Explorer Series 1: The NGM Bio Discovery Engine

Dr. Woodhouse became Chief Executive Officer and a member of NGM’s board of directors in September 2018. He previously served as NGM’s Chief Financial Officer, joining the company in March 2015. From 2002 to 2015, he was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, most recently as a Managing Director in the healthcare investment banking group and co-head of biotechnology investment banking. Earlier in his career, Dr. Woodhouse worked at Dynavax Technologies and also as a research assistant at Amgen, Inc. Dr. Woodhouse received a B.A. in pharmacology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a Ph.D. in molecular pharmacology from Stanford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Chen is NGM’s Founder and has served as a member of our board of directors and as Chief Scientific Officer since January 2008. He was also NGM’s President until November 2014. Previously, Dr. Chen held various positions at Amgen, most recently as its Vice President, Metabolic Disorders, with responsibility for leading the company’s global research efforts in small molecule and biologic drug discovery for the treatment of human diseases affecting metabolism, bone, mineral balance and muscle. Prior to joining Amgen, he served as Vice President of Biology at Tularik where he guided drug discovery research in oncology, inflammation and metabolic disease. Dr. Chen’s pioneering work on a broad array of targets at both Amgen and Tularik not only opened up opportunities to study new aspects of biology and physiology across disease areas, but also led to contributions of multiple drug candidates to the development pipelines of these organizations, including RepathaTM (evolocumab), a novel anti-PCSK9 antibody that lowers low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.

Prior to his current role as NGM’s Chief Translational Officer, Dr. DePaoli served as NGM’s founding Chief Medical Officer (CMO). Before joining NGM in 2010, Dr. DePaoli was CMO at IntreKin Therapeutics. In this role he oversaw global development of INT131, a PPAR-gamma modulator, through a successful End of Phase 2 meeting with the FDA. He brings to NGM more than 20 years of experience as a clinician and translational researcher in diabetes, obesity and metabolic disease. Dr. DePaoli trained in Clinical and Molecular Endocrinology at the University of Chicago and in the Howard Hughes laboratory of Dr. Graham Bell. His clinical and translational research interests in diabetes and obesity were focused during his work at the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute which led him to join Amgen in 1998 to champion the development of their cardiometabolic disease portfolio. His work at Amgen was pivotal in enabling multiple clinical applications of the adipocytokine leptin (Myalept). At Amgen, he also led a broad array of cardiometabolic, muscle and bone programs with a focus on translating novel pathways into the clinic. These pathways included: RANK Ligand (now Prolia and Xgeva), PCSK9 (Evolocumab), 11 Beta HSD-1, Myostatin, IL-1 receptor, Calcium Sensing Receptor (Sensipar), PPAR-gamma modulation, DPP-4 and MCH-R1. Dr. DePaoli also maintains a clinical endocrinology practice at the William Sansum Diabetes Center.

Dr. Miller joined NGM as Vice President of Biologics Research in July of 2021. Prior to NGM she acquired broad experience in industry research environments, successfully leading productive drug discovery teams at both large and small biopharmaceutical companies including Schering-Plough/Merck, Novartis, Five Prime, and most recently IGM Biosciences. Over the last 20 years Dr. Miller played key roles in leading biologics-based drug discovery efforts across diverse therapeutic areas including cancer, immune disorders, cardiovascular, and CNS diseases, and developed a record of harnessing innovative technologies for antibody discovery and engineering, therapeutic protein engineering, and novel drug formats. Dr. Miller earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from The Ohio State University and conducted post-doctoral research at Genentech focused on structure-function studies with immunoglobulins.

Dr. Lichtman took up leadership of the Biology team in 2022. He has held several roles in the greater research organization since joining NGM Bio in 2015. He has been involved in the early stages of NGM's immuno-oncology programs, he built and led NGM's bioinformatics team, and he currently leads efforts in human genetics-based target discovery. Dr. Lichtman joined NGM Bio after the completion of his Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Stanford University School of Medicine where he studied host-microbiome interaction in the mammalian gut using mass spectrometry-based proteomics. He also has a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Dickinson College and worked as a research assistant at Synthetic Genomics.

Dr. Kaplan joined NGM in 2008. He heads NGM’s Translational Immune-Oncology group and serves as leader of the NGM707 (anti-ILT2/ILT4) development team. He has directed drug discovery efforts across numerous therapeutic areas, including metabolic diseases and oncology. For the past seven years, his team has worked to understand the suppressive mechanisms at play in the tumor microenvironment, and how these mechanisms restrict anti-tumor immune responses in many cancers. They have elucidated “myeloid checkpoints” that mediate immune suppression in tumors, and they have identified therapeutic targets for relieving these checkpoints. Dr. Kaplan obtained his Ph.D. from Duke University, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral scholar, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University, where he was an American Cancer Society fellow.

Dr. Roda is the Research Lead for NGM831 and the Project Team Lead for NGM936, and she led the pre-clinical project teams that advanced these molecules from the target validation stage through candidate designation. Dr. Roda and her colleagues published a paper in Cancer Immunology Research in August 2021 describing the discovery of fibronectin as a functional ligand for ILT3 and characterizing this interaction as a “stromal checkpoint” that promotes myeloid cell suppression in the tumor microenvironment. Her team is additionally responsible for biomarker efforts across NGM’s immune-oncology portfolio. Prior to joining NGM in 2016, she worked at OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, leading target validation and assay development efforts for a number of immune-oncology programs, including etiligimab (MPH-313). She received her PhD in Cancer Immunology from the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program of The Ohio State University School of Medicine, and completed additional post-doctoral training in cancer immunology at Ohio State as a NIH T32 post-doctoral fellow.

Prior to joining NGM, Ms. Nolan Mangini served as President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Castlight Health, a publicly traded San Francisco-based healthcare technology company. She joined Castlight in 2012 and assumed roles of increasing responsibility, ultimately being appointed CFO in 2016 followed by her additional appointment as President in 2019. At Castlight, Ms. Nolan Mangini was responsible for a wide range of functions including strategic and corporate planning, finance, investor relations, people, legal, real estate, customer support and business operations. Prior to joining Castlight, Ms. Nolan Mangini worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company, specializing in the health care and private equity practices. She began her career at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation as a financial associate responsible for managing the allocation of the foundation’s endowment. Ms. Nolan Mangini currently serves on the Board of Directors of Artemis Health. Ms. Nolan Mangini has a Master of Business Administration from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, a Master of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.