Greg Verdine: Becoming His Father’s Hands at Age Five — Spending a Lifetime Building “Hands” for the Impossible

A Harvard Professor Who Takes on “Undruggable” Targets Is Coming to Shanghai / Faced with the “Impossible”, He Prefers to Get His Hands-On First

Author’s Note

This profile is based on a series of conversations with Greg Verdine and his wife, Circe Liu, following BiG’s introduction to them at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. We explored his early life, scientific career, and experience building biotechnology companies.

Greg’s story offers a personal perspective on the persistence and creativity behind scientific entrepreneurship. We’re pleased to welcome him to Shanghai this October as a keynote speaker at the 12th BiG IMPACT Annual Conference.

On June 10, 2026, Nasdaq hosted the largest-ever IPO in biotech history. The founder of the bell-ringing company is a 67-year-old emeritus professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He has founded more than ten companies over his lifetime, yet he says everything he does traces back to an event that happened when he was five-years-old.

On His Birthday, the Gift He Had Waited 26 Years Finally Arrived

June 10, 2026, New York. Parabilis Medicines priced its IPO at USD 20 per share for 33.5 million shares, raising USD 670 million. Surpassing Kailera and the historic Moderna offering, this stands as the largest biotech IPO on record. On its first trading day, its share price surged 58 %, giving the company a market capitalization above USD 3.7 billion.

That exact day marked Greg Verdine’s 67th birthday.

Dating back to 2000, when he “stapled” the first short peptide inside his Harvard laboratory, this birthday present had taken him 26 years to arrive.

Within the next two-plus months, fate delivered two further major gifts: one of his founded companies completed a USD 263 million financing round, and an anti-cancer drug developed along his technical pathway won FDA approval. 2026 became Greg Verdine’s “Year of Deliverables”.

To understand these three thunderclap milestones, we must travel back to the pine-barren wilderness of New Jersey.

His Father’s Hands

Verdine grew up in a working-class household in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens region. When he was five-years-old, his father Richard suffered an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down.

For a family that lived by manual labor, this was catastrophic. But his father refused to give up mechanics and manufacturing. Having lost functional use of his own hands, he enlisted young Greg to become his hands. Starting at age 7, Verdine regularly skipped school to work alongside his father on ambitious engineering projects: boat-building.

He would later recall that at age 10, following his father’s instructions, he built his first boat — a roughly 5-metre-long small craft. The father-and-son project list stretched far beyond boat-building: they fitted a wheelchair lift onto the family minivan, rebuilt an engine for a Chevrolet Corvette, and later even restored a 42-foot Chris-Craft yacht.

Many years afterwards, Verdine realized those days had taught him lessons no classroom could deliver. There were no instruction manuals, no proven mature solutions. When problems arose, you had to think while you worked. He calls this improvisation.

Almost nobody in that family expected to attend university. His father finished only ninth grade; his brothers mostly went into blue-collar trades. Upon graduating high school, Verdine planned to go straight into work — until a college counsellor saw his SAT scores, helped him apply to Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and secured him a scholarship.

Fateful forks in life often hide within small incidents like this.

An English-Major Student Finds His Childhood Inside an Organic-Chemistry Laboratory

When he entered university, Verdine majored in English. What truly captivated him was the organic-chemistry laboratory. In his own words: taking molecules apart and reassembling them for your own intended purpose gave him that familiar joy he had felt in childhood, building boats with his father by turning piles of components into seaworthy vessels.

From there he plunged into the interdisciplinary space between chemistry and biology. 1986: PhD from Columbia University researching interactions between the anti-cancer drug mitomycin C and DNA. Subsequent postdoctoral work at MIT and Harvard Medical School. 1988: At age 29, he was appointed professor at Harvard. 1994: Aged 35, he earned tenure, becoming the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry in nearly 50 years. Back then, that department held 21 faculty members including five Nobel laureates, and no new tenured faculty had been added for half a century. He later held the Erving Professorship and is now emeritus.

At Harvard, he chose a problem other researchers avoided.

“Undruggable”? He Responds: That Is Unacceptable

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry accepted a default “common wisdom”: large numbers of disease-relevant proteins inside the human body were “undruggable”.

Two main reasons explained this label. First: these proteins sit inside cells. Small-molecule drugs can cross cell membranes, but large-molecule antibody therapeutics cannot penetrate past the cell wall. Second: the surface of these proteins is smooth, lacking binding pockets for small-molecule molecules to attach to.

The scientific community labelled these proteins and walked away. Verdine reacted with frustration:

“We fully understand what drives a patient’s cancer, yet we say ‘oh that cannot be solved’? That is completely unacceptable. Think of all those patients! Move faster!”

