Our Story:
Who We Are

Serge Messerlian brings over 25 years of experience in serving patients and building value in the life science industry across a range of roles and therapeutic areas, including immunology, hematology, oncology and rare disease. Before joining Creyon, Serge was CEO of Teon Therapeutics. Prior to that, as President of Oncology at Johnson & Johnson, he set the strategic direction for the organization, its key brands, and pipeline programs across hematology and solid tumors, as well as platforms including cell therapies. He also held executive leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson’s Actelion, Baxalta, and Baxter International. Serge is an Operating Partner at DCVC Bio. He holds a B.Sc. degree in physiology & biotechnology and a M.Sc. degree in molecular genetics, both from McGill University, and an MBA from the University of Toronto.

Jason has a unique combination of leadership experience across various disciplines of drug discovery and development. Prior to joining Creyon, Jason co-founded Intrinsic Medicine, serving as its President and Chief Operating Officer, a company focused on developing oligosaccharides found in human milk as therapeutic prebiotics. As he was building Intrinsic, Jason provided intellectual property, regulatory and business strategy consulting services to early-stage drug discovery and development companies. For the preceding nearly 14 years, Jason was at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, where he held various positions including Vice President, Regulatory Affairs and Corporate Development and Vice President, Patents and Corporate Development where he lead the patent group for nearly a decade and served as the Project Team Lead for Ionis’ original PKK drug candidate to treat hereditary angioedema. Before joining Ionis, Jason was patent counsel for Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and patent manager for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Prior to becoming an attorney, Jason was a research medicinal chemist. Jason received his J.D., cum laude, from Suffolk University Law School, with an Intellectual Property Concentration, his M.A. in Chemistry from San Diego State University, and his B.S. in Biochemistry with an emphasis in Chemistry from the University of California, Riverside.

Matthew is a nucleic acid chemist, biochemist, molecular biologist, and biotechnologist with more than 20 years of experience with leadership roles in academia as a Principal Investigator and head of laboratory and in industry with roles as Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer, and co-founder. He is an expert in engineering nucleic acids, proteins, and other functional oligonucleotides, particularly in developing aptamers for targeting cell surface receptors. Before joining Creyon, Matthew served as the Head of Discovery at Vitrisa Therapeutics. Prior to that, he held a position as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he ran a successful research program for 10 years focused on developing new technologies and approaches using nucleic acid aptamers as well as engineered proteins for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and has 9 issued patents. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry and his M.S. in Chemistry at the University of California San Diego, and went on to obtain his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.

JP is a Medicinal Chemist by training and an experienced scientific leader in pharmaceutical discovery and development with business acumen and more than 20 years of project leadership. JP has extensive experience in design and execution of drug discovery projects from hit to the clinical candidate stage with management of resources in CRO set-up. Before joining Creyon, JP served as research director in Syngene International Ltd (a Biocon company) in Bangalore where he was leading discovery chemistry teams (>250 chemists) working for big and medium pharma and small and virtual biotech collaborations in different domains. At Syngene, he was also involved in setting up and managing the larger collaborations for big pharma by establishing infrastructure, budget, recruiting top talents, other business, and scientific operations. JP has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and has 10 patents. He received his Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and subsequently received his postdoctoral training at Arizona Cancer Center, Tucson in identifying structures and designing drugs for multi-stranded oligonucleotides (G-quadruplexes and i-motifs). At Creyon, JP will be heading all the scientific and other operations in India.

Amy brings 20 years of biotech leadership experience spanning R&D, commercial, product management, and operational roles. Amy’s post-academic career began at DuPont (now Corteva BioSciences), where she managed a portfolio of bioinformatics analysis tools and databases and spearheaded initiatives to apply genomic data directly to ongoing research and operational work. She then spent 12+ years in genomics devices, including time at PacBio and Illumina. While at Illumina, Amy focused on the design, development, and marketing of IVD products that applied DNA sequencing to patient care in prenatal testing and oncology. Amy earned a B.S. in Communication from Cornell University, a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Georgia, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in bioinformatics and genomics at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill.

Steve is an experienced clinical development executive who has served on the executive leadership team of several companies. He joins Creyon from Ultragenyx, where he was the Neurology Therapeutic Area Head who oversaw submission of a BLA for a MPS IIIA gene therapy and initiation of a Phase 3 ASO trial for the treatment of Angelman syndrome. Steve’s previous experience includes CMO roles at Ashvattha, where he oversaw development of clinical-stage ophthalmology and neurology programs; Calibr/Scripps Bioventures, a leading nonprofit translational research center focused on preclinical drug discovery and early-stage clinical research; and Allievex, a rare disease start-up company that he helped spin out of BioMarin Pharmaceuticals. Over the course of his career, Steve has secured more than $2M in grant funding from the NIH and other privately operated organizations. Steve earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in neuroscience from Case Western Reserve University. He is a board-certified child neurologist with experience as a primary investigator while serving as pediatrics and child neurology faculty at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children’s Hospital, Case Western Reserve University/Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, and the University of Pittsburgh/UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.