Coles, 54, is using his own money to build a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup called Yumanity that is using yeast, the microbes that help make bread and beer, to study how misfolded proteins in the brain cause Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease and Parkinson’s, and to create drugs based on that knowledge. There’s already interest from Big Pharma. Coles says he chose to attack brain diseases, not tumors, because the need is so dire and the science is so fresh.
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Luke Timmerman
Coles also happens to be African American in an industry with very few people with his skin color. So by definition, he’s had a lot of experiences that most people in the business have only read about.
xconomy.com
Anonymous
Dr. Coles completed his cardiology and internal medicine training at Massachusetts General Hospital and was a cardiovascular research fellow at Harvard Medical School.
marketwatch.com
Anonymous
He have had any job he wanted in the drug industry. In five years at the helm of cancer drug developer Onyx Pharmaceuticals he increased its market cap eightfold by purchasing an experimental blood cancer drug for $800 million, developing it into a big seller and flipping the whole company to Amgen for $10.4 billion in October 2013.
forbes.com
