Ritwik Datta joined Juvena Therapeutics as a Scientist on the Pharmacology team. Ritwik is a physiologist with over ten years of experience. His expertise lies in comprehending the molecular basis of cardiometabolic diseases. Ritwik’s approach to investigating complex biological questions involves utilizing both mouse models and cell-based methods to develop innovative therapies for cardiometabolic and pulmonary diseases.
Ritwik received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta under the guidance of Sagartirtha Sarkar, Ph.D. Ritwik focused on studying how two major cell types in the heart – cardiac myocytes and fibroblasts – communicated with each other through secreted molecules and how these signaling pathways impacted cardiac fibrosis.
Ritwik completed his extensive postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the lab of Kamran Atabai, MD. Ritwik’s research identified a novel integrin-mediated feedback loop of insulin receptor signaling that regulates skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, laying the foundation for integrin-based therapy to lower daily insulin needs in diabetic patients. In his recent work, Ritwik investigated integrins’ role in regulating dietary fat metabolism in the intestine, providing insights into how intestinal lipid droplet homeostasis affects whole-body lipid metabolism and cardiovascular health.
Throughout his career, Ritwik has garnered recognition and support from prestigious organizations, including postdoctoral fellowships from the Larry L Hillblom Foundation, enabling him to pursue his research endeavors. Ritwik has 6, 1st author publications including in PNAS and Cell reports, and he is a co-author of 10 publications in leading scientific journals.
Besides his passion for science, Ritwik is a travel and photography enthusiast.
Juvena CEO, Hanadie Yousef, PhD, discusses the market opportunity for their unique discovery platform for mapping secreted proteins to unmet medical needs leading to their growing pipeline of biologics for rare and chronic diseases to senior leaders of Mubadala’s LP.
Juvena Therapeutics, Inc. is a regenerative medicine biotech startup inviting applicants for Program Manager – Discovery, Platform, and G&A. Applicants should be excited to join a company focused on the discovery and validation of novel disease-modifying biologics that promote tissue regeneration by inducing tissue-specific rejuvenating phenotypes.
This position (“the PM”) will report to the VP of Program Management and work closely with other Senior Leaders at Juvena daily. The PM will serve as the hands-on project manager of a broad portfolio of Discovery and Platform projects that are core to Juvena’s mission and strategy. Working with Leadership and other stakeholders, the successful candidate will work with the VP Program Management in the planning, execution, and control of integrated KPIs, Research, Discovery (R&D), and G&A program plans, and portfolio management processes that provide a foundation for driving operational objectives. The PM will train, coach, and mentor Staff and Leaders on project management best practices and proactively manage weekly project objectives, identify and analyze dependencies, perform resource planning, develop alternative scenarios based on priority changes and/or pivots on KPIs or objectives, liaise with key stakeholders, and provide regular status updates and recommendations to Leadership on projects within their portfolio.
The position is temporary with the option to convert to a regular full-time position with health benefits. This is the perfect opportunity for someone interested in the exciting and fast-paced environment of a startup company and looking to make a difference in improving people’s lives through science.
*Title commensurate with experience
Company Summary
Juvena Therapeutics is a venture backed biotechnology startup discovering and developing disease-modifying biologics by leveraging their computationally-driven discovery platform to rapidly identify and validate secreted proteins with regenerative potential for multiple rare and chronic diseases.
At Juvena Therapeutics, we are on a mission to discover and develop biologics for rare and chronic degenerative diseases by mapping secreted proteins to unmet medical needs through a machine learning (ML)-enhanced platform. Juvena’s approach integrates proteomics, transcriptomics and imaging with phenotypic human in vitro disease model screening and extensive preclinical validation to mine the therapeutic potential of human stem cell secretomes as a rich source of new medicines that promote tissue regeneration and repair. We are advancing lead drug candidates for muscular dystrophies, atrophy, injury, and osteopathies, and establishing new programs targeting tissue-specific degenerative diseases across multiple therapeutic areas. Since our launch in mid-2018, Juvena has discovered and validated several hits for neuromuscular, skeletal, and metabolic diseases. Juvena’ preclinical programs are supported by funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Juvena is advancing a lead program for Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1, a rare autosomal dominant, progressive muscle-wasting disease.
At Juvena we embrace a diversity of backgrounds, experience and approaches that all combine to lead us to world-class scientific results in an inclusive environment.
Position Location and work permit requirement
640 Galveston Dr. Redwood City, 94063
Candidate must be legally authorized to work in the US.
Position Requirements and Duties
Collaborate with the VP of Program Management to develop, promote, and support a foundation of project management best practices across Juvena by training, coaching, and mentoring Staff and Leaders in its adoption.
Work with Leadership and other stakeholders to lead the establishment of integrated KPIs, R&D program plans, and portfolio management processes that provide a basis for driving operational objectives, deliverables, execution, and timelines.
Drive program and project management processes and activities such as managing priorities, scope definition, schedules, budgets, risk, quality, and changes while ensuring key company milestones and KPIs are defined and met.
Manage meetings in alignment with Juvena’s best practices (e.g., agenda and pre-read information provided, meeting outcomes pre-defined, logging of risks, action items, issues, and decisions [RAID log], etc.).
Develop and manage portfolios for Platform and Discovery through pre-clinical readiness and Corporate G&A projects.
Monitor ongoing projects for potential risks and develop proactive mitigation strategies with Leadership and the relevant R&D teams. Identify, track, and support resolution efforts for all program-related issues and effectively communicate to relevant internal and external contractor teams via regular and ad hoc status updates.
