Firoz Antia, PhD

Vice President, Oligonucleotide & Small Molecule CMC at Denali Therapeutics

Speaker

Firoz is Vice President of Oligonucleotide and Small Molecule Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls and brings over 30 years of CMC experience to his leadership of process and product development and manufacturing in support of Denali’s small molecule portfolio and Oligonucleotide Transport Vehicle (OTV) platform.

Prior to joining Denali, Firoz spent 12 years at Biogen, where as Head of Oligonucleotide Development he led the establishment of internal oligonucleotide process development and manufacturing capabilities and was instrumental in filing SPINRAZA ® and QALSODY ® . Before Biogen, he led CMC activities at Palatin Technologies, developing all aspects of their peptide therapeutics, particularly Vyleesi ® , from drug substance through autoinjector drug product. Earlier, he was at Merck for 10 years in BioProcess and Chemical Engineering R&D functions, contributing to the success of the semisynthetic CANCIDAS ® and several other small molecules. Firoz started his career developing peptides, initially at Sandoz Pharma AG, and then at J&J’s RW Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute.

Firoz holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, an M.S. from the University of Akron, and a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi, all in chemical engineering.