Apple Tree Partners Recruits Noted Biotech Entrepreneur and Computer-Aided Drug Design Pioneer Matthew P. Jacobson, Ph.D., as New Venture Partner

Roberto Zoncu, Ph.D.
SAB Member

Roberto is a professor of Molecular Therapeutics in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to UC Berkeley, Roberto was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Whitehead Institute, where he worked in Dr. David Sabatini’s laboratory. Roberto combined biochemical and microscopy-based assays to understand how lysosomes govern the signaling activity of the master growth regulator, mTORC1 kinase, and how these organelles generally function as metabolic signaling centers. For his doctoral studies, Roberto joined Dr. Pietro De Camilli’s laboratory. He used advanced microscopy and chemical genetic techniques to interrogate how a class of phospholipids known as phosphoinositides control endocytic vesicle traffic and maturation.

Roberto holds a Ph.D. in Cell Biology at Yale University. He studied molecular biology at the University of Pisa in Italy.

Aimee Kao, M.D., Ph.D.
SAB Member

Aimee is the John Douglas French Foundation Endowed professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and associate professor of Neurology at the University’s Weill Institute for Neurosciences. Aimee’s laboratory studies the basic mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disorders. She is an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of age-related cognitive conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration.An award-winning scientist, Aimee She maintains an active clinic at UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center. At UCSF, she teaches medical students and serves as a research mentor to UCSF undergraduates for both theSummer Research Training Program (SRTP)and San Francisco Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (SF BUILD) program. Aimee also co-chairs the Neuroscience graduate program’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.

Aimee completed her internship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, residency in neurology at University of California, San Francisco, where she was chief resident, and received fellowship training in behavioral neurology and molecular genetics. She holds an MD and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and BS fromBrown University. She joined the UCSF faculty in 2007.

Robert Edwards, M.D.
SAB Member

Robert is the Cahill professor of Neurology and Physiology at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. His work focuses on the molecular and cellular basis of neurotransmitter release and its role in Parkinson’s disease. In his research, he and his colleagues have identified several proteins implicated in Parkinson’s disease. Robert joined University of California, San Francisco from the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. Among Robert’s many awards is the Established Investigator Award of the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders. He serves on editorial boards of several journals and the scientific advisory board of the Parkinson’s Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

He studied as a postdoctoral fellow with William J. Rutter after completing residency in clinical neurology at UCSF. Robert completed his M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and BA at Yale College. 

Sami Barmada, M.D., Ph.D.
SAB Member

Sami is the Angela Dobson Welch and Lyndon Welch research professor and associate professor of Neurology at University of Michigan and director of the University’s Michigan Brain Bank. Sami’s research focuses on combining basic biology with translational research and technology development to investigate unanswered questions in neurodegenerative diseases. His lab uses innovative technologies and methods involving fluorescence microscopy, computer science and engineering, bioinformatics, genome engineering and molecular biology to investigate critical abnormalities in RNA and protein metabolism in ALS and FTD.

Sami received his Ph.D. in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he investigated prion diseases. He went on to train with some of the premier clinicians and scientists in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Bruce Miller and Cathy Lomen-Hoerth while at University of California, San Francisco for his neurology residency. Throughout residency and postdoctoral fellowship, Sami worked with Steve Finkbeiner at the Gladstone Institutes, where he established one of the first human neuronal models of familial ALS and FTD.

Sami serves on the executive advisory board of the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research and scientific advisory boards of the Live Like Lou Foundation and Synapticure, Inc. He takes an active role in their efforts to raise awareness of ALS.

John Hood, Ph.D.
Endeavor Biomedicines

John is a 20-year veteran of the life sciences community in California and has founded and led several successful biotechnology companies. He is currently founder, chief executive officer and executive chairman of Endeavor Biomedicines, which was funded in 2021 to develop novel therapeutics for oncology and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. John has founded and led several other successful biotechnology companies including the now Bristol-Myers-Squibb-owned Impact Biomedicines, of which he was Founder and CEO.

He began his career in 2001 as director of research at TargeGen, where he co-discovered fedratinib, a treatment option approved worldwide for myelofibrosis, and led a team identifying small molecule therapeutics for cancer and eye disease. John is an inventor on more than 100 patents and author of more than 50 scientific articles.

He received a Ph.D. in Medical Physiology and a B.S. in Biochemistry from Texas A&M University.

Michael Ehlers, M.D., Ph.D.
Apple Tree Partners (ATP)

Mike is chief scientific officer and venture partner at Apple Tree Partners (ATP), where he applies expertise gained through a successful career leading research and development at major biopharmaceutical companies. He co-founded ATP’s portfolio companies Intergalactic Therapeutics (Cambridge, MA), Aulos Bioscience (Cambridge, MA), Ascidian Therapeutics (Boston, MA), and Replicate Bioscience (San Diego, CA).

