy, corporate communications, IP management, and portfolio and program management in public and private biotechnology, pharmaceutical and academic organizations.

Prior to joining Seismic, she served as Chief Business Officer of Ikena Oncology (Nasdaq: IKNA), a clinical-stage biotech company, where she built and managed the business development, legal and corporate strategy functions. At Ikena, she led key company building initiatives, including the negotiation and execution of a $1B+ strategic partnership with BMS, the strategy and execution of the company rebranding and pipeline expansion into targeted oncology, the acquisition of Amplify Medicines, and as part of the executive team, drove core elements of financing activities resulting in over $260M in private and public capital.

Previously, Dr. Tessier was Executive Director, Business Development and Licensing at Merck & Co, leading oncology partnering in the Boston innovation hub. She served as Assistant Director, Business Development and Strategic Initiatives at Boston Children’s Hospital. She began her career at Xanthus Pharmaceuticals, a venture-backed oncology biotech company in Cambridge, Mass., where she had key roles in business development and program management of a Phase 3 drug candidate leading to its eventual FDA approval. She holds a BSc in Biochemistry from McGill University and a PhD from the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto.

Edward Freedman, JD

Chief Financial Officer

Ed has more than 25 years of leadership experience directing finance, legal and operations activities in companies across multiple industries. Ed has served as COO of Pandion Therapeutics as well as in CFO roles at Dyno Therapeutics, Faze Medicines, Kymera Therapeutics, Mana Therapeutics, KSQ Therapeutics, XTuit Pharmaceuticals, Oasys Water and Ensemble Therapeutics. Ed also served as General Counsel of Flagship Ventures (now Flagship Pioneering) and started his legal career at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, LLP. Before going to law school, Ed was an accountant at Arthur Andersen & Co.

Ed earned his JD from Boston College Law School and his BSBA in Accounting from Boston University.

Nathan Higginson-Scott, PhD

Chief Technology Officer and Senior VP Drug Creation

Nathan has been creating innovative biologics drugs and drug technologies for over 15 years in both academia and industry. Prior to joining Seismic as the Chief Technology Officer and SVP of drug creation, he served as VP of Biotherapeutics at Pandion Therapeutics where he played a pivotal role in growing Pandion to 60+ employees from its earliest days in 2017 through several successful large financing rounds, an upsized IPO and the companies ultimate acquisition by Merck in 2021 for $1.85bn. Under Nathan’s leadership, Pandion’s Biotherapeutics department integrated diverse discovery, engineering, and analytics technologies, and seamlessly collaborated with Immunology colleagues, to develop Pandion’s tissue targeting TALON platform and create PT101, a now clinical stage systemic TReg agonist.

Nathan has also held various positions at Pfizer over an 8 year period where he co-invented a proprietary bispecific platform, led an antibody optimization group, and led numerous technology development and drug discovery projects spanning ideation to drug candidate nomination and IND filing across a broad spectrum of therapeutic areas including inflammation and immunology. Nathan also worked at Google[x] to help launch Verily Life Sciences where he played a key role in the development of antibody-based capabilities designed to support a diagnostic nanoparticle platform. Nathan began his career in antibody technology and molecular immunology at Imperial College London on a prestigious Wellcome Trust grant, where Nathan’s Ph.D focused on innovative methods for developing bi-paratopic antibodies using phage display.

Nathan believes that organizations can only truly succeed when people feel safe in bringing all of who they are to work.  He co-founded the MA chapter of a Pfizer Colleague Resource Group for LGBTQ+ employees and allies. And drove Pandion’s participation in Boston Pride.  Most recently Nathan volunteers time every week as a suicide and crisis intervention counsellor for The Trevor Project supporting LGBTQ+ youth in crisis.

Kevin Otipoby, PhD

Senior VP Immunology

Kevin has more than 25 years of industry and academia experience in immunology.  His work has largely focused on understanding lymphocyte activation and discovering and developing therapeutics to modulate lymphocyte activity. Kevin graduated magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.  He then received his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Washington in Seattle where he studied the role of the BCR co-receptor CD22 in B cell development and activation.  Kevin did his post-doctoral training in Klaus Rajewsky’s lab at Harvard University in Boston, where he helped establish the critical role of the BCR in mature B cell survival, proliferation, and lineage commitment.  Kevin then joined the Immunology Research department at Biogen where he led the biology efforts to discover and develop small molecule inhibitors of BTK to treat multiple autoimmune diseases and a biologics program targeting long-lived plasma cells.  Kevin then joined the Immunology Pharmacology group at AbbVie where, among other responsibilities, he led the biology efforts to discover a small molecule GPCR agonist with colon-restricted activity to treat IBD.  Kevin left Large Pharma to help start Pandion Therapeutics as the second employee, where he led the Immunology and Biomarker groups.  At Pandion, Kevin built a successful interdisciplinary team to discover and develop a pipeline of biologics-based therapies to treat autoimmunity by either activating regulatory T cells or inhibiting effector T cells to reestablish immune homeostasis.  After Pandion was acquired by Merck, Kevin joined Seismic Therapeutic as the Senior Vice President of Immunology.  Kevin brings his knowledge of molecular and cellular immunology and experience in advancing projects from early discovery, through IND and to the clinic.

