Start-up Experiences

Dr. Mandana Manzari Honu is a scientist turned investor and company-builder. Her biotech client base consists of bioprocessing, antibody therapeutic, diagnostics, cell therapy, vaccine, and AI/ML companies. Mandana was formerly Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Business Development at Kaleidoscope Bio, leading development of their first enterprise-level software product, building out the science team, and establishing their initial customer base. Prior to Kaleidoscope, Mandana was Head of Scientific Assessments for corporate BD and investments at Resilience. She led evaluation of technologies and therapeutics spanning vaccines, cell, gene, nucleic acid therapies, and biologics, transacting on over $300M across more than a dozen deals. Her first start-up experience was on the molecular discovery team at MIT spinout Eleven Biotherapeutics.

Research

Mandana is an MIT-trained chemical engineer and holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Duke University. She spent fifteen years as a laboratory scientist at the NIH, UMD, GWU, Harvard, MIT, Duke, and the Sloan Kettering Institute. Her protein engineering and antibody development training in Dane Wittrup’s lab at MIT resulted in a debut publication and start-up role at an associate spinout, Eleven Biotherapeutics. Her doctoral work in Tosh Chilkoti’s lab at Duke explored cancer therapeutics ranging from biomaterials applications for recombinant protein delivery, aptamer-targeted small molecule delivery, probiotic-based drugs, multivalent protein-based therapies, and genome-editing approaches for studying cancer drug resistance. During her postdoctoral research in Dan Heller’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mandana studied nanodelivery of small molecules, developing precision medicines for various cancer types and leveraging machine learning approaches to understand molecular interactions in nanoparticle assembly. Mandana’s research in protein engineering, nano delivery, and gene editing has been published in Science Advances, Blood, JMB, and Nature Reviews Materials, with over 500 citations. She holds multiple patents for her engineered proteins and proprietary cancer drug combinations.