Nenad Svrzikapa, DPhil

Co-Founder, Head of Oligonucleotide Platform at Orfonyx Bio

Speaker

Dr. Nenad Svrzikapa is a co‑founder, entrepreneur, and Head of Platform at Orfonyx Bio, where he is developing antisense oligonucleotides that upregulate protein expression by targeting translational regulatory elements. He holds a DPhil in Paediatrics from the University of Oxford. He began his research career in ageing biology at UMass Medical School before moving into systems biology at Harvard Medical School. He then joined Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where he contributed to the first RNAi trial in humans, and later became a founding scientist at Wave Life Sciences, helping to build the company and its platform from the very beginning. At Wave, he was one of the lead inventors on the phosphorothioate stereochemistry control platform published in Nature Biotechnology in 2017 and pioneered allele‑specific targeting using stereopure antisense oligonucleotides in Huntington’s disease. He is an inventor on five US patent families in oligonucleotide chemistry and RNA editing and has authored multiple peer‑reviewed publications.