Michael Mendelsohn

Dr. Mendelsohn is the Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Strategy Officer of Cardurion Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage cardiovascular biotechnology company. He is an internationally recognized cardiovascular physician-scientist, industry research leader and business executive with broad experience in healthcare.

Currently, Dr. Mendelsohn serves as a Board Director for Foghorn Therapeutics (FHTX) and Cyclerion Therapeutics (CYCN), and a Senior Advisor and consultant to the head of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. He is also a Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. From 2013-2017, Dr. Mendelsohn was a Venture Partner at SV Health Investors in Boston.

From 2010-2013, Dr. Mendelsohn served as SVP and Global Head of Cardiovascular Diseases at Merck & Co., with end-to-end responsibilities for cardiovascular scientific strategy, research & development, business development and customer engagement. In this role, he had responsibility for all cardiovascular research, from early drug discovery through late clinical development. At Merck, Dr. Mendelsohn directed preclinical and clinical programs in four major CV areas: heart failure, atherosclerosis, specialty hypertension, and thrombosis. He also worked closely with Merck’s Global Human Health division to align Merck’s research and commercial marketing, and with Merck business development to source, evaluate and advance a wide variety of partnerships and licensing agreements, including the worldwide joint venture between Merck and Bayer involving soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) stimulator drugs.

Prior to Merck, Dr. Mendelsohn worked for 25 years as an academic cardiovascular physician-scientist in Boston. Dr. Mendelsohn received an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and English from Amherst College in 1978, and his MD from Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 1982. From 1982 to 1993, he completed a residency in internal medicine and from 1985-1988, a fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and HMS. He then spent five years as an assistant professor of medicine on the faculty of HMS, where he was a member of the BWH Cardiology Division and ran an independent, NIH-funded basic science laboratory focused on molecular cardiovascular biology.

In 1993, Dr. Mendelsohn moved to Tufts Medical Center, where he created and served as the first executive director of the Molecular Cardiology Research Institute, a research department of 18 faculty and approximately 120 members exploring basic and translational research in heart and vascular diseases. Dr. Mendelsohn was the first recipient of the Elisa Kent Mendelsohn Professorship of Molecular Cardiology and Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and in 2008, Dr. Mendelsohn was named the first-ever Chief Scientific Officer at Tufts.

As an academic physician-scientist, Dr. Mendelsohn focused on signal transduction pathways regulating vascular and myocardial function. His laboratory at Tufts contributed to deciphering the mechanisms of action of endogenous vascular protective molecules, including key pathways implicated in cardiovascular disease, with an emphasis on cyclic GMP signaling pathways in blood vessels and heart and on nuclear hormone receptor actions in the vasculature. He has been the principal investigator on numerous National Institutes of Health awards, including a Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) in Ischemic Heart Disease, a Program Project Grant (PPG) studying molecular mechanisms of vascular relaxation, and multiple RO1 awards.

Dr. Mendelsohn has served broadly on the editorial boards of research publications and has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles on numerous cardiovascular scientific and clinical topics. He was an invited speaker for the 1999 Nobel Symposium in Karlskoga, Sweden, “Estrogen and Women’s Health” and for the 2008 Nobel Symposium in Stockholm, “Recent Advances in Understanding Estrogen Signaling”. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the Association of University Cardiologists (AUC) and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).