Anastasia Khvorova, PhD

Education:
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

Anastasia Khvorova, PhD, has more than twenty years of experience developing oligonucleotide technology and therapeutics. She is a professor in the RNA Therapeutics Institute (RTI) and Program in Molecular Medicine at the UMass Chan Medical School (UMass Chan). Her lab brings together hardcore organic and oligonucleotide chemists, RNA biologists, pharmacologists, and bioinformaticians to develop novel approaches and solutions to understanding natural and therapeutic RNA trafficking and delivery. She established the RTI Nucleic Acid Chemistry Center, which provides expertise in RNA chemistry to labs within and outside UMass Chan, and is the only non-profit center in North America capable of synthesizing complex RNAs at scales necessary to support both in vitro and in vivo studies.

Dr Khvorova joined UMass Chan after several years in industry, during which she served as Chief Scientific Officer at lead biotech companies (Dharmacon, ThermoFisher; RXi Pharmaceuticals) and co-founded several startups. She served as director of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society from 2011 to 2018 and currently is director-at-large/scientific & research council chair of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.

Dr Khvorova is named as inventor on more than 150 patents and 300 patent applications, and she has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, including seminal articles in Cell, Nature, and Nature Biotechnology (citation index exceeding 2000 per article) defining the field of RNAi drug design and development. Dr Khvorova is principal investigator on four major National Institutes of Health grants.