Our Team
Leadership
Michel Lévesque, MD, is the chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Siragen Pharmaceuticals. A successful entrepreneur, neuroscientist and neurosurgeon. Dr. Lévesque has authored over 75 articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, contributed chapters to many leading neurosurgery treatises, has published over 200 scientific abstracts, and is the inventor of 7 patents. Dr. Lévesque received his medical degree at Université de Montréal. He completed his neurosurgical training and post-graduate studies in neurosciences at Mc Gill University, followed by a fellowship in functional neurosurgery. He is also an MBA graduate from the University of Michigan.
Michel Levesque MD, MBA
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Mohamedi "Mo" Kagalwala, Ph.D., is the Chief Scientific Officer at Siragen Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Kagalwala is responsible for overseeing the research and development activities including discovery and pre-clinical studies with all assets in the pipeline. He is regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of chromatin and epigenetics for his contributions to chromatin remodeling. Dr. Kagalwala trained in neurobiology and neurodegenerative disorders at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA with Professor Fred "Rusty" Gage. There he expanded his knowledge and expertise of neural stem cells to understand adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus and carried out biochemical and functional genomic analysis of iPSC derived Neural Stem Cells from Schizophrenia patients. There he laid the solid foundation for his research in the understanding the molecular mechanisms of aging and neurodegeneration.
Mohamedi Kagalwala PhD, MBA
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer
Patricia Eastman, MHA, is Vice President Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer at Siragen Pharmaceuticals. She has served as Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Neurogeneration since 2008. She previously was Chief Executive Officer of Associated Students UCLA. Prior to this, she served as Vice President, Business Development, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She is a graduate of Arizona State University and Loma Linda University.
Patricia Eastman MHA
Vice President Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer
Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Anthony R. Means is a pre-eminent biomedical scientist who studies how calcium participates in the regulation of cell function. He has been interested in the signaling pathways regulated by hormones and growth factors since graduate school where he worked on early actions of estrogen. Following postdoctoral training in Australia where he began investigations on the early actions of FSH in the male he continued this interest as a faculty member at Vanderbilt and Baylor College of Medicine. Close examination of immediate post-receptor signaling led to an appreciation of important roles for Ca2+ and the identification of a Ca2+ receptor that was subsequently christened calmodulin (CaM). Not only was Dr. Means one of the first to recognize the importance of CaM, he is the principal architect of a now central tenant in biology that CaM serves as the primary and ubiquitous receptor for calcium. He was the first to sequence the calmodulin protein, isolate its gene and determine its 3D structure alone and bound to two separate target enzymes. Currently, he uses mouse models to demonstrate important roles for these protein kinases in human diseases such as cancer, diabetes/obesity and other components of metabolic syndrome. Dr. Means is a distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duke University Medical Center in Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and is now currently a Professor at Baylor College Medicine, Houston, Texas. In Molecular and Cellular Biology.
Anthony Means PhD
Baylor College of Medicine
Dr. Scott graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Hon) from the University of Glasgow in 1997, followed by a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Dundee in 2002 funded by a prestigious Wellcome Trust Prize scholarship. He was recruited to St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research (SVIMR) in Melbourne in 2006, where he currently leads the Neurometabolism group. Dr. Scott is also a Senior Research Academic at the Mary MacKillop Institute of Health Research at ACU and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. His primary research interest is on understanding the molecular pathways that regulate mood and emotional behavior in response to hormones and metabolites. His is a leading researcher on the control of protein-kinase signaling pathways that regulate whole-body energy metabolism and complex behavior. Dysregulation of these pathways has strong links with human psychiatric diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. His group uses a wide range of techniques including biochemistry, cell biology, protein crystallography, mass spectrometry and genetically modified mouse models to decipher the role of the signaling networks that regulate complex behavior in health and disease.
John Scott PhD
St Vincent Institute of Medical Research
Dr. John is an accomplished medicinal chemist and leads the Drug Discovery Laboratory (DDL) at the Department of Neurology at UCLA. Dr. John is a member of the Alzheimer's Disease Program in the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer's Disease. The DDL team consists of scientists and skilled technicians with basic science and drug development experience who have joined the lab to find effective, safe therapeutics for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The DDL team identifies preclinical candidates and then establishes partnerships to progress these therapeutic agents from bench to bedside. Previously Dr. John was with Athena Neurosciences and Elan Pharmaceuticals for 18 years where he led a team of medicinal chemists developing drugs for central nervous system (CNS) diseases with a focus on AD. His work at Elan led to clinical candidates that went into advanced human trials. Dr. John is an inventor on over 100 pending or issued patents on compounds and analogs for CNS related targets.
Varghese John PhD
UCLA
Dr. Franck Polleux did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, (France) where he obtained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 1997. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Anirvan Ghosh at Johns Hopkins University for his post-doctoral training. In 2002, Dr. Polleux was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience Center and Department of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill where he became an Associate Professor in 2008. In August 2010, he joined The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In 2013, he was recruited as a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University to join the new Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind, Brain, Behavior Institute. Throughout his career, Dr. Polleux has focused on the identification of the molecular mechanisms underlying neuronal development in the mammalian brain. More recently, his lab started studying the genetic basis of human brain evolution as well as the signaling pathways underlying synaptic loss during early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease progression.
Franck Polleux PhD
Columbia University