Eric Larson

Senior Vice President of Finance

Eric Larson brings nearly 30 years of financial leadership experience with private and public companies across multiple industries. His expertise extends across accounting and controls, financial planning, tax and treasury. Prior to joining Seismic, Eric was Vice President of Finance at Pandion Therapeutics, where he built the finance and accounting infrastructure in support of its transition to a Nasdaq-listed public company. Previously, he was the Corporate Controller for Proteostasis Therapeutics and the Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer for Northern Power Systems. Earlier in his career, he held financial leadership roles at Biogen Idec, CMGI, Inc., and Ernst & Young. Eric is a CPA and earned his BA from Grove City College.

Heather Vital

Vice President of R&D Strategy

Heather Vital joins Seismic with more than 15 years of experience across strategic and operational functions, including program and alliance management, portfolio planning and R&D strategy and commercialization. She most recently was Senior Director, Portfolio Strategy and Operations for Relay Therapeutics, where she contributed to portfolio strategies for pipeline programs and was responsible for alliance management with a large biopharma partnership and a research collaboration. She served as Senior Director of Program Leadership at Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, where she was the program lead for two oncology drug programs including one through product approval. Previously, Heather had a tenure at Biogen, culminating in the role of Director, R&D Strategy and Portfolio Leadership and for several disease areas. Her earlier roles at Biogen included portfolio strategy for spinal muscular atrophy, launching SPINRAZA as part of the global brand team and new product commercialization for the immunology therapeutic area. Heather has a BS from Babson College, MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a Master of Science (SM) from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program.

Timothy A. Springer, PhD

Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital

Timothy A. Springer, Ph.D. is the Latham Family Professor at the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Senior Investigator at the Program of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is a world leader in structural biology and immunology. He discovered many of the adhesion receptors in the immune system with monoclonal antibodies, then cloned and functionally and structurally characterized, them. He was the first to demonstrate that lymphocytes and leukocytes had adhesion molecules. His work on these receptors has advanced to characterizing their interactions and allosteric transitions by x-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, and laser tweezers force spectroscopy. In recognition of this work, he received the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2019, and was recently awarded the Biophysical Society’s Founder’s Award in 2021. He is a founder and private investor in biopharmaceutical ventures, including LeukoSite, Scholar Rock, Morphic Therapeutic, Moderna Therapeutic, Editas Medicine, Selecta Biosciences, and Ab Initio Biotherapeutics. His research and company formation has led to six FDA-approved drugs, including antibodies for treating cancer and immune diseases. Notably, he also co-founded the Institute for Protein Innovation: a non-profit to advance entrepreneurship and innovation in protein therapeutics and open-source antibodies and small molecules.

Debora Marks, PhD

Harvard Medical School

Debora Marks, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. As a mathematician and computational biologist, Marks develops novel algorithms, statistical methods and machine learning to successfully address unsolved biological problems. Her passion is to understand, predict and design biomolecular systems in a way that impacts biomedical applications and synthetic biology at many scales, with a focus on developing new methods in probabilistic modeling that exploit the huge and increasing corpus of natural and synthetic sequence diversity. Over the past five years, her lab has developed methods that accelerate structural biology with applications to cryoEM, crystallography, protein design and computed 3D structures of thousands of proteins with unknown folds, protein complexes and RNA interactions, as well as flexible, dynamic and even disordered protein ensembles. To address new challenges in protein design, Marks has adapted and developed NLP-inspired deep neural methods for (i) designing libraries of high affinity, specific nanobodies, antibodies that bypass the need for expensive rounds of selection or labor-intensive specificity assays and (ii) design and prediction of proteins that induce membranes compartmentalization and potentially biostasis in human cells and (iii) predicting the effect of genetic variation on disease and drug response. In 2016, Marks received the ICSB Overton Award for outstanding accomplishment in the early-to-mid career with significant contribution to the field of computational biology, and in 2018 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award in the Neurodegeneration Challenge.