His solution drew directly from the hands-on methodology he learned boat-building alongside his father in childhood: If you cannot reach it, improvise and build a hand.

First Hand: Putting “Staples” onto Short Peptides

Protein-protein recognition is frequently mediated by alpha-helical structural segments. Verdine’s idea was to isolate these functionally-active helical fragments as short amino-acid chains. These short fragments might retain target-recognition capability while gaining potential to cross cell membranes.

One critical obstacle: once separated from the full-length parent protein, short peptides lose rigid structure; they become floppy and are readily degraded by proteases.

His straightforward solution: use a hydrocarbon linker to “staple” two positions of the peptide chain together, locking it into a stable helical conformation. Stapled peptides were born.

In 2000, Verdine’s team systematically demonstrated the full-hydrocarbon-linker method for stabilizing alpha-helices in JACS. In 2004, working together with Loren Walensky and others, they published work in Science showing stapled peptides mimicking the BH3 domain of the BCL-2 protein family could enter cells, bind target proteins, and exhibit anti-tumor activity in leukemia cells and mouse xenograft tumor models.

This research pathway was far from smooth sailing. ALRN-6924, the first stabilized-helix stapled peptide to enter clinical trials, was discontinued in 2023 after failing to meet primary endpoints in a Phase Ib chemotherapy-protection trial for breast cancer. To this day, no stapled-peptide-derived drug has reached approval. Verdine did not turn back. Three early-stage grants totaling USD 450 000 from Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator pushed forward proof-of-concept work. In 2015, this accumulated knowledge spawned Fog Pharma — today’s Parabilis Medicines — where stapled-peptide technology evolved into the Helicon stabilized-helix-peptide platform.

Its lead asset zolucatetide (FOG-001) directly targets the historically-labelled “undruggable” β-catenin, blocking its interaction with TCF transcription factors. In November 2025, the FDA granted it Fast-Track designation. In clinical trials for desmoid-tumor patients, 100 % of subjects achieved meaningful tumor shrinkage and the objective response rate hit 74 %.

June 10, 2026 was the day this company rang the Nasdaq opening bell.

Second Hand: Finding a “Chaperone Protein” for Small-Molecule Molecules

RAS is arguably the most famous “undruggable” oncology target. Its surface is as smooth as a billiard ball, and it binds its natural substrate with extremely high affinity. For decades it defeated countless medicinal-chemistry efforts. Over 90 % of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas carry activating RAS mutations.

Again, Verdine drew inspiration from nature. Fungi and bacteria long ago invented “molecular glues”: natural-product molecules such as rapamycin and FK506. These agents first bind intracellular chaperone proteins, and then use that chaperone “hand” to grasp the intended target protein.

In 2012, Verdine founded Warp Drive Bio to realize this concept. How much capital did it raise? USD 125 million; Sanofi funded half of the Series A round. Yet what tangible assets did he hold at that moment?

“No intellectual-property rights. Nothing at all. It was only an idea — that we could drug RAS using molecular-glue technology. I had absolutely no idea how to accomplish it.”

Some people told him: “This is crazy. It will never succeed.” His reply: Indeed, stacking an historically-undruggable target together with an unprecedented therapeutic modality means compounded risk.

In 2018, Revolution Medicines acquired Warp Drive Bio for approximately USD 69 million, bringing its tri-complex platform in-house. Drug molecules first bind cyclophilin A (CypA), which acts as the “hand” to capture activated RAS(ON). A ternary complex forms, blocking oncogenic signaling.

Why the Platform Ended-Up Inside Revolution Medicines

Warp Drive Bio, founded 2012, was backed by Third Rock Ventures alongside Greylock Partners and Sanofi. Revolution Medicines, incorporated two years later, originally focused on Martin Burke’s natural-product synthesis and had no connection to RAS research — it was also incubated by Third Rock Ventures. The same venture-capital firm incubated both start-ups, which would eventually merge into one entity.

In 2013 Verdine took a leave-of-absence without pay from Harvard to serve as Warp Drive Bio CEO. Harvard imposes strict time-limits on academic sabbaticals; once exhausted he was required to return to campus. In April 2016 he handed the CEO role to Lawrence Reid and returned to Harvard. Though he went back to university, the platform remained within the commercial marketplace under investor ownership. In 2018, Third Rock Ventures completed an all-stock transaction absorbing Warp Drive Bio into Revolution Medicines for approximately USD 69 million. Sixteen months later, February 2020, Revolution Medicines went public on Nasdaq raising USD 238 million in its IPO.

