Saurabh Saha

Saha received his undergraduate degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology.[2] He also attended both Harvard Business School and Oxford University.[3] Saha trained under Bert Vogelstein during his studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine,[4] where he received both an MD and a PhD in cancer genetics.[5]

After leaving academia, Saha joined the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in their Pharmaceuticals and Medical Products Practice in New York City.[6] In 2005, he became the Director of the New Indications Discovery Unit at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[5] Between 2008 and 2015, Saha served as the President of BioMed Valley Discoveries, a biomedical research and development company focused on cancer drug discovery,[7] and the Chief Scientific Officer of two of the company's spin-offs.[3] While at BioMed Valley, he led the development and demonstrated human effectiveness of two first-in-class cancer drugs, an ERK kinase inhibitor (Ulixertinib; BVD-523) and a bacteriolytic immunotherapy (C. novyi-NT). Saha serves as a venture partner for the life sciences venture capital firm, Atlas Venture and also served as the Chief Medical Officer for its portfolio company, Synlogic.[8]

In 2016, Saha was appointed as President and CEO of Delinia, a biotech company focused on developing novel therapies for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases such as lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis and others.[9] That same year, he led the company from stealth mode and announced that it had secured $35 million in Series A funding.[10] In January 2017, Saha oversaw the acquisition of Delinia by the pharmaceutical company Celgene for $775 million.[11]

Saha has published in periodicals including the Nature and Science journals, where he has reported translational research and development discoveries in cancer research.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18] He is also on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Clinical Oncology,[19] Journal of Translational Medicine,[20] and Cancer Biology & Therapy.[21]

In 2014, Saha and his team published evidence that injecting a weakened strain of Clostridium novyi bacteria into a cancer tumor caused shrinkage or disappearance of the injected cancer lesion, a type of cancer biosurgery whereby living organisms are used to microscopically destroy tumor cells while sparing normal tissue.[22] Initial tests were done on canines with naturally occurring cancers and one human cancer patient. The anaerobic bacteria survived in environments of low oxygen and destroyed the tumor from the inside-out while triggering an inflammatory/immune response at the site of the tumor destruction.[23] During the study, of the sixteen dogs with soft-tissue sarcoma treated with the C. novyi-NT therapeutic, three dogs saw their tumors disappear for up to two years, and another three saw their growths shrink by 30%. When the bacteria reached the edge of the tumor, they stopped killing cells around them due to the oxygen present in the environment of normal body tissue.[4][16] I A clinical trial in humans was begun in 2014 [24]