Mark Benjamin

Mark is a trained scientist and seasoned business development professional. Prior to joining Cyrus, Mark was Chief Business Officer at Q-State Biosciences, a Harvard University company focusing on neuroscience drug discovery. Mark served as CEO of Galenea, an MIT spin out from the lab of Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, which – through partnerships with Otsuka, CHDI, Novartis, Eisai and Janssen, worked on drug discovery for a number of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Prior to Galenea, he was Chief Business Officer at Nura, a company formed out of Nobel Laureate Linda Buck’s GPCR work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Mark spent some time in Geneva helping to build and eventually sell a Serono spin-out DNA-sequencing company – Manteia - the core of which forms part of the Illumina sequencing platform, and he was an early employee at Rosetta Inpharmatics – a gene expression profiling and microarray company founded by a Seattle-based team including Nobel laureate Lee Hartwell and systems biology pioneer, Lee Hood, where he headed up Business Development. He has a D.Sc. in Cancer Biology from Harvard University and a B.Sc. (First class, with honors) in Genetics from the University of London.