For projects within their program, drive resource planning and impact analysis of priority change/pivot scenarios. Manage changes to project scope, ensuring that all impacts and changes are approved through Governance and appropriately communicated.
Liaise with external partners such as pharmaceutical companies and critical suppliers.
Support the development of TCPs (Target Candidate Profile) and initial TPPs (Target Product Profile).
Develop and maintain project/portfolio dashboards, reports, and metrics including GANTT charts and status summaries.
Other tasks as assigned.
Qualifications
You may be a great fit if you have the following qualifications:
Basic Qualifications (required)
Undergraduate degree,
PMP certification,
Strong working knowledge of common project management best practices & tools (RAID logs, Gantt charts, Risk registers, etc.),
2+ years project management experience in pharmaceutical drug discovery, development, or healthcare related R&D,
Ability to operate in a fast-paced, multi-disciplinary scientific environment that is often required to be adaptive and agile to respond to new discoveries and industry changes,
Strong oral and written communication, meeting facilitation, and organizational skills,
Ability to motivate, collaborate, and innovate to achieve objectives,
Ability to wear many hats with a team-first attitude.
Bonus Qualifications (preferred)
Graduate degree, especially in a scientific or computational area,
4+ years relevant experience in in pharmaceutical drug discovery, development, or healthcare related R&D,
Experience with biologics development,
Track record of advancing R&D projects through discovery to successful candidate nomination,
Experience advancing R&D projects through preclinical to successful IND or CTA regulatory filings,
Horizon Ventures Techcracker conference spotlights Juvena Co-Founder, Hanadie Yousef, PhD as one of 70 founders of innovative new companies developing disruptive technologies that improve lives Oct. 2022
At the Myotonic Dystrophy Foundation Annual conference Juvena Therapeutics joins a community of advocates, people who suffer from this most common muscular dystrophy, their families, caregivers, clinical leaders and experts, and Industry leaders developing therapeutics for this major unmet medical need Sept. 2022
Dr. Rohit Jadhav brings more than 12 years of cross disciplinary experience encompassing the fields of oncology, immune aging and auto-immune diseases. He has extensive experience in algorithm development for diagnostic and prognostic biomarker discovery dealing with diverse datasets investigating the Transcriptome, Epigenome and DNA mutations in clinical cohorts.
Dr. Jadhav earned his B.Tech. in Bioinformatics from India, a M.S. in Bioinformatics from Indiana University, Indianapolis, a PhD in Molecular Medicine from UT Health, San Antonio as a CPRIT pre-doctoral fellow, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic.
Masters & PhD (2009-2016)
Dr. Jadhav worked on identifying epigenetic biomarkers investigating alterations in DNA methylation across different cancer types including breast, ovarian, endometrial, oral and prostate. He was awarded a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Predoctoral Fellowship, which enabled him to be involved in collaborative projects focusing on non-invasive approaches for biomarker discovery. One such project involved use of single-cell RNA sequencing to study circulating tumor cells and another involved studying DNA methylation in cell free DNA, both from peripheral blood. As a lead bioinformatician for these studies, he implemented classification-based prediction methods to enable identification of a panel of biomarkers to be used in determining treatment approaches for prostate cancer patients belonging to different subtypes. These studies have led to 3 approved patents from his mentor Dr. Tim Huang. During this time, Dr. Jadhav was also a lead author on the study that identified DNA methylation biomarkers capable of identifying predisposition to breast cancer after prenatal exposure to the compound bisphenol A and preventive effects of genistein.
Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2022)
Dr. Jadhav’s work at Stanford University and Mayo Clinic with Dr. Jorg Goronzy who is a leading expert in immune aging and auto-immunity, focused on epigenetics in the context of chromatin accessibility and specifically alterations in the immune cell types like CD4 and CD8 T cells during aging and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. He was also a lead author studying epigenetic alterations in exhausted T-cells post checkpoint blockade therapies in collaboration with Dr. Rafi Ahmed from Emory University. During this time Dr. Jadhav built pipelines deployed in on-prem clusters and in the cloud for analyzing and visualizing data from RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, TCR-seq, single cell multiome (RNA+ATAC), single cell Cite-seq (RNA+Protein) among others.
Dr. Jadhav has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers with over a thousand citations.
The Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference Featured Juvena CEO and CO-Founder, Hanadie Yousef, PhD, as a leading aging biology expert discussing “Building a Pipeline of Therapeutics that Target Diseases of Aging” and Dr. Thach Mai, leading Discovery Scientist, discussing Juvena’s innovative ML-enhanced platform for protein drug discovery Aug. 2022
Munir Yousef joined Juvena Therapeutics as a bioinformatics analyst to contribute to Juvena’s growing platform by developing robust data analysis pipelines for their in silico protein drug discovery platform. After realizing his passion for data-driven discovery of solutions to real world problems, Munir obtained his Masters degree in Applied Data Science from Syracuse University.
Before officially joining the team, Munir worked as a data science consultant and helped develop internal data analysis and visualization tools to support Juvena’s growing R&D platforms.
Megan brings eight years of industry experience in mammalian cell culture, protein expression, and protein purification. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from California State University, Eastbay. Prior to joining Juvena Therapeutics, Megan worked as an Associate Scientist in the Protein Sciences group at Bristol Myers Squibb. In this position, she played a crucial role in producing various protein modalities in support of R&D efforts across a wide range of biological targets. Outside of work, Megan enjoys puzzles, art, and volunteering at Nine Lives Cat Rescue.
