Inside Denali Therapeutics: A Fireside Chat with Peter Chin & Joe Lewcock

Join MCBcDNA and Nucleate Bay Area for an evening with two leaders from Denali Therapeutics, the South San Francisco biotech working on medicines for neurodegenerative and lysosomal storage diseases. Denali’s core technology is its TransportVehicle platform, which carries large-molecule drugs across the blood-brain barrier. That barrier is one of the hardest problems in drug development. Denali’s programs span rare genetic disorders like Hunter syndrome as well as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Speakers Peter Chin, M.D. is Chief Medical Officer and Head of Development at Denali. He is a neurologist who joined the company in 2019. He previously led the Enzyme TransportVehicle franchise and late-stage clinical development, including the BLA filing for Denali’s Hunter syndrome program. Joe Lewcock, Ph.D. is Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Discovery at Denali, where he oversees the discovery-stage portfolio. Before Denali, he spent nine years at Genentech as Director of Neuroscience. He earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and did his postdoc at the Salk Institute. The conversation will cover how a drug moves from discovery into the clinic, how to build a platform company around a hard biological problem, and what careers in biotech R&D and development actually look like.