Chris Heise

Chris Heise is a molecular pharmacologist and drug hunter with nearly 20 years of experience leading drug discovery teams of scientists from all disciplines to define and execute key experiments to drive toward clinical candidates. At Septerna, Chris leads the Discovery Biology team where he works with like-minded pharmacology enthusiasts to identify, characterize and optimize small molecules for the company’s drug discovery portfolio.

Prior to joining Septerna, Chris was Senior Director, Biochemical and Cellular Pharmacology at Genentech overseeing a team that performed detailed pharmacologic characterization of molecules directed against diverse target classes in several disease areas. Earlier in his career, Chris was a scientist at Neurocrine Biosciences where he worked on lead identification and lead optimization for diverse GPCRs and ion channel targets, and he performed detailed molecular characterization of advanced small molecule leads.

Chris obtained his PhD in Molecular Pharmacology from the University of Virginia and performed post-doctoral studies at the Rockefeller University.