Doug was the Founder, President, and CEO of Dicerna, a company developing medicines to selectively silence disease-causing genes using RNA interference (RNAi). He served as Dicerna’s President and Chief Executive Officer for almost 12 years, successfully leading the company through a highly successful IPO, multiple major corporate collaborations and, ultimately, through its $3.3B acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2021. Under his leadership of over 10 years, the company optimized and perfected its GalXC RNAi technology, which was the foundation of nearly 20 drug development programs and 6 major corporate collaborations.
Prior to Dicerna, Doug was a General Partner with the venture capital firm Oxford Bioscience Partners, where he specialized in financing innovative life science companies with transformative technologies, twice appearing on Forbes Midas list as the second highest ranked life science investor. His investments include first generation RNAi pioneer Sirna Therapeutics, which was acquired by Merck, and Solexa, inventor of the world’s dominant DNA sequencing platform, which was acquired by Illumina.
He was originally trained as a scientist, obtaining his PhD in Genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1996, before working as a genomic scientist at the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research (now known as the Broad Institute). Doug also holds an AB degree in Biology from Cornell University.