2024 MIT Health Science Forum - Startup Exchange Lightning Talks

Daniel Meyeris the Chief Executive Officer of CellChorus®, the dynamic single-cell analysis company. CellChorus is commercializing the TIMING™ platform, which merges AI/ML, advanced microscopy, and microscale manufacturing to deliver comprehensive single-cell data on cell movement, contact dynamics, potency, viability, and functional other metrics over time. The TIMING platform enables scientists to design, develop and deliver novel immune cell-based therapies faster, at lower cost, and with higher rates of success. Mr. Meyer is the former Chief Operating Officer and was a board member of Genospace, which was funded by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate and acquired by HCA Healthcare (NYSE:HCA), the largest private hospital company in the United States and one of the largest oncology clinical care and clinical trial organizations in the United States, having led more than 450 first-in-man clinical trials and having been a clinical trial leader in the majority of approved cancer therapies over the past ten years.Mr. Meyer was also a member of the early-stage healthcare and life sciences investment teams at Arboretum Ventures and PJC.vc, where he focused on investments in life sciences, medical devices, health care information technology, and health care services. Mr. Meyer holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Middlebury College.

Kanav Setia is the co-founder and CEO of qBraid. He earned a PhD in Physics from Dartmouth College in 2020, where he worked on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, with a particular focus on fermion-to-qubit encodings. Dr. Setia’s work on the Bravyi-Kitaev Superfast (BKSF) algorithm was the first to apply BKSF to quantum chemistry simulation. Collaborating with IBM, he developed the Generalized Superfast Encoding (GSE) for quantum simulation. This work was the first to show presence of inherent error-correcting properties within the fermion-to-qubit encodings.

During his Ph.D., Dr. Setia interned at IBM twice, contributing to IBM’s open-source quantum chemistry software, Qiskit-Chemistry, and Google’s OpenFermion. He was a co-author on the initial releases of both. Dr. Setia also holds a B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Astronomy and Planetary Sciences from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. After graduation, he worked for four years at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in the MEMS division of the Semi-Conductor Laboratory, focusing on the design and development of accelerometers and gyroscopes.

Dr. Deehan joined Vivtex in December 2022 and is a biotechnology and pharmaceutical professional with 22 years of drug development and commercialization experience. She obtained herPh.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Glasgow University and subsequently spent eight years in academic research before moving into the biopharma industry in 2001. She has gained expertise in all stages of the drug development cycle from discovery to product commercial launch, across a broad range of therapeutic areas. Her last nine years have been spent in global corporate development roles at Novimmune SA and Nordic Nanovector ASA where she gained a successful track record in business development and deal-making,for product and technology platform transactions, with a range of companies, including Genentech and Shire.

Derek Miller serves as the Vice President of Platform Research at DeepCure, where he has contributed for over 5 years. He leads the physics-based machine learning and computational chemistry team, driving innovation in molecular generation using deep learning, structure-based modeling, and protein-ligand interaction mechanics. With a decade of experience as a machine learning lead, Derek has worked across genomics, proteomics, and small molecule-protein binding. He is deeply passionate about pioneering approaches to unlock undruggable protein targets with small molecules.