Rachel Meyers, PhD
Dr. Rachel Meyers is currently a consultant, advising a number of biotech companies and venture capital firms and serves on a number of Scientific Advisory Boards. Most recently Dr. Meyers was Senior Vice President of Research and RNAi Lead Development (RLD) at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA. In this capacity, she played a key role in advancing RNAi therapeutic programs from early discovery through clinical development, and her team was responsible for program leadership for most of Alnylam’s preclinical and clinical stage programs. In addition, Dr. Meyers had overall responsibility for the chemistry and platform technology efforts that are the underpinnings of the company’s pipeline. Dr. Meyers worked closely with Alnylam’s business development group, playing an integral part in establishing important collaborations, and functioned as a scientific lead in collaborations with Novartis, Takeda, Isis, Roche and Genzyme. She also led the scientific diligence resulting in the acquisition of the Sirna assets from Merck. Prior to taking on the leadership of the Research and RLD Groups, Dr. Meyers was one of Alnylam’s Research Directors, focusing her efforts on the development of siRNA therapeutics to target infectious diseases. She was the project lead for the company’s RSV program, where she was responsible for advancing ALN-RSV01 from inception, through preclinical development and into the clinic. Dr. Meyers was honored in 2007 by Mass High Tech as one of 10 Women to Watch and by R&D Directions as one of its Top 20 Scientists. Before joining Alnylam in April 2003, Dr. Meyers was a Senior Scientist at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (1999-2003) in Cambridge, MA where she led a unit of the company’s target discovery and validation efforts involving bioinformatics and molecular and cell biology. Dr. Meyers completed her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School in the field of signal transduction, and received her PhD from MIT in the field of in vitro transcription.