Therna Biosciences Advances Corporate and Scientific Objectives with a New Chief Operating Officer, Two AI Advisors, and NIH Challenge Win

Kevin Green, former Chief Business Officer of Inceptive, joins as Chief Operating Officer

Dave Burke, former Arc Institute CTO and Google Android engineering leader, and Harsh Mehta, Co-Founder and CTO of Mirendil, named AI Advisors

NIH Common Fund selects Therna as a Phase I winner of its TRDNT Challenge for an AI-driven approach to designing medicines for ultra-rare diseases

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Therna Biosciences, a biotechnology company whose AI RNA Biologist, RNA-Logix™, translates RNA language into medicines, today announced new leadership and outside recognition that advance the platform. Kevin Green, who brings more than 20 years of experience building and leading biotechnology companies across AI-enabled drug discovery and RNA therapeutics, has been appointed Chief Operating Officer. Therna Biosciences also added two AI technical leaders to its advisory team: Dr. Dave Burke, who served as the first Chief Technology Officer of Arc Institute and previously led Android engineering at Google, and Mr. Harsh Mehta, who is co-founder and CTO of Mirendil and previously held research roles at Anthropic and Google. In addition, the NIH Common Fund has selected Therna as a Phase I winner of its Targeting RNA in Disease with Novel Technologies (TRDNT) Challenge, recognizing its RNA-Logix™ approach to designing medicines for ultra-rare genetic diseases.

“Every new potential medicine we design with RNA-Logix™ is meant to reach a patient, and getting there takes people who have done it before,” said Nazli Azimi, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Therna. “Kevin has guided RNA and AI companies through partnerships and acquisitions with leading drugmakers. Dave and Harsh have built technology at a scale few engineers ever reach: Dave led engineering for Android, which runs on billions of devices, and Harsh helped push the frontier of AI at Google and Anthropic. Both are now applying that experience to biology. Together with Bo Wang and Brian Hie, they give Therna an AI advisory team for the next phase of Company’s AI strategy.”

Therna Named Phase I Winner of NIH TRDNT Challenge

Therna is one of 25 Phase I winners of the TRDNT Challenge. The three-phase competition, which aims to spur the development of publicly available RNA-targeting technologies for new therapeutic classes, offers up to $13.1 million in total awards as teams develop and validate their technologies through 2027. Therna’s winning proposal, An Agentic Platform for Structure Mapping and De Novo Design of Gain-of-Function Activating Antisense Oligonucleotides for Ultra-Rare Haploinsufficiencies, introduces a co-scientist agent built on RNA-Logix™. The agent works as an autonomous computational-to-experimental engine, designing and optimizing sequence-specific activating antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) that increase production of a target protein. The approach is suited to haploinsufficiencies, conditions in which a single working copy of a gene produces too little protein to support normal function.

Kevin Green Appointed Chief Operating Officer

Mr. Green joined Therna in August and leads the Company’s operations and business development as Therna moves RNA-Logix™ into partnered and internal programs. His experience spans corporate strategy, operations, organizational development, portfolio planning, business development, financing, and strategic transactions.

“I’ve worked with RNA and AI companies at several stages, and I know what it looks like when a platform is ready to grow. Therna is there, and I am excited to be part of what comes next,” said Mr. Green.

Mr. Green most recently served as Chief Business Officer of Inceptive, where he helped shape corporate and partnering strategy for its AI-driven biological design platform and led a licensing and collaboration transaction with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. Previously, he held multiple executive roles at Elsie Biotechnologies, including Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer, helping build and position the RNA therapeutics company through its partnership with and subsequent acquisition by GSK. He served as Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Bioniz Therapeutics, where he helped lead strategy, operations, financing, and the company’s acquisition by Equillium. Earlier in his career, he spent 11 years at Allergan in the finance and corporate development groups. Mr. Green holds an MBA from the University of California, Irvine and a B.A. from California State University.

Dave Burke and Harsh Mehta Join as AI Advisors

Dr. Burke and Mr. Mehta will advise Therna on AI strategy and engineering as RNA-Logix™ grows. They join Therna’s existing AI advisors Drs. Bo Wang, Chief AI Scientist at Xaira Therapeutics, and Brian Hie, Faculty at Stanford and Arc Institute. Dr. Burke is an advisor to Arc Institute and continues to partner on the Institute’s AI and biology initiatives. As Arc’s first Chief Technology Officer, he led engineering for the Institute’s work at the interface of biology and AI, including its effort to build a computational model of the cell. Before joining Arc, Dr. Burke was Vice President of Engineering for Android at Google, where he led the engineering organization behind the world’s most widely used mobile operating system.

Mr. Mehta is the co-founder and CTO of Mirendil, an AI lab building self-improving AI systems for scientific discovery. Previously, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Anthropic and a researcher at Google, where he contributed to Gemini, Google’s flagship AI model.

About Therna Biosciences

Therna is a biotechnology company translating RNA language into medicines. Its platform, RNA-Logix™, is an AI RNA Biologist that unlocks new biology and designs the novel medicines that act on it. Because RNA-Logix™ treats mRNA both as a medicine and as a target, Therna designs across modalities on one platform, engineering mRNA optimized for translation, stability, immune evasion, and tissue-specific expression, and identifying optimal target sites within mRNA for ASO and siRNA design. Therna’s technology can increase, decrease, or finely tune gene expression, enabling applications across cardiovascular, metabolic, immunological, and genetic diseases, in addition to ultra-rare, individualized treatments. Headquartered in San Francisco, Therna is backed by leading investors and scientific advisors at the forefront of RNA and AI innovation. Please visit therna.com for more information.