RDiscovery’s team includes experienced professionals with deep expertise in the life sciences, biomedical industry, business, finance, and law. Our community thrives by championing collaboration, diversity, and unity.
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Taro is Founder and Managing Partner at Remiges Ventures. He has over 31 years of business experience including 21 years in start-up financing and company creation in the life science area. At Remiges, Taro is engaged in technology sourcing, company creation, leading negotiation for investments and serving as director for the Remiges’ portfolio companies including Inflectis, Omeicos, Imel and Tranquis. Prior to establishing Remiges, Taro managed the biopharma investment team and investment portfolio at divisions of Mitsui & Co., Ltd. Taro holds a B.E. in Polymer Chemistry, Kyoto University and MBA from European University.
Taka has over 20 years of business development and venture investment experience. At Remiges, Taka is engaged in technology sourcing, company creation, leading negotiation for investments, and serving as director for the Remiges’ portfolio companies including Digestome, Cyrano and Immunis, and as president of Digestome Japan. During his tenure at Mitsui, he held several positions as a board member, in acting management roles in newly created companies, and raising capital at globally diversified portfolio companies. Taka holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Tokyo.
Aki has more than 20 years of experience in search and evaluation, business development and venture investment. At Remiges, Aki is engaged in technology sourcing, leading negotiation for investments and serving as director for the Remiges’ portfolio companies including KisoJi, Phost’In and Qinotto. Prior to joining Remiges, he was at Ora as Vice President of Corporate Development. Aki worked at Daiichi-Sankyo for more than 13 years with focusing on identifying opportunities from discovery to late clinical stage. Aki holds a BSc. in Material Sciences from Tokyo Univ. of Agriculture and Technology, MSc. from San Diego State University and M.B.A. from the UCSD.
Kazu has over 20 years of experience in drug discovery, licensing, and search and evaluation. At Remiges, Kazu is engaged in technology sourcing, company creation, leading negotiation for investments and serving as director for the Remiges’ portfolio companies including Kupando and Restore Vision. Prior to joining Remiges, he worked at Nippon Boheringer Ingelheim for search and evaluation of Japanese innovative seeds. Kazu holds MSc from graduate school of agriculture in Kyoto University and PhD from graduate school of medical sciences in Nagoya City University.
Hans is an internationally known stem cell expert and serial entrepreneur who has led therapy development for cancer, spinal cord injury, immune disorders, motor neuron disease, retinal disease, and infectious disease. He has founded 5 successful biotechnology companies. He and his teams have led 17 successful clinical trials. Previously, he was Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, where he co-founded and directed the $77 million Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center. He was a founding advisor of the California stem cell initiative that resulted in the $8.5 billion CIRM stem cell fund and has been a long-time advisor to several governments on biomedical policy.
Walter has over 28 years experience in business development, healthcare consulting and venture investment. Walter spent 12 years in venture investments with Mitsui Ventures, during which time he held positions as a board member or observer in 10 portfolio companies. Prior to Mitsui Walter spent 6 years with Cambridge Pharma Consultancy (an IMS Health company) advising on global pharmaceutical pricing, reimbursement and market access issues to leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Prior to Cambridge, Walter spent 8 years in Tokyo in various roles with Genzyme Japan and SRL, Inc. Walter holds a AB in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and MBA from Cornell University.
Hiroshi is a Chief Medical Officer at RDiscovery and has over 30 years of clinical practice and basic medical research experience in academia, as well as drug development, marketing, and business development in the pharmaceutical industry in Japan, Asia Pacific, and the US. After 12 years of clinical and research experience, Hiroshi spent 18 years at Pfizer, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb in R&D, marketing, medical affairs, and business development. Before RDiscovery, Hiroshi was in charge of clinical development for innovative medicine at Luzsana Biotechnology in Princeton, NJ. Hiroshi holds an MD and PhD from Jichi Medical University School of Medicine, an MBA from Kenichi Ohmae Graduate School of Business, and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.
