Sharon joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Senior Scientist working on preclinical in vivo disease modeling and drug discovery. She received her B.S. in Molecular Toxicology and Ph.D in Metabolic Biology from UC Berkeley where she used chemoproteomic and metabolomic technologies to uncover metabolic drivers of triple-negative breast cancers. Sharon completed her post-doctoral training at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School where she developed a transplantation assay for lung stem cell-derived organoids to mouse models with lung disorders to assess the potential for future cell therapies. She then spent a few years in the biotech industry leading studies to support preclinical drug development.
Sharon has been awarded multiple fellowships during her time in academia, including the NSF graduate fellowship and the Hope Funds for Cancer fellowship. She is a co-author on 22 publications.
Dr. Vengadeshprabhu Karuppa gounder, PhD, joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist II working on preclinical in vivo disease modeling and drug discovery. Dr. Karuppa gounder brings over 10 years of pharmacology & drug development experience in academic research. Dr. Karuppa gounder has strong background in pharmacology, immunology and molecular biology. He has several years of experience developing preclinical animal models in areas of diabetes, NASH, cardiomyopathy, autoimmune diseases, aging, osteoarthritis, IBD, renal and inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Karuppa gounder completed his Undergraduate and Master’s work on Pharmaceutical Sciences at the TamilNadu DR. MGR Medical University, Chennai, India and did his Ph.D. studies at Niigata University of Pharmacy and Applied Life Sciences, Japan, where he studied the role of HMGB1 and GPCR role in diabetes and autoimmune disease models. Then he joined as a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State College of Medicine, PA. During his fellowship, Dr. Karuppa gounder established new methods to study the role of GPCR signaling in synovitis, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis in mouse models and treatment options.
Dr. Karuppa gounder achieved the first author in leading scientific journals, Science Translational Medicine, & Aging Research Reviews and co-author of several research and review articles, and bagged several awards and grants.
Tina Duong is the Director of clinical outcomes research and development at Stanford University Neuromuscular division. Clinically, she is a physical therapist with 20 years of clinical experience in evaluating, treating and validating clinical outcomes for patients with neuromuscular disease.
Her clinical and research interests are in developing, refining and understanding impacts of muscle imbalances and pathology on function and performance. Her work has contributed to improved understanding and characterization of disease phenotypes impacting clinical trial design and care management.
Currently, her research focuses on the effect of exercise and physical activity on human movement and disease physiology. She hopes to integrate technology and digital biomarkers as a complementary tool to performance based measures used in trials, in the clinic and remotely. She enjoys working on collaborative diverse inter-disciplinary teams, mentorship and creating patient focused solutions to improve the quality of life for individuals with neuromuscular disease.
Since 2011 John has been Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics (Genetics) and Pathology at Stanford University, where he is Director of the Division of Neuromuscular Medicine. He received his MD from the University of Minnesota, and PhD in Neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he studied neuronal electrophysiology, synaptic physiology and plasticity. After completing neurology and neuromuscular training at UCSF, he was Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics and Genetics at the University of Minnesota, where he founded and directed the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Center.
John has investigated the genetic causes and multisystemic effects of neuromuscular disorders and has more than 35 years of experience designing and directing clinical trials of novel therapeutics. He spearheaded clinical research on spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) at Stanford, which resulted in the approval of antisense and AAV-gene replacement treatments, and led to nationwide newborn screening for SMA and institution of neonatal genetic treatment.
Ritwik Datta joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist on the Pharmacology team. Ritwik is a physiologist with over ten years of experience. His expertise lies in comprehending the molecular basis of cardiometabolic diseases. Ritwik’s approach to investigating complex biological questions involves utilizing both mouse models and cell-based methods to develop innovative therapies for cardiometabolic and pulmonary diseases.
Ritwik received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta under the guidance of Sagartirtha Sarkar, Ph.D. Ritwik focused on studying how two major cell types in the heart – cardiac myocytes and fibroblasts – communicated with each other through secreted molecules and how these signaling pathways impacted cardiac fibrosis.
Ritwik completed his extensive postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the lab of Kamran Atabai, MD. Ritwik’s research identified a novel integrin-mediated feedback loop of insulin receptor signaling that regulates skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, laying the foundation for integrin-based therapy to lower daily insulin needs in diabetic patients. In his recent work, Ritwik investigated integrins’ role in regulating dietary fat metabolism in the intestine, providing insights into how intestinal lipid droplet homeostasis affects whole-body lipid metabolism and cardiovascular health.
Throughout his career, Ritwik has garnered recognition and support from prestigious organizations, including postdoctoral fellowships from the Larry L Hillblom Foundation, enabling him to pursue his research endeavors. Ritwik has 6, 1st author publications including in PNAS and Cell reports, and he is a co-author of 10 publications in leading scientific journals.