Jeffrey V. Ravetch, MD, PhD

Rockefeller University

Jeffrey V. Ravetch, M.D., Ph.D. is the Theresa and Eugene Lang Professor at the Rockefeller University and Head of the Leonard Wagner Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology. His research has focused on synthetic oligoribonucleotides, the genetics of viral replication and gene expression for the single stranded DNA bacteriophage f1, and gene characterization for human antibodies and DNA elements involved in switch recombination. From 1982 to 1996 Dr. Ravetch was a member of the faculty of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell Medical College. His laboratory has focused on the Fc domain of antibodies and the receptors it engages, determining the mechanisms by which this domain enables antibodies to mediate their diverse biological activities in vivo. His work established the novel structural basis for Fc domain functional diversity and the pre-eminence of FcR pathways in host defense, inflammation and tolerance, describing novel inhibitory signaling pathways to account for the paradoxical roles of antibodies as promoting and suppressing inflammation. His work has been widely extended into clinical applications for the treatment of neoplastic, inflammatory and infectious diseases. Dr. Ravetch has received numerous awards including the Burroughs-Wellcome Scholar Award, the Pew Scholar Award, the Boyer Award, the NIH Merit Award, the Lee C. Howley, Sr. Prize (2004), the AAI-Huang Foundation Meritorious Career Award (2005), the William B. Coley Award (2007), the Sanofi-Pasteur Award (2012), the Gairdner International Prize (2012), the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2015), the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine (2017) and the Robert Koch award (2018). He has also presented numerous named lectures. Ravetch has contributed extensively to the scientific community by serving as a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Cancer Research Institute, the Irvington Institute for Medical Research, the Damon Runyon Foundation, the medical advisory board of Gairdner Foundation, the Sanofi-Pasteur Award Jury and the L’Oreal Women in Science Jury. He has been active in biotechnology for the last two decades, and currently serves as a consultant or member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of Asylia, Biohaven, Harpoon, IgGenix, Jasper, Palleon, Vir and Xencor.

Eric J. Sundberg, PhD

Emory University School of Medicine

Eric J. Sundberg, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of Biochemistry at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. His research has focused on emulsion polymerization, structure and function of bacterial superantigens, and the interactions of bacterial superantigens with T cell receptors and major histocompatibility complexes. In 2002, he was promoted to non-tenure track assistant professor at the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology, an institute of the University of Maryland, and was awarded his first NIH grant, which he leveraged to obtain an independent faculty position at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute (BBRI), in Watertown, Massachusetts. At BBRI, he broadened his research program to include studies of additional immune receptors and antibodies. In 2011, he returned to Maryland, this time to the Institute of Human Virology (IHV) and the Departments of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. At IHV, his lab was next door to that of Lai-Xi Wang; together they began a collaboration on the structure and function of EndoS, the IgG-specific endoglycosidase, that continues to this day. He moved again in 2019 to become Chair of the Department of Biochemistry at the Emory University School of Medicine, where he continues to broaden his research program in glycobiology and infectious diseases. Dr. Sundberg has received numerous awards throughout his career, including an Arthritis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, an Elsa U. Pardee Foundation Cancer Research Award, a Simeon J. Fortin Charitable Foundation Cancer Research Award, an Experienced Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, an American Asthma Foundation Scholar Award, and a National Psoriasis Foundation Discovery Award. He serves the scientific community in myriad ways, most notably as Chair of the Public Affairs Committee of the Biophysical Society.

Andrew Kruse, PhD

Harvard Medical School

Andrew Kruse, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the structure and function of transmembrane receptors, with an emphasis on poorly understood transmembrane proteins. He began his independent career as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School in 2014. Key research accomplishments include defining the structural basis for agonist action at the angiotensin II type 1 receptor and other G protein-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), cloning the sigma-2 receptor, and determining the first structure of a tetraspanin protein and showing how it regulates B cell activation. The Kruse lab also developed a single-domain antibody fragment discovery platform that has now been distributed to more than 400 academic labs and has been licensed to four pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Kruse is a co-founder of Tectonic Therapeutic, a biotechnology company, and the Institute for Protein Innovation, a non-profit research organization. He has received awards including an Amgen Young Investigator Award (2019), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2017), a Vallee Scholars Award (2016), and an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (2015). He received B.S. degrees in Mathematics and Biochemistry from the University of Minnesota in 2009, and completed a Ph.D. in Structural Biology at Stanford University in 2014, where he trained with Dr. Brian Kobilka.