Leading the Next CRISPR Revolution

Dr. David Baram co-founded Emendo and has served as its President & CEO since that time. Under his leadership, David has taken Emendo from the pre-seed stage through multiple financing rounds and a successful acquisition in 2020. Prior to Emendo, David co-founded multiple biotech companies and a seed-stage incubator in which he was responsible for technological innovation, entrepreneurship and financing. David lead the negotiation and execution of a broad range of deals including mergers & acquisitions, out-licensing, and in-licensing, fundraising over $500  million in private and public rounds, and serving as a member of the board of directors for several biotech companies. David is an inventor of over thirty patents. He completed his Ph.D. studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science under Nobel Laureate Dr. Ada Yonath.

Dr. Todd Wider serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Medical Officer at Emendo. Todd has served as a consultant to numerous entities in the biotechnology space. He is an attending surgeon at Mount Sinai West in New York City. Todd graduated from Princeton University, Phi Beta Kappa with High Honors, and received his MD from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Todd completed his surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery residencies at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and did additional fellowships at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the University of Miami in complex oncologic microsurgery and craniofacial surgery.

Rachel Diamant co-founded Emendo and serves as Chief Business Officer. Rachel is responsible for Emendo’s IP strategy, which she designed to generate an extensive patent portfolio to cover various novel aspects of the technology and products while also expertly navigating the IP space. In her role as CBO, Rachel also builds Emendo’s pipeline of clinical programs and the academic and industrial collaborations and partnerships for the pre/clinical development of Emendo’s selected indications and genomic targets. Rachel has extensive experience in constructing IP strategy that is designed to serve business objectives based on careful competitive landscaping to reduce risks and maximize value. In the private market, Rachel has been a consultant for numerous biotechnology and medical device companies and accumulated extensive expertise in IP mining, strategic portfolio design and hands-on portfolio management. Rachel holds an MSc in Neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a Biotechnology Engineering degree from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

Dr. Asael Herman is Emendo’s Chief Operating Officer, having joined Emendo in 2017 with nearly two decades of experience in academia and the biotech industry. Asael is responsible for Emendo’s preclinical and clinical development, while in his previous role as Emendo’s CTO he managed Emendo’s scientific team and was responsible for the company’s platform development. Asael joined Emendo from Smartzyme Biopharma where he was Vice President of R&D. Prior to that, as Vice President at Biolojic Design he developed therapeutic antibodies. Asael holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University and further trained in protein engineering with Prof. Dan Tawfik at the Weizmann Institute and Prof. Larry Loeb at the University of Washington.

Dr. Lior Izhar co-founded Emendo and serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Lior has been a major contributor shaping Emendo’s vision since inception and is responsible for laying the scientific foundation of the company. Lior leads Emendo’s technology innovation, discovery and computational activities. An expert in DNA damage repair, Lior brings extensive experience in this field as well as in the development and implementation of high-resolution screen-oriented assays and methodologies. Lior conducted his postdoctoral studies in Steve Elledge’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where he developed and performed screens to identify novel components of the DNA damage response in human cells. Lior holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is the principal author of several scientific publications in high impact journals and is an inventor in all company foundational patents.

Oran Mordechai is Emendo’s Chief Financial Officer. Oran is responsible for all areas of the company’s finances, having managed the company’s finance department since 2017. Oran’s business experience includes corporate finance, international corporate tax, mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings. Prior to Emendo, Oran founded Insight Finance, a boutique CFO and financial services consulting firm focused on the needs of technology companies. Oran also worked at Ernst & Young for 13 years in several positions, including his last role as senior manager in the high-tech practice, leading and managing diverse client accounts, including start-ups through exits, domestic, multinational and publicly traded companies. Oran holds a BA in Economics, Management and Accounting from the College of Management and an MBA in Finance and Financial Management Services from Tel-Aviv University and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Dr. Rafi Emmanuel is the Executive VP of Research & Development. In this role, Rafi leads the proof of concept and nuclease technology departments and supervises the preclinical studies of the Severe Congenital Neutropenia program. Upon joining Emendo in 2016, Rafi established the proof of concept department where the feasibility and safety of the therapeutic strategies are demonstrated both at the genomic and functional levels. Rafi has over 10 years of research experience in the field of transcription and translation regulation of genes and holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Rafi’s research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Rivka Dikstein. Rafi completed his postdoctoral training at Tel Aviv University at Prof. Dan Peer’s laboratory, and he was also a senior intern at the Weizmann Institute of Science at the laboratory of Prof. Yardena Samuels.