Besides his passion for science, Ritwik is a travel and photography enthusiast.
Min received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan and worked for five years as a product engineer at Samsung Austin Semiconductor. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford University, where he researched growth factor and cell cycle signaling in the laboratory of Tobias Meyer. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University (laboratory of Thomas Rando), where he leveraged single-cell genomics and chemical and genetic screening to investigate the mechanisms of skeletal muscle stem cell fate specification. Min has over 2400 citations and an H-index of 16 (Google Scholar).
Trang joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist to contribute to Dr. Li’s research on developing various assays for advancing Juvena Therapeutics’ pipeline library of rejuvenating proteins for therapeutic purposes.
Trang obtained her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UC Davis and continued to study for her Master in Immunology at UC Davis. Before joining Juvena, she worked at Teva Pharmaceuticals and worked extensively in their antibody screening. She managed an early antibody discovery project and had experiences in running various animal models for lead efficacy testing. She has extensive experience in flow cytometry, assay development and project leadership.
Jonathan Gaffney joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Research Associate on the Discovery Team, where he conducts in vitro cell assays to evaluate the bioactivity of lead proteins, produces viruses to establish new cell lines, and generates gRNA libraries for optical pooled screening. Jonathan earned his B.S. in Biochemistry from UCLA. During his time at UCLA, he conducted chemical biology research in the Sletten Group.
Jonathan’s initial project in the Sletten Group involved investigating the photophysical properties of near-infrared polymethine dyes, focusing on whether exchanging their counter-ions could improve brightness. He later worked on synthesizing branched fluorous tags, which could be appended to drug payloads to enhance solubilization in fluorous nanoemulsions, with the ultimate goal of improving drug delivery. Outside of work, Jonathan enjoys running, biking, hiking, and spending time with his family and dogs. He’s also an avid fan of good Netflix shows.
Dr. Rohit Jadhav brings more than 12 years of cross disciplinary experience encompassing the fields of oncology, immune aging and auto-immune diseases. He has extensive experience in algorithm development for diagnostic and prognostic biomarker discovery dealing with diverse datasets investigating the Transcriptome, Epigenome and DNA mutations in clinical cohorts.
Dr. Jadhav earned his B.Tech. in Bioinformatics from India, a M.S. in Bioinformatics from Indiana University, Indianapolis, a PhD in Molecular Medicine from UT Health, San Antonio as a CPRIT pre-doctoral fellow, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic.
Masters & PhD (2009-2016)
Dr. Jadhav worked on identifying epigenetic biomarkers investigating alterations in DNA methylation across different cancer types including breast, ovarian, endometrial, oral and prostate. He was awarded a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Predoctoral Fellowship, which enabled him to be involved in collaborative projects focusing on non-invasive approaches for biomarker discovery. One such project involved use of single-cell RNA sequencing to study circulating tumor cells and another involved studying DNA methylation in cell free DNA, both from peripheral blood. As a lead bioinformatician for these studies, he implemented classification-based prediction methods to enable identification of a panel of biomarkers to be used in determining treatment approaches for prostate cancer patients belonging to different subtypes. These studies have led to 3 approved patents from his mentor Dr. Tim Huang. During this time, Dr. Jadhav was also a lead author on the study that identified DNA methylation biomarkers capable of identifying predisposition to breast cancer after prenatal exposure to the compound bisphenol A and preventive effects of genistein.
Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2022)
Dr. Jadhav’s work at Stanford University and Mayo Clinic with Dr. Jorg Goronzy who is a leading expert in immune aging and auto-immunity, focused on epigenetics in the context of chromatin accessibility and specifically alterations in the immune cell types like CD4 and CD8 T cells during aging and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. He was also a lead author studying epigenetic alterations in exhausted T-cells post checkpoint blockade therapies in collaboration with Dr. Rafi Ahmed from Emory University. During this time Dr. Jadhav built pipelines deployed in on-prem clusters and in the cloud for analyzing and visualizing data from RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, TCR-seq, single cell multiome (RNA+ATAC), single cell Cite-seq (RNA+Protein) among others.
Dr. Jadhav has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers with over a thousand citations.
Danielle joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist I on the Pharmacology Team, contributing to preclinical in vivo research. She holds a B.A. in Integrative Biology and a Ph.D. in Endocrinology from UC Berkeley, where she focused on thermogenesis, energy metabolism, and obesity. Her research specifically explored key factors, such as transcription factors, histone modifiers, and signaling molecules, that activate thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue.
Danielle further developed her expertise in molecular cell biology during her postdoctoral work and has accumulated over eight years of experience designing and executing molecular and cellular bioassays, as well as a wide range of in vitro, in vivo, and ex vivo assays. She has authored four first-author publications and contributed to co-authored papers in high-impact journals, including EMBO, Molecular Cell, Cell Reports, and eLife, among others, in the fields of obesity and metabolism.
