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.