The present-day pipeline tells the rest of the story. Revolution’s entire portfolio of clinical-stage RAS(ON) inhibitors — daraxonrasib (multi-selective), elironrasib (G12C), zoldonrasib (G12D), RMC-5127 (G12V), and RM-055 — bear no relation to Revolution’s original founding mission. Everyone was built upon the tri-complex-inhibitor platform obtained in that 2018 acquisition. Evidence appears in paper acknowledgements: “The authors acknowledge Greg Verdine and scientists at Warp Drive Bio for their early work on natural-product analogs as synthetic tri-complex inhibitors.”

These five drug candidates were not discovered during the Warp Drive Bio era. They were generated post-acquisition inside Revolution Medicines using the inherited platform. He handed over the platform rather than finished drug molecules. Verdine returned to Harvard, yet his platform continued its journey in industry for fourteen more years, culminating in that FDA approval document dated August 26, 2026.

On August 26, 2026, the FDA issued approval for the end-product of this research pathway — oral multi-selective RAS(ON) inhibitor daraxonrasib (brand-name Rasonque). It is the first therapeutic directly targeting RAS for metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Phase III clinical data extended median overall patient survival from 6.7 months to 13.2 months. This is the first approved drug among the five clinical-stage assets built upon that platform.

Fourteen full years passed between that “nothing-but-an-idea” concept in 2012 and this regulatory approval.

Third Hand: Borrowing a 4-Billion-Year-Old Chemical Library from Fungi

His obsession with “building hands” extended even to borrowing them.

Verdine co-founded LifeMine Therapeutics to pursue a counter-intuitive strategy: instead of relying on synthetic-chemical libraries, mine fungi — a vastly-under-appreciated natural-product treasure trove evolved across four billion years. Its top-down drug-discovery platform integrates fungal evolutionary genomics, machine learning and synthetic chemistry. Researchers first define disease targets, then directly mine fungal genomes for molecules capable of hitting those targets.

Lead candidate LIFE-001 targets organ transplantation: a novel-mechanism calcineurin-activating-inhibitor (CNai) formulated for long-acting injection. It binds calcineurin directly and locks it into an inactive conformation to suppress T-cell activation. Unlike older agents such as ciclosporin and tacrolimus, it does not rely on immunophilin chaperone pathways. It holds potential to avoid organ toxicity linked with long-term use of traditional immunosuppressants.

On August 6, 2026, LifeMine announced completion of its USD 263 million Series E financing round, led by Milky Way Investments. New investors included Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier and RA Capital. Existing backers GSK and ARCH participated in follow-on investment. Reportedly, after each hearing a one-hour pitch, both Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates advised Verdine to “raise more capital”. The final round size reached three-to-four times the original financing target.

Why Him?

Three major industry milestones within a single calendar year, more than ten founded companies, and entirely novel therapeutic modalities. Reducing Verdine’s achievements merely to genius or luck oversimplifies reality. His success rests upon three pillars.

First: Tackle the hardest-possible problems, and persist once you select them. β-catenin, RAS, calcineurin are all well-validated disease drivers widely deemed intractable. Far harder still is sustained long-term commitment. Stapled peptides travelled from a 2000 JACS paper to a 2026 IPO across 26 years. Warp Drive Bio’s concept took 14 years from a bare idea through to daraxonrasib approval. Sustaining work over such time horizons comes less from raw willpower than from single-minded simplicity. The sole objective becomes solving the problem; there remains no room for calculation of gains and losses.

Second: Scientific talent paired with sound judgement. Selecting targets demands courage; selecting technical paths demands judgement. The molecular-glue concept could have prioritised FKBP12, but researchers pivoted toward more-abundant CypA after observing insufficient FKBP12 expression in tumor tissue, and adopted sanglifehrin A as a starting design scaffold. Those two directional shifts gave rise to daraxonrasib. Part of this judgement is innate talent; part comes from curiosity plus those hands-on practical skill forged in childhood. That experience of working without instruction manuals, thinking while executing, trains exactly the ability to navigate pathways amid high uncertainty.

Third: Credibility. Drugging “undruggable” targets requires years of capital burn. Before you have generated proof-of-concept data, you need to convince others to fund your multi-year journey. When Warp Drive Bio launched with “no intellectual-property rights, nothing but an idea”, Verdine still persuaded Sanofi to fund half the Series A. That power of persuasion comes not from sales rhetoric but authenticity and scientific purity. Once investors commit capital, he delivers tangible milestones in return: an approved drug, a record-setting IPO. Trust compounds: think boldly → deliver results → think even more boldly → deliver further results.

