Victor Perlroth co-founded Kodiak Sciences in 2009 and is the company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Together with a talented core team, Dr. Perlroth has built Kodiak on a foundation of scientific excellence with a simple mission—to design and develop important new medicines for highly prevalent diseases. Under Dr. Perlroth’s leadership, Kodiak is building a pipeline of potentially life transforming ophthalmology drug candidates with the goal to build a dominant retinal franchise for the benefit of patients globally. Previously, Dr. Perlroth served as Venture Partner and then Entrepreneur in Residence at MPM Capital, a dedicated healthcare venture capital investment firm. In 2003, Dr. Perlroth co-founded Avidia Inc., a biopharmaceuticals drug discovery and development company where he served as General Manager and Vice President of Corporate Development. In this role, at various times he had broad management responsibility across both corporate and research and development activities. Dr. Perlroth was one of two principals involved in the acquisition of the company by Amgen for $450 million. Earlier, Dr. Perlroth worked at Guzik Technical Enterprises, the industry-leading provider of test equipment to the hard disk drive industry, where he was Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Perlroth earned his M.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Stanford University and an A.B. in Molecular Biology summa cum laude from Princeton University.

John Borgeson is our Chief Financial Officer and has served in this position since June 2014. Mr. Borgeson brings over 25 years of pharmaceutical industry experience in finance, strategy and operations on a global scale. Previously Mr. Borgeson was a Vice President of Finance at Pfizer and a member of Pfizer’s Global Financial Leadership Team. Mr. Borgeson’s roles at Pfizer included CFO for Pfizer’s biotherapeutics division and corporate tax executive with responsibility for US and Europe. Under Mr. Borgeson’s leadership, Pfizer completed a transformational restructuring of the global tax group that was replicated by other Fortune 50 companies. Mr. Borgeson has more recently led finance for a variety of private biotech companies, including Labrys Biologics, which was acquired by Teva Pharmaceuticals for $825 million. He was also CFO of venBio, a venture capital firm with a strong track record in biotechnology investing. Mr. Borgeson started his career as an auditor with Ernst & Young and is a certified public accountant. He has an M.B.A. from R.I.T. and an undergraduate degree from the School of Management at the University at Buffalo (S.U.N.Y.).

Hong Liang is our Vice President of Discovery Medicine and has served in this position since December of 2015. Dr. Liang leads Kodiak’s discovery efforts with the goal to design important medicines that prevent and/or slow the progression of retinal disease in high risk patients. Most recently, Dr. Liang was Senior Director at the Rinat Laboratory of Pfizer Inc. where she led the Genomics and Computational Biology group focusing on target discovery and translational biomarker work. Previously, she was responsible for many preclinical projects in metabolic and neurological diseases at Rinat/Pfizer. In particular, Dr. Liang was the project initiator and inventor and a driving force behind Rinat/Pfizer’s Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin Kexin type 9 inhibitor (PCSK9i) bococizumab development program. Bococizumab antagonizes PCSK9-mediated degradation of low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor, increases LDL-C clearance, and lowers blood LDL-C levels. Bococizumab’s phase 3 global clinical development program involves approximately 32,000 high-risk primary and secondary prevention patients and is being studied for its potential to lower the known cardiac risk factor LDL-C and improve cardiovascular outcomes. Earlier, Dr. Liang lead the expression profiling and knockout construct generation efforts at Deltagen Inc. Dr. Liang trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, earned a Ph.D. degree at Northwestern University, and received her B.A. in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Desiree Beutelspacher is our Vice President of Clinical Operations. Ms. Beutelspacher brings with her 20 years of clinical drug development experience. Fifteen of those years have been spent in ophthalmology, with an emphasis on retinal diseases such as wet and dry age-related macular degeneration. During the prior ten years, she was Executive Director of Clinical Development at Ophthotech Corporation. While there, she led the clinical operations for the Fovista™ franchise from Phase 1 through Phase 3, as well as Zimura™. Previously, she was an independent clinical consultant working with small biotech companies to develop early-stage clinical programs. She also worked on the Macugen® franchise at Eyetech Pharmaceuticals. Ms. Beutelspacher holds a B.S. in biology from UCLA and has a PMP certification.

Joel Naor serves as Vice President of Clinical Science and Development Operations. In this role, Dr. Naor is responsible for clinical development of the company’s development-stage programs. He oversees Kodiak’s clinical science, biometrics, clinical operations, project management, regulatory affairs, and toxicology / pharmacology activities. Dr. Naor has contributed to retinal medicines development since the inception of the retinal pharmaceuticals market with the launch of Visudyne®. As such he brings to Kodiak a uniquely deep and broad retinal development perspective that includes commercialization. Dr. Naor has contributed to a range of products and molecule types including Ozurdex®, Trivaris TM, Opsiria TM, and HuCNS-SC®, as well as a range of indications spanning Wet and Dry AMD, Diabetic Retinopathy, Retinal Vein Occlusion and Posterior Uveitis. Prior to joining Kodiak, Dr. Naor held leadership positions with increasing responsibility at QLT Inc., Allergan Inc., Macusight Inc., Santen Inc. and Stem Cells Inc. Dr. Naor earned his M.D. from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Upon completion of a residency in ophthalmology and obtaining an ophthalmic surgeon certification, he completed a clinical fellowship at the University of Toronto where he also obtained an M.Sc. in epidemiology with an emphasis on clinical trials. Dr. Naor holds an M.B.A. from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Stephen Raillard serves as Vice President, Chemical Development and Manufacturing. In this role, Dr. Raillard is responsible for chemical research and development in support of new product candidates and product platforms as well as leading chemical development and manufacturing activities for Kodiak’s drug substance portfolio. Dr. Raillard brings to Kodiak over twenty years of experience in building and leading global internal/external teams tasked with pharmaceutical research and development, process scale-up and commercial manufacturing.

Most recently, Dr. Raillard was Executive Director of Chemical Development at XenoPort, Inc. In this role, he was responsible for developing the commercial manufacturing process for Gabapentin enacarbil (Tradename HORIZANT) and for supervising commercial manufacturing campaigns of over twenty metric tons with a per batch size of 800 kilograms. Horizant is approved by the FDA for use in patients with Restless Legs Syndrome and Post-Herpetic Neuralgia. In addition, he was responsible for the development and manufacturing of seven additional APIs in XenoPort’s portfolio, four of which entered clinical trials. Dr. Raillard was a core Chemistry Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) team member in due diligence discussions that led to licensing agreements with GSK and Astellas for Gabapentin enacarbil, Indivior for Arbaclofen Placarbil, and Dr. Reddy’s for XP23829. Dr. Raillard has contributed to CMC filings and interactions with global regulatory authorities across the spectrum of drug discovery, development, and commercialization and including pre-Investigational New Drug Applications, New Drug Applications, and post-approval commitments.

Prior to joining Kodiak, Dr. Raillard held technical positions at Affmax Research Institute where, among other duties, he invented and reduced to practice methods enabling fast scale-up using solid-phase chemistry on custom high-load polymer resins.

Dr. Raillard received his Ph.D. from the ETH Zürich in Switzerland followed by a post-doc at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA.