Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan, PhD

Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation and Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals

Speaker

Dr. Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan serves as the Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation, a Scientific Advisory Board Member, and a Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2003, he was the founding chemist hired at Alnylam as the Head of the Drug Discovery. He and his team pioneered the discovery and development of numerous chemical modifications, GalNAc conjugation chemistry, lipid conjugates (the first in vivo demonstration of RNAi in 2004) and Lipid Nanoparticles (LNP) delivery platform that made RNA interference-based human therapeutics possible. This work led to the approval of five RNAi therapeutics: ONPATTRO® (patisiran, 2018), GIVLAARI® (givosiran, 2019), OXLUMO® (lumasiran, 2020), LEQVIO® (inclisiran, 2020, 2021) and AMVUTTRO® (vutrisiran, 2022). Dr. Manoharan has had a distinguished career as a world-leading chemist in the field of oligonucleotide therapeutics. Prior to joining Alnylam, he worked at Isis (Ionis) Pharmaceuticals from 1990-2003 in the field of antisense oligonucleotides. He is an author of more than 250 publications (nearly 72,000 Google Scholar citations with an h-index of 123 and an i10-index of 452) and over 500 abstracts, as well as an inventor of over 300 issued U.S. patents. Dr. Manoharan is the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (OTS, 2019), the M. L. Wolfrom Award (2007), D. Horton Industrial Carbohydrate Chemistry Award (2021) from the Carbohydrate Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society, the Chemical Research Society of India (CRSI) 2022 Medal by the Council of the Chemical Research Society of India, the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL, Pune, India)-K. N. Ganesh award in 2023, and the Professor Ronald Breslow Biomimetic Chemistry National award by the American Chemistry for the year 2024. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2022. He has been honored with Bernard Belleau lecture award of McGill University in 2024. Dr. Manoharan was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India and received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in chemistry at the American College, Madurai, India. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, (Professor Ernest L. Eliel) and learned the field of oligonucleotides at Yale University and University of Maryland as a post-doctoral research associate (Professor John A. Gerlt).