Jeff Porter, Ph.D. was appointed as Chairman of Scientific Advisory Board of Laekna in March 2022. He has over 25 years of global R&D leadership and strategic expertise, having most recently served as Vice President, Global Head of Chemical Biology & Therapeutics for the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR).

As a senior member of the Leadership team at the NIBR from its inception, Jeff developed an enabling target and lead discovery approach focused on biological pathways, a fundamental tool for the success of NIBR. The diverse research group he led developed a dynamic multidisciplinary platform that merged pathway biology and disease area expertise with enabling technology. Their efforts led to numerous seminal discoveries, from fundamental insights to novel targets and clinical candidates that showed benefits in early proof of concept human trials and beyond. Examples include the discovery of multiple key targets/drug candidates in the core pathways of Developmental biology as well as the ‘drug-ability’ of RNA splicing.

Prior to Novartis, Jeff worked with Ontogeny (now Curis, Inc.) for over 5 years, starting as a staff scientist and advancing to serve as its Vice President of Research. He received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and performed postdoctoral work in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Johns Hopkins.