Board of Directors and Advisors
Anil Goyal, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Goyal, has 24+ years of senior management and leadership experience at several public and private biotechnology companies where he has raised >$200M from public / private investors / federal sources, completed >$1B in pharma deals and accomplished several exits. Prior to joining IMMvention in 2017, he was COO at Ribometrix where he raised Ribometrix's first venture funding. His other biotech experience includes, leading company formation, fund raising, business development, M&A, strategic planning, and senior management roles at Heat Biologics (HTBX), Serenex (led acquisition / sale to Pfizer), Optherion (led acquisition / sale to Sequenom and Baxter), Qualiber, Ascletis (public company on Hong Kong market) and Millennium Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Takeda). He is currently a board member / advisor to Enzerna Biosciences, MimiVax and UNC-Chapel Hill KickStart Program.
He has experience building and growing companies with small molecule, antibody, siRNA, gene and cell therapies across many therapeutic areas including immuno-oncology, ophthalmology, and inflammation.
Dr. Goyal received his Ph.D. degree in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics jointly from Rutgers, The State University and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He completed post-doctoral fellowships at the NJ Center for Agriculture & Environment and Merck & Co.
Fun Fact: Anil roved the World (pre-COVID) to find the hottest sauce for his collection.
Jenny Ting, Ph.D.
William Rand Kenan Distinguished Professor of Genetics at UNC-Chapel-Hill
Dr. Ting has more than 35 years of research experience in studying innate immune sensors and receptors and their roles in inflammation, cancer, and infection. She is a co-discoverer of the NLR family (nucleotide binding leucine rich repeat proteins or NOD-like receptors) of inflammasome forming receptors. Her group first described the human NLR gene family, which included a few known genes and sixteen new genes. She has studied the divergent roles of this family and have uncovered their roles in transcriptional activation, inflammasome activation, cytokine processing, cell death and autophagy. She is an expert in inflammasome research and published the first paper documenting the roles of NLR inflammasomes in high fat diet-induced type 2 diabetes which has been cited over 1000 times. She also published the first papers on the roles of inflammasomes in colitis, colon cancer, neuroinflammation, autoimmune diseases, and viral infection. Dr. Ting has trained over 60 postdoctoral fellows, physician scientists and 35 pre-doctoral students. Her team has published over 320 papers and have been consistently on the Reuters / Clarivate highly cited researcher list. Dr. Ting has numerous honors and awards from organizations such as ACS, AAI, NIH, & MS Society. Currently, she serves on the board of Burroughs Wellcome Fund and is president-elect (2020-21) of American Association of Immunologists.
