To help us orient our long-term decisions and strategy, we rely on an experienced and dependable board of seasoned industry professionals, investors and health care specialists:
Shannon A. Fairbanks
Shannon Fairbanks is a venture capital investor with a distinguished career spanning U.S. government service, a decade of private equity investing and service on significant non-profit boards. Over the last 20 years she has founded and led The Fairbanks Investment Fund.
Currently Shannon is Chair of Invectys, Inc., whose spin-out from the Pasteur Institute, Paris, she co-led and co-financed; and Chair of the Board of ProteoNic, a biopharma spin-out from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Shannon was formerly Executive Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board; served in the first term White House domestic policy staff for President Ronald Reagan, and was a Presidential appointee of President George H.W. Bush to the board of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC).
Among her numerous non-profit Boards, Shannon has served for 10 years on the Board of the French American Foundation, in both New York and Paris, and, currently, is on the Board of The Fund for the Endowment of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State.
Shannon and her late husband, Ambassador Richard M. Fairbanks III, have two sons.
Maurizio Zanetti, M.D.
Maurizio Zanetti is currently Professor of Medicine, since 1993, at the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the Laboratory of Immunology at the UCSD Moores Cancer Center. Among his numerous accomplishments, in 2003 he launched the first transgenic cell-based therapeutic vaccine for cancer. Over his long career, he has served on numerous reviewing panels for the NIH, Nation Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and others.
Dr. Zanetti obtained his M.D. degree (summa cum laude) from the University of Padova (Italy) in 1974 and soon after became a Visiting Fellow at the Hôpital Necker/University of Paris VI (France) where he trained in clinical transplantation under Professor Jean Hamburger, who performed the first successful organ transplant into humans in 1952.
Dr. Zanetti is named inventor in numerous patents in fields such as antibody engineering, methods to program immunity using transgenic lymphocytes etc. In 2000 he was the first to report the immunogenic properties of telomerase reverse transcription (TERT) in cancer patients, reported in PNAS and highlighted by The Lancet as a major scientific/medical accomplishment.
Dr. Zanetti has been an advisor to Invectys since its founding and currently serves both on its Board of Directors and also as the Director of the Company’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Pierre Langlade-Demoyen, M.D., Ph.D.,
Distinguished Board Advisor and Founder
Pierre Langlade-Demoyen, MD, PhD has recently returned to the scientific company he founded as the Distinguished Scientific Advisor to the board of Invectys. Prior to founding Invectys, SAS in 2010, Pierre spent 20 years at Institut Pasteur, Paris, including 10 years as Head of Laboratory in the Virology Department where he pioneered the T cell responses to telomerase reverse transcriptase in cancer patients, paving the way for the scientific beginnings of Invectys.
Subsequently, under his leadership as CEO of the company, the Invectys scientific team developed a First in Class breakthrough advance for a CAR-T treatment for solid tumor cancers by targeting the HLAG molecule which is expressed by multiple cancers. This advance has now entered an FDA-approved Phase 1 clinical trial led by the superb clinical development team at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the largest cancer treatment center in the U.S.
Dr. Langlade is the author of over 70 scientific publications in the field of immunology. He recently recovered successfully from quadruple open heart surgery and is gallantly back as a Distinguished Advisor to the Invectys board.
Ivor Elfiri, Ph.D.
Dr. Ivor Elrifi is CEO of Tiziana Life Sciences. Prior to that, he was the global chair of Cooley LLP’s patent counseling and prosecution practice group. His practice included patent prosecution, litigation, arbitration, licensing and transactional work with a focus on novel therapeutic treatments, biotechnology, genetics, diagnostics, biomarkers, drug formulations and medical devices. Dr. Elrifi counseled clients worldwide in developing and implementing patent strategies and in the prosecution, licensing and enforcement of patents. He has extensive experience in advising clients on transactional work and regularly counseled clients with respect to investments, mergers and acquisitions, including acquisition transactions involving Novartis, Eli Lilly, Biogen and Astellas.. He also advised plaintiffs and defendants in patent litigation and arbitration cases.
Before joining Cooley, Dr. Elrifi was co-chair and section manager of Mintz Levin’s intellectual property practice and a member of the firm’s management committee. Earlier in his career, he served as patent counsel and then general counsel and vice president for CytoTherapeutics in Providence, Rhode Island, and as patent counsel to Modex Therapeutics in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has spoken at numerous international conferences, and he has written numerous articles for leading legal and scientific publications.
Dr. Elrifi is an elected member of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, a global honorary society of attorneys, judges, law faculty and legal scholars. He received his J.D. from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in 1989 and Ph.D. from Queen’s University at Kingston, Biology in 1986, and is admitted to practice law in California, Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Canada.
Jake Kushner, M.D.
Dr. Jake Kushner is President and Chief Executive Officer of Invectys, Inc. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Dr. Kushner completed his MD at Albany Medical College, pediatric residency at Brown, pediatric endocrinology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and a research fellowship at the Joslin Diabetes Center/Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Harvard Medical School. He then held full-time medical school faculty appointments at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and lastly Baylor College of Medicine, where he was Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology. Dr. Kushner is an internationally renowned type 1 diabetes researcher with extensive previous NIH and JDRF funding. Dr. Kushner is the author of over 70 scientific publications. He has served on numerous review and advisory panels for industry, the NIH (DDK-B study section chair), and foundations including the JDRF and the ADA. Dr. Kushner has received numerous honors, including awards from the March of Dimes, the Charles H. Hood Foundation, and the NIH, elected membership to the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the Society of Pediatric Research, and the American Society for Clinical Research, and served as elected President of the Society of Pediatric Research.
Dr. Kushner has extensive experience in biotechnology and biopharma, having served a variety of advisory and full time roles since 2008 including roles for Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Lexicon, and Sanofi. After leaving academia in 2018 he managed medical investments for McNair Interests, a private equity firm in Houston, Texas, rising to Vice President of Medical. At McNair Interests Dr. Kushner managed a $160MM portfolio of privately held life-science investments. Portfolio companies focused on cancer immunotherapy (Invectys and Immatics), diabetes treatments (Xeris), and advanced medical devices (surgical robotics, interventional radiology, cancer diagnostics, aesthetic technologies, glucose sensing for type 1 diabetes, and home laboratory testing).
Dr. Kushner has a 6 year history with Invectys, having served as Observer for the Invectys Board of Directors starting in 2018. He was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of Invectys in April 2023.
