Megan Blewett, PhD

Megan Blewett is the co-founder and President at Iris Medicine, a Venrock-backed therapeutics company.

She also co-founded Kelonia Therapeutics, which is engineering novel lentiviruses to achieve tissue-specific delivery of gene therapies. Megan was previously an investor at Venrock, where she worked on the launch of Federation Bio, a microbiome company developing bacterial consortia to treat serious metabolic and immune diseases.

She currently serves on the board of Convergent Research, a member organization of the Schmidt Futures Network and nonprofit start-up for Focused Research Organizations (FROs).

Megan has had a long-standing interest in developing new therapies for autoimmune conditions, and for her PhD, determined at a molecular level how the widely prescribed multiple sclerosis drug Tecfidera blocks immune cell activation. This work revealed new, potentially much safer, therapeutic approaches for suppressing the immune system and formed the foundation for the biotechnology company Vividion.

Megan’s PhD work, under Benjamin Cravatt at The Scripps Research Institute, was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Hertz Foundation Fellowship. Also, while a PhD student, Megan founded the healthcare analytics company VoxHealth. Google partnered with VoxHealth to expand its health Knowledge Graph, and VoxHealth data is now viewed by millions of people every day in Google’s medical condition search results – alongside data from institutions such as Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School. Megan currently serves as a consultant to Google’s health condition search team.

Megan received her AB from Harvard, where she worked in the lab of Nobel prizewinner E.J. Corey and was co-author on three separate publications. For this work, she was awarded the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for “outstanding scholarly work or research” in a senior thesis. She has been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Healthcare and Business Insider’s Under 40 in Biotech.