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leadership

Management and Board of Directors

Our initial management team at Agios is comprised of individuals who have a proven track record of founding and building many respected and successful life sciences companies. The team brings the full range of operating and leadership experience across the critical disciplines — science, technology, business development, marketing and finance necessary to build Agios into a leading biopharmaceutical company.

Agios Pharmaceuticals’ Management

David Schenkein, MD
CEO

Dr. David Schenkein joined Agios in August 2009 as the Chief Executive Officer. Prior to joining Agios, Dr. Schenkein was the Senior Vice President, Clinical Hematology/Oncology at Genentech, Inc. in San Francisco where he was responsible for leading the medical and scientific strategies for their BioOncology portfolio. He has been a Medical Oncologist and Hematologist for over 20 years and while in San Francisco was an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Medicine Oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Prior to joining Genentech, Dr. Schenkein spent 17 years in academic and clinical medicine as an attending physician in Hematology Oncology at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, where he was an associate professor and held the position of director of the Cancer Center. From 2001- 2006, he worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals where he served as the Senior Vice President of Clinical Research, overseeing the clinical development of Velcade, a first-in class cancer therapy now approved to treat multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Dr. Schenkein holds a BA in Chemistry from Wesleyan University and an MD from the State University of New York Upstate Medical School.

Duncan Higgons
Chief Operating Officer

Duncan Higgons joined Agios in May 2009 as the Chief Operating Officer. Prior to joining Agios, Mr. Higgons worked at Archemix Corporation from 2006 – 2009 where he most recently served as President, Chief Operating Officer and interim C.E.O. Prior to Archemix, he worked as the Chief Commercial Officer at TransForm Pharmaceuticals which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson Company. Mr. Higgons has also previously held positions at Alkermes, Inc. including Senior Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, and at Eli Lilly & Co. where he served in a variety of senior sales and marketing functions, and at Baxter International. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from King’s College University of London, and an MSc. Econ. from London Business School.

Shin-San Michael Su, Ph.D.
Interim Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Su brings more than seventeen years of organization, project management and scientific experience in the biotechnology industry. Most recently, he served as General Director and Vice President of the Biomedical Engineering Research Laboratory (BEL) at ITRI in Taiwan. Prior, he spent 14 years in a number of roles, concluding his tenure as Program Executive and Vice President of the Novartis Kinase Collaboration for Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

Agios Pharmaceuticals’ Board of Directors

Bob Nelsen – ARCH Venture Partners
Doug Cole – Flagship Ventures
Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D. – Co-Founder
Kevin Starr – Third Rock Ventures

Founders

With seed capital from ARCH Venture Partners and Flagship Ventures, Agios was founded with preeminent scientists that have pioneered the field of cancer metabolism, having made numerous advances in our understanding of the how diseased cells — in particular cancer cells — have adapted to use more nutrients than normal cells to promote their survival and growth. Together, these leaders drive the development of novel therapeutics against critical metabolic pathways for the treatment of cancers.

Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D.
Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
Director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts
and Sciences

Dr. Cantley is a world leader in the understanding of the biochemical
pathways linking cancer and energy metabolism. Key contributions include:

• Discovering the phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K) signaling pathway.



• Characterizing the mechanism by which PI3K is activated by growth factors and oncogenes, and elucidating pathways downstream of PI3K, including the AKT/PKB signaling pathway



• Pioneering the application of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) for studying small molecule cell membrane transport



• Discovering pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) as a “hub” to integrate growth factor signaling and aerobic glycolysis, a new evolution to the understanding of the Warburg effect

Tak W. Mak, Ph.D.
Professor of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto
Director, Advanced Medical Discovery Institute
Director, The Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research
Foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Society

Dr. Mak is a preeminent researcher of the biology of the immune system, the biology of apoptosis and the pathogenesis of cancer. Key contributions include:

• Discovering the T-Cell receptor.



• Characterizing the tumorigenic functions of the tumor suppressor protein p53, and the kinase Chk2.



• Identifying CPT1C as a tumor-specific gene product that plays an important role in the utilization of fatty acids as an alternative energy source of cancer cells.

Craig B. Thompson, M.D.
Director, Abramson Cancer Center
Chair of the Department of Cancer Biology, University of Pennsylvania
Member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Institute of Medicine

Dr. Thompson is an authority in the study of how genes regulate apoptosis and metabolism and investigates their application in treating cancer. Key contributions include:

• Elucidating the role of the Bcl-2 family of oncogenes role in regulating cell survival.



• Identifying the roles of aerobic glycolysis, fatty acid synthesis and autophagy in the metabolic adaptation by cancer cells as part of carcinogenesis.



• Proposing the concept that most oncogenes and tumor suppressors evolved to regulate cellular metabolism.

Shin-San Michael Su, Ph.D.
Co-Founder and Interim Chief Scientific Officer, Agios

Dr. Su brings more than seventeen years of organization, project management and scientific experience in the biotechnology industry. Most recently, he served as General Director and Vice President of the Biomedical Engineering Research Laboratory (BEL) at ITRI in Taiwan. Prior, he spent 14 years in a number of roles, concluding his tenure as Program Executive and Vice President of the Novartis Kinase Collaboration for Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

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