Dr. Warren Marcus PhD

Dr. Warren Marcus received his bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1995 and performed his doctoral work at Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2000. He then performed postdoctoral research at the Georgia Institute of Technology until 2002, and was then a researcher at Arizona State University until 2006. He left academia and started to work at Altor Bioscience in 2006, where he was an inventor of a recently approved drug (April 2024) now known as Anktiva.

While initially spending the first 5 years primarily in the lab, during his final 7 years at Altor, Dr. Marcus was involved in the business development of the company, actively looking for investors and pharmaceutical partners for the company/drug. He was also managing a team of scientists in the lab as they continued to work on other potential drugs.
Altor was ultimately sold in 2017 for a deal value of $1.08B, the largest biotech exit to-date in Florida. After a short stint as a director of business development and research at a small diagnostic company, Dr. Marcus joined a large, international pharmaceutical company: Boehringer Ingelheim (BI).

While at BI, part of Dr. Marcus’ responsibilities was to help the Business Development team recruit start-up biotech companies for various company-sponsored events. While interacting with some of these companies, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and it rekindled his desire to start his own company one day. Thus after a thorough search for technologies within various universities, Dr. Marcus found a revolutionary RNA technology for cancer and diabetes at the University of Miami, leading to him then licensing the technology and starting WiNK Therapeutics. Warren is passionately focused on the mission to solve the disease of diabetes, witnessing the impact it has had on his own loved ones, and many others whom he has known personally.