The Iaso Ventures team represents the diversity of modern entrepreneurship

Wasim Q. Malik, PhD

Managing Partner

Michael Fenn, PhD

Venture Partner

Mark G. Currie, PhD

Venture Partner

Julia Sytnikova, PhD

Principal

Sadiqa Mahmood

Executive in Residence

Anil S. Jina, MD

Executive in Residence

Sharon Tan

Executive in Residence

Jeff Carter

Entrepreneur in Residence

Maurizio Fava, MD

Advisor, Clinical R&D

Emilio Bizzi, MD, PhD

Advisor, Neuroscience

Jason Novak, JD

Advisor, Intellectual Property

Craig A. DeLarge, MBA

Advisor, Digital Health

Richard Golob

Advisor, Data Science

Wasim Q. Malik, PhD

Managing Partner

As the Managing Partner, Wasim oversees the overall strategy, investments and partnerships at Iaso Ventures.

He previously served as the first Chief Digital Strategist at Roivant Sciences, a global biopharma company ($7.3B IPO). There he led digital health investments, strategy and partnerships to help accelerate drug development and commercialization across 15+ therapeutic areas, and contributed to incubation and early growth of various portfolio companies.

As part of his work in the healthcare provider industry, Wasim has served on the faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital, the flagship teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, for over a decade. Affiliated with the MGH Department of Psychiatry and the Clinical Trials Network and Institute, he built a research program on tech-enabled clinical research in neurology, psychiatry and anesthesiology, with a focus on neurodegenerative and movement disorder biomarkers, and brain-computer interfaces.

He has also taught entrepreneurship, neuroscience and machine learning at MIT, most recently as faculty on the NIH-supported IMPACT Program, and is affiliated with the MIT Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences.

He currently sits on the board of directors at The Epilepsy Foundation, Scaffold Therapeutics, Altimate Health, ClexBio and BioTrak Health, with previous board roles at Saphetor and monARC Bionetworks. He serves as a Senior Advisor for Life Sciences at Health Catalyst . He is a startup mentor at NYU Stern’s Endless Frontier Labs, the neuro stream at the Creative Destruction Lab, and the health-tech stream at Dreamit Ventures. He is an angel investor at Sky Ventures, MIT Alumni Angels, and HBS Angels of Boston.

Earlier in his career, he led a team to deploy AI-based telecom fraud detection systems across major European telcos at Nortel Networks, co-developed the first ever graphical browser for a smartphone in partnership with RIM and Motorola, and rolled out South Asia’s first telemedicine network.

He has published 100+ research papers, holds 7 patents, and has received numerous international awards for his research. He serves on the Steering Committee of the NIH EPPIC-Net and IEEE Brain Initiative, the grant review panels for NSF and NASA TRISH, and the national scientific research councils of 6 countries. His work has been featured in multiple media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC World, and others.

Wasim received his DPhil in electrical engineering from Oxford, postdoctoral training in neuroscience from MIT, and finance education in venture capital and private equity from Harvard Business School.

Mark G. Currie, PhD

Venture Partner

Mark G. Currie, PhD, is a dynamic biopharma leader and leading scientist who has made numerous important contributions to the understanding of hormonal regulation of the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems. Beyond these academic contributions he has led the discovery and development of drugs for the treatment of pain and improve the quality of life for patients across the globe. He is a highly recognized leader in the advancement of innovative treatments for patients and has broad expertise in the therapeutic areas of cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, inflammation, and neurology.

Mark serves on the board of directors of Ironwood Pharma, Antag Therapeutics, and Sea Pharma, and chairs the scientific advisory boards of Wild Bio and Tisento Therapeutics. Outside of the biotech industry, he is on the board of directors of Science Exchange, a breakthrough technology company focused on accelerating drug discovery and development through an external research marketplace. Additionally, Mark is active in many non-profit areas of medical research and
climate crisis. He currently serves as a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute of Harvard and has served on the board of the Medical University of South Carolina’s Foundation for Research and Development, a member of the president’s council of Boston’s Museum of Science, and the president and co-founder of the Land, Marine, and Atmosphere (LAMA) foundation where he has co-created a comprehensive climate change scale (LAMA scale).

