Dr. Rosana Kapeller joined GV as the first-ever life sciences entrepreneur-in-residence in 2018. A brilliant scientist, she theorized that the dark genome and the repeatome within – repetitive sequences of nucleic acids derived from the integration of viruses into the human genome throughout evolution – could hold valuable clues for drug discovery and lead to essential new medicines to treat a variety of diseases. She chose GV as her starting point to incubate the idea into a company, ROME Therapeutics.

Rosana and her team at ROME are developing therapies targeting the repeatome to transform how we approach oncology and autoimmune diseases. She explains that the ROME team is focused on “expanding the therapeutics pipeline and building, what we call, the repeatomics platform to decode the repeatome. Our aim is to add a new layer to precision medicine.”

Rosana has over 25 years of scientific leadership and entrepreneurial experience. She was the founding Chief Scientific Officer of Nimbus Therapeutics, where she led the company’s initiative to apply advanced computational technologies to the design and development of novel therapeutics. Rosana’s vision and leadership were instrumental in the discovery of the ACC inhibitor for NASH, acquired by Gilead. Previously, Rosana served as co-founder and VP of Research at Aileron Therapeutics. Early in her career, she spent ten years at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and spent time as a consultant for Third Rock Ventures and Atlas Venture.

Rosana serves on the Board of Directors of Schrödinger and Cedilla Therapeutics and is a Key Advisory Board Member for Harvard’s Business School’s Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship. Rosana earned her M.D. from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Tufts University.