Michal Avidan Gartzman is Emendo’s VP Operations, having led Emendo’s operations department since its establishment. Michal works in partnership with the executive team to support Emendo’s strategic goals, providing cutting-edge facilities, the implementation of management technologies and the optimization of laboratory management processes. As a senior operations executive, Michal brings strong management capabilities with a broad industry background, earned throughout 18 years of leadership positions in the hi-tech, healthcare and biotech sectors. Michal has wide-ranging experience including operational roles for large hi-tech vendors, SCM and PMO. Michal holds an Executive MBA from Bar-Ilan University.

Liat Zadikov is the VP of People at Emendo. Liat has built Emendo’s human resources department to align with the company’s organizational and HR strategies and support business growth. Liat is responsible for all areas of employee engagement, talent management, and successful hiring. Liat brings to Emendo a strong background in initiating and implementing HR strategies and programs, with expertise in transformation and change management, executive leadership coaching and organizational development. Liat has experience in multi-national and culturally dynamic environments, gained from roles she held at both private and public global technology companies, ClickSoftware and ClickTale. Liat holds an M.A., Social Sciences for Human Resource Managers from Tel Aviv University.

Dr. Liat Rockah is the Vice President of Nuclease Technologies. Since joining Emendo in 2016, Liat has been responsible for leading the discovery, characterization and engineering of CRISPR-based novel nucleases. Liat directs the optimization of Emendo’s nucleases to achieve gene-editing based composition solutions that successfully target a desired indication, by using enzyme engineering and directed evolution and computational-driven design, such as machine-learning. Liat brings more than 15 years of experience and knowledge in the evolution of various mechanisms of the arms race of bacterial immune systems: the Toxin-Antitoxin, Restriction-modification, and CRISPR-Cas systems. Liat holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Protein Engineering from the Weizmann Institute with Prof. Dan Tawfik and further has been awarded post-doctoral fellowships with Prof. Ron Milo in synthetic metabolic pathway engineering.

Dr. Keren Farin is Emendo’s VP of IP and Pipeline Development. Keren is responsible for developing and implementing Emendo’s patent strategy, managing its IP portfolio and leading the development of Emendo’s pipeline of clinical programs. Keren is a patent attorney with extensive experience in the field of intellectual property and business intelligence. Prior to Emendo, Keren served as an intellectual property manager in several MedTech and Biomed companies and Tech transfer units. Keren holds a Ph.D. in Life Sciences from Tel-Aviv University and a B.Sc., Magna Cum Laude, in Biotechnology Engineering from Ben-Gurion University.

Dr. Roy Sirkis is Emendo’s VP of Protein Development. In this role, Roy is responsible for the development of protein production technologies, the generation of protein pipeline capabilities within Emendo that are on par with industry standards, and the development of novel capabilities such as high throughput protein screening. Roy brings over fifteen years of broad experience in the field of biochemistry, protein production and process scale up. Previously, Roy was the biochemistry lead at Monsanto, conducting the development and production of proteins from lab to field scales. Roy holds a Ph.D. in Structural Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science, as well as an MBA from the College of Management.

Dr. Idit Buch is VP of Computational Biology at Emendo. Upon joining the company, Idit established the computational group that is now initiating novel visionary computational projects, as well as providing computational algorithms and pipelines for all R&D scaling endeavors. As part of this initiation, Idit is responsible for building a computational infrastructure with unlimited scalability that enables the company’s fast growing computational needs. Idit is a computational biologist with many years of experience from both the hi-tech and biotech industries. Idit holds a Ph.D. in Structural Biology from Tel-Aviv University, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Ruth Nussinov and Prof. Haim Wolfson. Idit also holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science focused on Machine Learning and a B.A. in Computer Science and the Academy of Music as a pianist, all from Tel-Aviv University.

Dr. Ira Gotliv is VP of Pre-Clinical Research at Emendo. In this role, Ira oversees the Pre-Clinical Research department which is responsible for evaluation and early development of potential products in multiple indications. Ira has 8 years of experience in the Pharma and Medical device industries in leading positions. Ira has extensive knowledge in cell biology and biochemistry with more than 16 years of experience in research. Prior to joining Emendo, Ira was a Preclinical Manager at Nano-Ghost, responsible for the preclinical development of an MSC-derived delivery platform for oncology indications, as well as Associate Director at Pi-Therapeutics, where she was responsible for developing a small molecule for treatment of Hematological malignancies from early discovery to pre-IND submission. Ira holds a Ph.D. and a Post Doc. in Biological Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Ella Segal is Emendo’s Head of Analytics. In this role, Ella is responsible for the establishment and development of many different analytical pipelines to support the broad molecular activity in Emendo. Ella has a decade of extensive experience in developing analytical assays and different NGS tools. Prior to joining Emendo, she led the management of a large research group in Tel Aviv University and was engaged in many different research projects. Ella holds an MSc in Biotechnology from Tel Aviv University, Israel, where she conducted research under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Mevarech.