Previously, he was the President, Chief Scientific Officer, and scientific founder of Cyclerion Therapeutics. In his capacity as a co-inventor Mark led the company’s soluble guanylate cyclase platform producing multiple drug candidates currently in clinical studies, including one for Alzheimer’s disease. An industry leading and highly recognized pharmacologist and drug developer who discovered several human hormones that have served as the basis for drugs in the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal therapeutic areas. Additional basic science discoveries have served as the basis for the rationale for several market leading drugs including Celebrex, Dynastat, Lunesta and Linzess. These drugs have improved the lives of tens of millions of patients and provided over $40 billion in revenues.

Mark was a highly productive academic researcher who transitioned to the biotech industry and has held a number of leadership positions at Ironwood, Sepracor, Searle and Monsanto. At Ironwood, Mark led the transformation of the original company of Microbia from a bioengineering focused
company to the GI focused, therapeutics company of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:IRWD). He built and led R&D and served as president of the therapeutic business.

Mark has published more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and holds numerous US and international patents, including being the primary inventor of the blockbuster drug linaclotide (Linzess). He has won several awards for his academic discoveries and contributions to drug
discovery. Mark was on the faculty of Medical University of South Carolina and a research professor at Washington University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. from Wake Forest School of Medicine and his BS from University of South Alabama.

Maurizio Fava, MD

Dr. Maurizio Fava is Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); director of the Division of Clinical Research of the MGH Research Institute; executive director of the MGH Clinical Trials Network and Institute (CTNI); associate dean for clinical and translational research, and the Slater Family Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Fava is a world leader in the field of depression. He has edited eight books and authored or co-authored more than 800 original articles published in medical journals with international circulation, articles which have been cited more than 75,000 times in the literature and with an h index of over 135.

Dr. Fava obtained his medical degree from the University of Padova School of Medicine and completed residency training in endocrinology at the same university. He then moved to the United States and completed residency training in psychiatry at MGH. He founded and was director of the hospital’s Depression Clinical and Research Program from 1990 until 2014. In 2007, he also founded and is now the executive director of the MGH Psychiatry Clinical Trials Network and Institute, the first academic CRO specialized in the coordination of multi-center clinical trials in psychiatry.

Under Dr. Fava’s direction, the Depression Clinical and Research Program became one of the most highly regarded depression programs in the country, a model for academic programs that link, in a bi-directional fashion, clinical and research work.

Dr. Fava has been successful in obtaining funding as principal or co-principal investigator from both the National Institutes of Health and other sources for a total of more than $120 million. Dr. Fava’s prominence in the field is reflected in his role as the co-principal investigator of STAR*D, the largest research study ever conducted in the area of depression, and of the RAPID Network, the NIMH-funded series of studies of novel, rapidly-acting antidepressant therapies.

Dr. Fava has received several awards during his career and is on the editorial board of five international medical journals. Since 1990, Dr. Fava has also mentored more than 50 trainees who have gone on to become lead investigators in the area of psychiatry. He has developed with Dr. David Schoenfeld a novel design (with over five patents) to address the problem of excessive placebo response in drug trials and to markedly reduce sample size requirements for these trials. In 2009, Dr. Fava received the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School, and in 2013 the John T. Potts, Jr., MD Faculty Mentoring Award from Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the former President of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology.

Dr. Fava is a well-known national and international lecturer, having given more than 300 presentations at national and international meetings.

Jason J. Novak, JD

Jason is a Partner in Norton Rose Fulbright’s Digital Health and Precision Medicine Initiative, based in the Bay Area, where he focuses on advising entities, both large and small, on the various legal issues that can arise with emerging technologies in the healthcare and life sciences industries. Tech and Biotech are traditionally disparate technologies that, when blended together to form many of our most exciting new technologies, bring forth a combination of unique and interrelated legal issues.

