Hanadie Yousef, PhD
Co-Founder and CEO of Juvena Therapeutics, USA Dr. Hanadie Yousef is a scientist, aging biology expert, and the co-founder and CEO of Juvena Therapeutics, a biopharma startup developing protein-based therapeutics to promote tissue regeneration and increase healthspan to prevent, reverse, and cure degenerative diseases. For over 18 years, Dr. Yousef performed biomedical research in both academia and industry. She studied mechanisms that underly brain and muscle aging, including adult stem cell decline, inflammation, and fibrosis associated with aging and multiple degenerative diseases. She elucidated age-associated protein signaling changes systemically and locally in tissues that lead to loss of tissue homeostasis and the onset of degenerative diseases. Dr. Yousef’s discoveries led to several novel drug targets and methods for tissue rejuvenation. Her research was supported by multiple fellowships and grants that include the NIH, NSF, and SPARK and has led to numerous issued and pending patents. Her research has been highlighted in high-profile publications including Nature Medicine, Cell Reports, and others on mechanisms of aging and methods for tissue rejuvenation, particularly in the brain and muscle. Dr. Yousef’s key discoveries laid the foundation of Juvena Therapeutics’ venture-backed, drug discovery and preclinical development platform. Since Juvena’s launch in mid-2018, Dr. Yousef and her team have translated those key discoveries into a proprietary pro-regenerative protein library and validated their potency on multiple tissue types, with several issued and pending patents. They built a machine learning-enhanced drug discovery and preclinical development platform to enable a pipeline of drug candidates for multiple age-related and rare diseases. The platform has enabled the identification, extensive preclinical validation, and lead optimization of 3 novel drug candidates that enhance muscle regeneration, function, and reduce frailty, with several additional discovery candidates for degenerative diseases. Dr. Yousef earned her B.S. in Chemistry with a Spanish minor, summa cum laude from Carnegie Mellon University, a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley as an NSF graduate research fellow, pursued a 5-year postdoctoral fellowship in Neurology at Stanford School of Medicine as an NIH fellow and SPARK scholar, and conducted research and development for Regeneron and Genentech. |