The Standard of the “Hand-Builder”

Reviewing the companies Verdine founded or co-founded: multiple listed on Nasdaq. Gloucester Pharmaceuticals was acquired by Celgene; its HDAC inhibitor romidepsin gained FDA approval. Assets originating from co-founded Enanta Pharmaceuticals supplied key components of blockbuster therapies commercialized by AbbVie and Merck.

They share one unifying trait: avoid chasing fashionable hot areas. Instead, they target well-understood disease systems for which no therapies exist, then build an entirely new “hand” to drug them.

Last August, his new company Dove Tree signed a pipeline-collaboration agreement with Insilico Medicine worth up to USD 5.99 billion — a record-setting deal within AI-driven drug discovery. This time his out-stretched hand grasps Chinese-origin AI and automated-lab platforms.

Harvard and Him: Mutual High-Stakes Bets

Nearly his entire professional career unfolded within Harvard’s ecosystem. His professorship spanned three departments simultaneously: Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Stem-Cell and Regenerative Biology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology. “Interdisciplinarity was not a slogan — it was baked-into faculty appointments.” This institutional reality represents Harvard’s formal endorsement for research that falls neatly into neither pure chemistry nor pure biology.

Harvard’s most direct early-stage support came in modest dollar terms. Between 2011-2013, Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator awarded three grants totaling USD 450 000. At that high-risk, early-stage moment where federal grant-funding agencies hesitated, that small amount of capital moved stapled-peptide proof-of-concept far enough to attract outside venture capital. That illustrates how Harvard’s innovation ecosystem operates: it does not supply huge cheques; it provides the first tranche of funding when nobody else dares invest.

Return flows back to the university equally materially. Three FDA-approved drugs stemming from his research — romidepsin, paritaprevir, glecaprevir — have generated aggregate sales exceeding USD 10 billion. Harvard captured substantial revenue through patent-licensing royalties and equity holdings across companies he founded. Sources familiar with the situation estimate these returns may become Harvard’s largest-ever royalty stream. For comparison: Harvard’s publicly-disclosed largest single licensing payout came from Moderna mRNA-related patents, totaling more than USD 300 million by 2022. Rarely do university-scientist partnerships achieve such ideal mutual success.

“We Ought to Fund Crazy Ideas”

From becoming his paralyzed father’s hands in childhood, through peptide staples, chaperone-protein molecular glues and fungal-genome mining, Greg Verdine’s story can be condensed into one sentence: When you cannot reach something, build a hand.

On October 23, 2026, this emeritus Harvard professor will make his first public appearance in China. He will deliver a keynote address with a global perspective at the 12th BiG IMPACT Annual Conference and join Academician Wang Xiaodong for a joint dialogue titled “The Journey of the Scientific Founder”. He brings decades-worth of improvisation and “crazy-idea” thinking to Shanghai, and poses a vital question for China’s biotech innovation community:

“We ought to fund crazy things, because it is crazy things that change the world.”

12th BiG IMPACT Annual Conference

Dates: 23-24 October 2026

Venue: Hilton Shanghai Zhangjiang

Expected attendance: 800-1000 participants

Greg Verdine’s Conference Agenda

- 23 Oct 13:35-14:05 Main-Forum Keynote Global Perspective: Entrepreneurial Practice of Legendary Overseas Scientific Founders

- 23 Oct 16:15-17:15 Panel Discussion Challenges and Opportunities in Translational Science

Parallel Highlights: Opening-session and China-perspective keynote by Academician Wang Xiaodong; US-China-collaboration panel moderated by RA Capital founder Peter Kolchinsky; China debut of the S2S Global Scientific-Translation Programme.

References

1. Harvard Gazette: Finding ways to drug the undruggable diseases (Jun 2026)

2. GlobeNewswire: Parabilis Medicines Announces Pricing of Upsized IPO (9 Jun 2026)

3. FDA: FDA approves daraxonrasib for metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma (26 Aug 2026)

4. BusinessWire: LifeMine Raises $263 Million (5 Aug 2026)

5. Verdine GC, et al. JACS, 2000; Walensky LD, et al. Science, 2004

6. Endpoints News: Escaping an improbable upbringing, Greg Verdine places his biggest career bets in drugging the 'undruggable'

7. C&EN (Vol 96, Issue 42): Revolution Medicines to acquire Warp Drive

8. Revolution Medicines official website Pipeline page / Q2 2026 Earnings / SEC DEF 14A (WAVE) filings

9. Yicai (First-Finance): A Harvard Tenured Professor’s Biotech Entrepreneurial Dream (15 Aug 2017)