About Us /
Management Team
Doug Treco, Ph.D., Co-Founder, President and CEO
Doug has been the CEO of Ra Pharma™ since its inception and serves on the Company’s Board of Directors. In 1988, he co-founded Transkaryotic Therapies Inc. (TKT, acquired in 2005 by Shire plc),a multi-platform biopharmaceutical company developing protein and gene therapy products. In his position as Senior Vice President of Research and Development, Doug established and directed TKT’s gene activation and protein production efforts, which led to the approval of the biopharmaceutical products Dynepo™, Replagal®, Elaprase®, and Vpriv™. Previously, he was a Visiting Scientist in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a Lecturer in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications and holds over 35 U.S. and European patents in the areas of protein production, gene mapping, and gene therapy. Doug is also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Morgenthaler Ventures. Doug received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from SUNY at Stony Brook and performed postdoctoral studies at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Kristopher Josephson, Ph.D., Director, Molecular Biology
Kris joined Ra Pharma™ as the Director of Molecular Biology in March of 2010. Previously he was a Senior Principal Investigator at EMD-Serono where he used fragment-based screening and structure-based drug design to discover and optimize kinase inhibitors. Kris was a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Jack W. Szostak at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. There, he developed a system for the ribosomal synthesis of peptide libraries assembled from drug-like amino acids, which forms the basis for Ra Pharma™’s peptide discovery platform. Kris received his Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For his thesis project with Professor Mark R. Walter, Kris utilized X-ray crystallography and protein engineering to study the signaling mechanisms of cytokines.
Kerry Black, M.S., M.B.A., Executive Director, Operations
Kerry joined Ra Pharma™ in March of 2010 as the Senior Director of Operations. She has over 20 years experience in the biotechnology industry working both as a Research Scientist and Operations Director. She has spent the last 10 years specializing in early stage companies, building business and operational infrastructure, including as an early employee at Critical Therapeutics, TetraPhase Pharmaceuticals and SetPoint Medical Corporation. Kerry received dual Bachelor of Science Degrees in molecular and cellular biology and biochemistry from the University of Maine. She received a Master of Chemistry Degree from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an MBA from the F.W. Olin School of Management at Babson College.
Dan Elbaum, Ph.D., Sr. Director and Head of Drug Discovery
Dan joined Ra Pharma as Senior Director and Head of Drug Discovery in September 2012. Prior to that, he worked in the Orphan and Genetic Disease Research Unit at Pfizer in Cambridge, where he led the chemistry effort to develop therapies for cystic fibrosis. In addition to working in orphan diseases, Dan has directed numerous projects in inflammation and oncology. At Critical Therapeutics Inc., Dan spearheaded the alpha-7 nACh receptor agonist project resulting in a pre-clinical candidate for the treatment of asthma, and at Amgen Dan used structure-based drug design contributing to the discovery of Motesinib, a multi-kinase inhibitor for the treatment of cancer. Dan received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Harvard University with Professor Stuart Schreiber. For his post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania with Professor David Christianson, Dan used crystallography to design inhibitors of arginase and fluorescent probes for the detection of zinc.