Matthew Burkhardt
Chair of Advisory Board
Matthew has over 15 years of experience in preclinical target discovery across academic, startup, and industry sectors. He began in traumatic brain injury with the Neurosurgery Department at the University of Pennsylvania, moved into the industry at Merck for in vivo Alzheimer’s Disease small molecule drug discovery and disease modeling, and then moved to iPierian, one of the first companies to use the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) platform. Since then Matthew has held positions at the Allen Brain Institute, Cellogy, and Novartis.
With Merck, he ran the bench experiments to support the in-licensing of Alectos Therapeutics’ O-GlcNAcase inhibitor (MK-8719). At iPierian, Matthew supported the early-stage discovery programs for iPierian/True North Therapeutics’ Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) and Cold Agglutinin Disease (CAD) monoclonal antibody assets that were sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb (2014) and Bioverativ (2017), respectively. Additional discovery work at iPierian/TrueNorth involved high throughput phenotypic screening for ALS candidate compounds.
Recently, Matthew has been heavily involved in entrepreneurial and innovative small company development in the San Francisco Bay Area (Indee Labs, Girihlet, IndieBio, Y Combinator, Verge Genomics). Further work has been done with rare disease organizations to advance their interests in addressing unmet needs.

Scientific and Medical Advisory Board

Our Scientific and Medical Advisory Board
We are very fortunate to have such a knowledgeable and well-respected team of scientists and medical doctors on our Advisory Board. Each of them shares our commitment to advancing the understanding of Schinzel-Giedion Syndrome and improving the lives of children born with this rare genetic disorder.

Matthew Burkhardt
Chair of Scientific and Medical Advisory Board | Preclinical Target Discovery

Dr Rocío Acuña Hidalgo
Molecular Genetics

Dr Bregje van Bon
Clinical Genetics

Dr Hans Bjornsson
Human Genetics and Epigenetics

Dr Jessica Duis
Pediatric Geneticist and Special Care Pediatrician
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