Session Chair Profile

Mark Levin

Biography

Mark Levin has been a life science leader for 40 years, most of them spent conceiving and launching biotechnology companies. Early on, Levin recognized that personalized medicine had the potential to benefit the patient and revolutionize both pharma and biotech. He strongly espoused that the only way the field would reach this potential was if all stakeholders banded together to overcome the many challenges it faced. To enable this, he helped conceive the Personalized Medicine Coalition. In 2007, Levin co-founded Third Rock Ventures, a different kind of VC firm that actively searched for disruptive medical technology and innovative science, to build into companies from the ground up. Many of these were based on personalized medicine, such as cancer epigenetics, gene therapy and molecular diagnostics. Then he and his partners carefully selected the founding teams and instilled them with a sustainable culture. Third Rock hatched the ideas for most of their 36 portfolio companies including Foundation Medicine, Agios, BlueBird Bio, Editas Medicine and Sage Therapeutics. Prior to Third Rock, Mark co-founded Mayfield Fund’s life science arm, where he was also founding CEO of companies such as Tularik, Cell Genesys/Abgenix, Stem Cells and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, serving as CEO for 12 years. Earlier in his career, Levin was an engineer and project leader at Lilly and Genentech. He holds an M.S. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from Washington University.

Speaker Profile

Panna Sharma

Biography

Mr. Sharma became a member of the board of directors and Chief Executive Officer in May of 2010. Mr. Sharma was at TSG Partners, a specialty life sciences consultancy and advisory company, from 2001 to 2010, where he was the Managing Partner and founder. At TSG he led the development of strategic initiatives, corporate growth strategy and corporate turnarounds for both public and private companies. He also led over 70 buy and sell-side transactions for life sciences, healthcare and biopharma companies. At TSG, he established the Global Diagnostics Index, the Global Biotools Index and several other life science capital markets indices that are still used in the life science industry. Prior to founding TSG, Mr. Sharma was the Chief Strategy Officer for iXL Enterprises, Inc. (“iXL”), a public e-business consultancy where he led strategy development and acquisitions activity and was part of the management team that aided in taking the company public in June 1999. At iXL, he also managed the specialty e-business strategy practices group that grew from under $4 million in revenue in 1998 to over $75 million in 2000. From 1996 to 1998, Mr. Sharma was a partner at Interactive Solutions, Inc., a marketing and strategy consultancy focused on health care and financial services in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was sold to Omnicom, Inc., one of the largest global market analysis and marketing companies. Prior to that time, Mr. Sharma served as a consultant to Putnam Investment Management, LLC and Bank of America Corporation. Mr. Sharma has also served on the board of directors of EpicEdge, a health care and government focused IT services firm, from 2001 to 2003 and as chairman of the Advisory Board for EndoChoice, a global leader for the gastrointestinal treatment market from 2008 to 2010. Mr. Sharma attended Boston University from 1987 to 1992 in the University Professor’s Program.

Talk

How AI is Accelerating and Enabling Precision Oncology
As the oncology industry moves towards precision medicine, massive data are being used to increase the accuracy and speed of clinical care, improve insights for targeted drug discovery. AI can advance cancer care by transforming all aspects: from compound discovery and clinical trial design to diagnostic development and patient targeting.