Dr. Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan serves as the Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation, a Scientific Advisory Board Member, and a Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In February 2003, he was the founding chemist hired at Alnylam, serving as the Head of Drug Discovery. Under his leadership, the Alnylam team pioneered the discovery and development of numerous chemical modifications, GalNAc conjugation chemistry, lipid conjugates (yielding the first in vivo demonstration of RNAi in 2004), and the Lipid Nanoparticle (LNP) delivery platform that made RNA interference-based human therapeutics possible. Based on these foundational contributions, six RNAi therapeutics covering seven indications have been approved from Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. Prior to joining Alnylam, Dr. Manoharan worked at Ionis (formerly Isis) Pharmaceuticals in the field of antisense oligonucleotides, where he invented or co-invented numerous chemical modifications and conjugates. He is the author of more than 260 publications (with over 78,500 Google Scholar citations, an h-index of 128, and an i10-index of 470), over 500 abstracts, and is an inventor or co-inventor of over 310 issued U.S. patents. Dr. Manoharan has earned numerous accolades for his work, including the Har Gobind Khorana Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) for the year 2026, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (OTS, 2019) and the Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry by the American Chemical Society (ACS) for the year 2024. He is an elected ACS Fellow and an inductee into the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame. Additionally, he was honored with the Melville L. Wolfrom and Derek Horton Awards from the ACS Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry in 2007 and 2021, respectively. Dr. Manoharan was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, and received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in chemistry from The American College in Madurai. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under Professor Ernest L. Eliel, and trained in the field of oligonucleotides as a post-doctoral research associate at Yale University and the University of Maryland with Professor John A. Gerlt.

Naoki Sugimoto received Ph.D. in 1985 from Kyoto University, Japan. After postdoctoral work at University of Rochester, NY in USA, he joined Konan University, Kobe, Japan in 1988 and was a full professor from 1994 to 2024. From 2003 to 2024, he was also a director of Frontier Institute for Biomolecular Engineering Research (FIBER) at Konan University and now is a Distinguished Professor of Konan University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Nucleic Acids Research and Scientific Reports, and so on. He served as the organizer of IRT2024 (XXV International Round Table on Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids). He received The Imbach-Townsend Award from IS3NA (International Society for Nucleosides, Nucleotides, and Nucleic Acids), San Diego, USA in 2018, The Chemical Society of Japan Award (Top Award) in 2020, Ikehara Award (Top Award) from JSNAC (The Japan Society of Nucleic Acids Chemistry) in 2024, Frantisek Sorm Memorial Medal from Czech Republic Academy of Science in 2025, and so on. He has published more than 500 scientific papers, reviews, and books.