Prior to ATP, Mike was executive vice president of Research and Development at Biogen, where he led discovery sciences, translational medicine, clinical development, and regulatory sciences with a focus on neurological, immunological, and rare diseases. He expanded and diversified Biogen’s clinical portfolio, transformed its R&D productivity, advanced more than 20 novel clinical candidates, and oversaw global filings and approvals of Spinraza™ (nusinersen), the first drug approved for spinal muscular atrophy. Prior to Biogen, Mike was senior vice president at Biotherapeutics and chief scientific officer of Neuroscience at Pfizer. While there, he created and advanced the neuroscience and rare disease portfolios,directed global development activities in biologics design, synthesis, and manufacturing, steered academic collaborations focused on immunology and oncology,and brought 22 compounds into the clinic. 

Before entering industry, Mike was a professor and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Duke University Medical Center. Hee pioneered studies on neuronal organelles and the trafficking of neurotransmitter receptors. He has received numerous awards, authored more than 100 scientific papers, and served on multiple editorial and advisory boards for the National Institutes of Health, private foundations and many other organizations across industry, academia and government.h

Mike holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and  a B.S. in Chemistry from California Institute of Technology.

Lani Wu, Ph.D., and Steve Altschuler, Ph.D. (Observers)
Nine Square Therapeutics
University of California, San Francisco

Lani and Steve are co-founders of Nine Square Therapeutics and professors in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco . They together tackle systems-level questions in biology, disease and pharmacology in their laboratories at UCSF, where they developed a research program that combines experimental biology, data sciences and modeling to attack fundamental problems in cell biology and drug discovery. They entered systems biology and pharmacology through Rosetta Inpharmatics, a biotech startup. Their research careers started in mathematics at the interface of analysis and geometry, in which they found diverse applications, including the Poincaré Conjecture, robotics and computer graphics. They transitioned to engineering at Microsoft, co-leading an invention team that developed machine learning approaches to improve human-computer interactions in areas including computer vision, social networking and noisy speech recognition.  

Lani and Steve are pioneering members of the Bauer Fellows Program at Harvard University and the Green Center for Systems Biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and visiting faculty at Mathematical Scientists Research Institutes in Berkeley and Google Brain in Mountain View.

Matthew P. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Nine Square Therapeutics
Apple Tree Partners (ATP)
University of California, San Francisco

Matthew P. Jacobson is a co-founder of Nine Square Therapeutics, a venture partner at Apple Tree Partners (ATP), and a biotech entrepreneur who has co-founded several other successful companies including Global Blood Therapeutics, Circle Pharma, and Relay Therapeutics. A Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at University of California San Francisco, he is a leading authority in computer-aided drug design and computational structural biology and biophysics. His research interests include docking against homology models and flexible protein binding sites, membrane permeability, antibody modeling, mechanisms of protein regulation by post-translational modifications, allostery, and pH. He is author of more than 200 research publications, the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and holder of several patents. Software written by Matt and his collaborators is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry.

Matt earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 and did his postdoctoral work at Oxford University and Columbia University.

Spiros Liras, Ph.D.
Nine Square Therapeutics
Apple Tree Partners (ATP)

Spiros is co-founder of Nine Square Therapeutics and venture partner at Apple Tree Partners (ATP). He brings to ATP his decades-long career leading scientific innovation and discovery at some of the world’s foremost pharmaceutical companies. At ATP, Spiros  co-founded its portfolio companies Nereid Therapeutics (Cambridge, MA) , Initial Therapeutics (San Francisco, CA), Evercrisp Biosciences (Berkeley, CA), Deep Apple Therapeutics (San Francisco, CA), and Apertor Pharmaceuticals (Alameda, CA).

Prior to ATP, Spiros established and led the External Portfolio Innovation unit within Research and Development at Biogen. Prior to Biogen, he was vice president of Medicinal Chemistry at Pfizer, where he led teams to deliver clinical pipelines in disease areas including cardiovascular, metabolic and neuroscience. Under his leadership, his divisions explored cutting edge drug discovery concepts including selective protein translation inhibition, design of macrocycles for drug discovery in tough target space, allosterism, and tissue targeting design strategies for the delivery of small molecule, oligonucleotide therapeutics and other modalities.

Spiros earned a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Iowa State University and completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Spiros is an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Seth Harrison, M.D.
Apple Tree Partners (ATP)

Seth Harrison is a founder and managing partner of Apple Tree Partners (ATP), where he oversees $2.65 billion in committed venture capital. Since starting the firm in 1999, Seth has launched or invested in more than 30 companies focused on delivering cutting-edge therapies for unmet medical needs, with 19 now public or acquired. Prior to ATP Seth was a venture partner at Sevin Rosen Funds and a general partner at Oak Investment Partners.

Seth received an M.D. and MBA from Columbia University, completing a surgery internship at the Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York. He earned an A.B. from Princeton University. He served on the board of the International Partnership for Microbicides from 2002-2010.

Robert holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München in Germany and is a board-certified neurologist.