Chandra Vargeese, PhD

Chief Technology Officer at WAVE Life Sciences

Dr. Vargeese is one of the industry’s leading oligonucleotide chemists with approximately 30 years of oligonucleotide research experience, authoring numerous scientific publications and patents in the field. Dr. Vargeese joined Wave Life Sciences in 2014 and was named Chief Technology Officer in 2020. She is responsible for the advancement of Wave’s PRISMTM platform, which is foundational to all of Wave’s drug discovery and development efforts. Before joining Wave, Dr. Vargeese served as Executive Director of Chemistry and Delivery, RNA Therapeutics Division at Novartis. She led siRNA delivery as Senior Director in the RNA Therapeutics division at Merck. She joined Merck through its $1.1 billion acquisition of Sirna Therapeutics, where she was Vice President of Chemistry. Dr. Vargeese served as Associate Director of Chemistry at NeXstar Pharmaceuticals and is the co-inventor of Macugen® (pegaptanib), an approved therapy for wet AMD. She earned a PhD in organic chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and completed post-doctoral work at University of Rhode Island.