Jason has extensive experience in IP strategy and patent portfolio management, preparation and prosecution, oppositions, counseling, licensing and technology transactions, in and out-licensing, freedom-to-operate, various types of due diligence, IP training, risk recognition and management, and dispute resolution. He directs that experience to clients in various industries, particularly in the medical device, personalized/precision medicine (e.g., genomic sequencing platforms, computational genomics/bioinformatics, and molecular diagnostics), digital health, life sciences tooling, and food industries.

Jason was previously a Partner at Haynes and Boone, and earlier a Partner at McDermott Will and Emery. Prior to starting this practice, Jason was a IP Director for Thermo Fisher Scientific, where he managed worldwide IP needs in genetic sciences instrumentation and software (e.g., qPCR, dPCR, capillary electrophoresis). Jason managed large IP portfolios, a team of agents and attorneys, licensing programs, various diligence needs, various IP-related transactions, and foreign and domestics patent challenges.

Before moving into the legal industry, Jason was a research engineer for a leading food product company, where he led numerous product and process redesigns, reformulations and launches. This cross-functional role required interaction and experience with operations, finance, marketing and regulatory areas, contributing to Jason’s ability to deal with various corporate functions from both an R&D and legal perspective.

Professional and Community Activities

Member of the Bay Area IP Advisory Board for Chicago-Kent College of Law

Selected Publications and Speeches

“Everything You Need to Know About Digital Health,” Cedars-Sinai Accelerator, November 2019.
“HITLAB World Cup Challenge,” May 2019.
“Life Sciences Bootcamp for In-House Counsel,” July 2019.
“IP Protection Strategies for Personalized/Precision Medicine,” BIOCOM, November 2018 (San Francisco).
“Intellectual Property 101”, Good Food Institute, September 2018.
“LES SVC: How to Run a Patent Prosecution Practice to Maximize Global Revenue from Licensing: A Perspective from Three Industries”, Licensing Executives Society, October 2017.

Richard Golob

Richard Golob is an experienced entrepreneur and business leader in outsourcing, digital transformation, data sciences, and life science and healthcare informatics. In 2020, he joined Quantori as Chief Executive Officer to build the company into the world’s leading data sciences and digital transformation company serving the life sciences and healthcare sectors.

Previously, Richard served as Global Head of Life Sciences at EPAM Systems, a publicly traded technology firm. During Richard’s tenure, the Life Sciences Business Unit became the fastest growing unit at EPAM, working with pharmaceutical, medical device, and scientific instrumentation companies, and associated software and publishing companies.

Richard’s entry into the outsourcing industry began as Chief Executive Officer of GGA Software Services, which he co-founded to provide scientific informatics services for life science and healthcare companies. Under Richard’s leadership, GGA built a a 650-person development center in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and a reputation for innovation and client customer satisfaction, winning numerous accolades and industry awards. GGA was acquired by EPAM as the foundation for its entry into the life sciences industry.

For many years prior to co-founding GGA, Richard was actively involved in the environmental and energy fields, founding an environmental consulting and publishing firm in 1980, and undertaking a number of activities to foster the development of the environmental industry.

During this period, Richard served as an adviser to the United Nations and government agencies worldwide, was chairman of the Harvard Environmental Health Council at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and was a frequent resource for the media, including appearances on “Face the Nation” and “Nightline”. He founded and published several respected environmental newsletters, convened a biannual environmental business conference, and advised the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on environmental policy and technology commercialization. In addition, he worked with the venture capital firm Charles River Ventures and investment banker Tucker Anthony to identify and qualify promising technology companies in the environmental field.

During these years, he coauthored “The Almanac of Renewable Energy” and coedited “The Almanac of Science and Technology.” which served as resource texts at several major universities including Harvard and Stanford. Richard also undertook a pilot project in rural Bangladesh to generate electricity using biogas from cow dung to power a closed-cycle regenerative heat engine.

Richard serves as board member of the United Nations Association of Greater Boston, where he was president for 10 years. He also serves as board member of Anti-Defamation League – New England, member of the Leadership Board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and president of the Puchovichi Memorial Park Project in Puchovichi, Belarus. In addition, Richard is a member of Sky Ventures Group, a Boston-based investment group that provides funding to early-stage life science and healthcare companies. Richard received his A.B. degree in biochemical sciences from Harvard College.