Carmichael Roberts, PhD
Executive Chairman
Carmichael Roberts is the Executive Chairman of Arsenal Medical and a General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. Prior to this role, he co-founded and served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company. Before Arsenal Medical, Carmichael co-founded and served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Surface Logix, Inc., a drug optimization company. Carmichael has also co-founded and served as a director of several other ventures, including Ancora Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a carbohydrate materials company, Nano-Terra, Inc., an electronics and industrial materials company, and Diagnostics For All, Inc., a non-profit organization that is developing a materials platform to make low cost diagnostics for the poor.
Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Carmichael worked in business development at GelTex Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which was acquired by Genzyme for $1.3 billion. Prior to GelTex, Carmichael was responsible for new product and business development in the Sentry Products Specialty Materials Division of Union Carbide Corporation.
Carmichael received his B.S. and Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Duke University and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Carmichael also received his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Jeff Carbeck, PhD
Co-Founder, Scientific Advisor, former Chief Technology Officer
Prior to his career as an entrepreneur, Jeff was a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Princeton. He left academics to co-found Arsenal Medical and served as its first Chief Technology Officer. His other ventures include Nano-Terra, where he served as its Chief Scientist, and MC10 where he is currently its Chief Technology Officer. In 2009 he was a Clean Energy Fellow with the New England Clean Energy Council. Soon after starting his career as an entrepreneur, the Boston Business Journal recognized Jeff as one of the 40 outstanding professionals under the age of 40. He attended the University of Michigan (BSE, Materials Science), MIT (PhD, Materials Science), and Harvard as a post-doctoral fellow in chemistry with George Whitesides. Jeff serves on the University of Michigan’s advisory board for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
George Whitesides, PhD
Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor, Harvard University
George M. Whitesides was born August 3, 1939 in Louisville, KY. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University in 1960 and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (with J.D. Roberts) in 1964. He was a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963 to 1982. He joined the Department of Chemistry of Harvard University in 1982, and was Department Chairman 1986-89, and Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry from 1982-2004. He is now the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor.
Robert Langer, DSc
David H. Koch Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Robert S. Langer is one of 14 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Langer has written approximately 1,050 articles. He also has approximately 750 issued and pending patents worldwide. Dr. Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 220 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history.
He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration’s SCIENCE Board, the FDA’s highest advisory board, from 1995 -- 2002 and as its Chairman from 1999-2002.
Dr. Langer has received over 170 major awards including the 2006 United States National Medal of Science; the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the 2008 Millennium Prize, the world’s largest technology prize. He is the also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award; 72 recipients of this award have subsequently received a Nobel Prize. Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Dickson Prize for Science (2002), Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the Harvey Prize (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright), the General Motors Kettering Prize for Cancer Research (2004), the Dan David Prize in Materials Science (2005), the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2005), the largest prize in the U.S. for medical research, induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2006), the Max Planck Research Award (2008) and the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2008). In 1998, he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world’s largest prize for invention for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” In 1989 Dr. Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.
Forbes Magazine (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Dr. Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover Magazine (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators world wide who will reinvent our future. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Dr. Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America (America’s Best). Parade Magazine (2004) selected Dr. Langer as one of 6 “Heroes whose research may save your life.” Dr. Langer has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, the Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and Uppsala University (Sweden). He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.
Milan Mrksich, PhD
Professor, University of Chicago Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Investigator
Milan Mrksich is considered a world leader in the realm of engineering the interface between cells and surfaces. As a postdoctoral fellow, he helped transform an inexpensive process for making computer microchips into a method to control the shape, position, and function of living cells. This method, based on adhesive molecules immobilized on substrates within microarrays, was used to gain insight into how mammalian cells decide to grow, differentiate, move, or die.
Moving with ease between chemistry, molecular biology, biophysics, nanotechnology, materials science, and cell biology, Mrksich focuses much attention on how cell surfaces are engineered. These surfaces support the cell and regulate its migration and adhesion to other cells. Understanding how this extracellular matrix works can lead to ideas for drugs and methods of engineering artificial tissues.
Mrksich has a fundamental question of cell biology in his sights: how do cells control the assembly of focal adhesions that mediate cell adhesion to extracellular matrix? This is a critical question because focal adhesions are where cells sense and integrate the mechanical and chemical signals responsible for controlling their growth and function. He has genetically engineered mimics of specific cellular adhesion proteins and shown how they assemble into focal adhesions. The work led to development of small molecule inhibitors that disrupt the adhesion process.
Mrksich used artificial cell surfaces to develop biochips—arrays of biological molecules that can be used to assay for specific activities. One success of biochip screening is identification of compounds that inhibit two toxins of anthrax.
Mrksich also uses these artificial surfaces to improve culturing of cells for scientific study of cell adhesion, because cultured cells require surfaces to grow.