Satoshi studied transplantation immunology at Harvard University and returned to Japan in 1999. While engaged in clinical practice at Saitama Medical University, he succeeded for the first time in the world in regenerating failing hearts by bone marrow cell transplantation for artificial heart therapy in 2005. From 2008, he supported the program of artificial heart therapy and heart transplantation at the Department of Cardiac Surgery, University of Tokyo for four years. In 2011, he took up a professorship at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, where he is engaged in basic medical research focusing on organelles that support the cellular basis. In 2017, he established mitochondrial genome replacement technology, and in 2019, he participated as a Founder in the establishment of IMEL Biotherapeutics Inc. using this technology to treat mitochondrial diseases, a rare intractable disease. In 2021, he became CSO with the establishment of IMEL Japan and is developing research for novel cancer therapies; in 2023, he became Scientific Advisor to RDiscovery and is conducting research to establish organelle therapies.
Shinobu graduated from Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Osaka University, in 1994 and obtained Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Osaka University. After engaging in basic research, in the field of molecular biology and immunology (Innate Immunity) at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Toronto and RIKEN Yokohama Institute, Shinobu has been involved in various open innovation activities especially at the Drug Discovery Stage in global pharmaceutical companies, Bayer, Abbvie and Boehringer Ingelheim. Since 2019, Shinobu moved to Kyoto University to accelerate academia-industry partnership by using her strong academia and industry background.
Stuart Hwang, Ph.D. is a venture partner and serial entrepreneur with over 25 years in corporate development including licensing, M&A, strategic alliances, portfolio prioritization and fundraising. He has acquired broad scientific and operational experience across multiple modalities like small molecules, biologics, and ADCs in oncology, neurology, and inflammation. Prior to Remiges, he was a cofounder and Chief Business Officer of Vincerx, building its pipeline and taking it public on the NASDAQ in 2020. Prior to Vincerx, he was active in company creation as President of Digestome Therapeutics and as an advisor to multiple early stage biotechs pioneering first-in-class therapies to address unmet patient needs including T-Cure, Quadriga, and Pellepharm. Earlier, Dr Hwang led business development at Supergen where he closed an epigenetic R&D strategic alliance with GSK, M&A with Astex Tx (resulting in Astex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ASTX)) and established the groundwork for an M&A with Otuska Pharmaceuticals. Earlier in his career, he has led various drug R&D efforts from discovery to clinical translation and validation and in introducing new technologies in drug development such as deep sequencing, gene discovery and transcriptional profiling (Agilent, Celera, Cor Therapeutics). Dr. Hwang is an inventor on several patents, authored numerous publications and presented at global scientific and business conferences. Dr. Hwang received a Biology BA with High Honors at UC Sta Cruz and a Ph.D. in Endocrinology at UC Berkeley, Cancer Research Lab under an NCI Fellowship. He completed his post-doctoral training in Cancer Genomics at UC San Francisco & LBNL as a DOE Distinguished Human Genome Postdoctoral Fellow.
Kyoko has over 18 years business experience in drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, patent practice at a patent firm and tech transfer at Technology Licensing Organization (TLO). Prior to joining Remiges, she worked at Tohoku Techno Arch, Sendai Japan based TLO with its primary business for technology licensing from universities and performed technology evaluation, patent application and prosecution, license contract negotiation mainly in the biotech area. She holds a MSc in Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Science from the Tohoku University and a M.B.A from Graduate School of Management, GLOBIS University.
Atsushi has been engaged in research and development of DDS technology for nucleic acid drugs for 16 years at a bio-venture company and experienced a series of processes from basic research and development to clinical trials for the creation of nucleic acid drugs. He was mainly in charge of pharmacodynamics in non-clinical studies. In addition, he managed PD marker measurement in clinical trials.
Kanako has about 10 years of experience of applied biotech research at a major electronics manufacturer. After that, she has been engaged in basic research work at a drug discovery venture companies for over 8 years. While serving as a group leader of new compound development at NapaJen pharma, she joined RDiscovery since 2021.She holds a PhD in Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences from Ochanomizu University.
Masako has 7 years of experience in drug discovery venture NapaJen pharma. She belongs to the development research department and promotes it as a lab manager. She was in charge of in vitro experiments on pharmacological effects in nonclinical studies. Since 2021, he has been engaged in drug discovery research experiments for R Discovery.
