Founder, President, Board Member Richard B. Silverman, Ph.D., the founder of AKAVA Therapeutics, is the Patrick G. Ryan/Aon Professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences, and Pharmacology at Northwestern University, where he has been a professor for 46 years. He is the inventor of the molecule that became the blockbuster drug Lyrica®, marketed by...

VP, Corporate Development, Board Member Philip Silverman serves as VP, Corporate Development and Board Member for Akava Therapeutics, Inc. He helped his father, Dr. Richard Silverman, start the company in 2019 and currently focuses on strategic and business-related matters, which include overseeing budgets, hiring key employees, managing investor relations, interacting with the legal team, and...

Board Member Brendan MacMillan is the Chief Investment Officer of (qp) global, a specialist in setting up and managing single-family offices. Mr. MacMillan is an accomplished investor, investing across geographies, capital structures, and sectors over nearly two decades. Amongst many sectors Mr. MacMillan has invested in, is the biotechnology sector, with a focus on both...

Board Member Joe Nolan is a results-focused pharma growth leader with more than 30 years of experience building high-performance teams, driving operational efficiency, and growing products in competitive spaces. In his career, Mr. Nolan helped launch several products in the central nervous system space, with the majority in orphan and specialty settings. Mr. Nolan currently...

Executive Board Chair Charles Polsky, M.D., is a biotechnology entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience working with startups in the life sciences. He has served in several executive positions, including co-founder of the molecular diagnostic 3PrimeDx (2016-19) developing a cardiac arrhythmia biomarker to predict sudden cardiac death risk; CEO of the gene-delivery company SonoGene...