Team
The scientists who made the discovery, and leadership with a track record of building biotech companies.
Mark Kaufmann
Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
Mark Kaufmann, MBA, brings more than 35 years of biotech leadership across CEO, CFO, CBO, and COO roles. He led Ardelyx's 2014 IPO, which was 3.5x oversubscribed and upsized to $70M, and has raised over $700M in public and private equity across his career. He has structured more than $1B in business development transactions. He has served three times as a full-time CEO for therapeutic biotech companies. Across these roles he has built and led teams spanning scientific, clinical, regulatory, and finance functions. He holds a degree in biochemical sciences from Harvard University and an MBA from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Zoltan Arany, MD, PhD
Co-founder & Scientific Advisor
Zoltan Arany, MD, PhD, is the Samuel Bellet Professor of Cardiology and Chair of the Department of Physiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Co-Director of the Cardiovascular Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Over 35 years as an academic researcher, he has built one of the field's leading programs in cardiovascular metabolism, publishing more than 200 articles in journals including Nature, Cell, Science, NEJM, and JACC. His seminal work established the role of PGC-1α in cardiac metabolism, discovered vascular and genetic causes of peripartum cardiomyopathy, and identified ANT's function in mitophagy. His 2020 Science paper provided the first comprehensive map of fuel consumption in the human heart.
Nicholas Forelli, MD
Co-founder & Scientific Advisor
Nick Forelli, MD, is a Cardiovascular Disease Fellow at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed his Internal Medicine residency. He is lead author of Forelli et al. 2026, the Science paper from the Arany lab describing PANK1 activation in heart failure that forms the scientific foundation of CoArdia. He earned his MD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and was a Sarnoff Cardiovascular Research Fellow from 2022 to 2024. His research background spans synthetic chemistry and natural product discovery at The Rockefeller University in the Brady Lab, where he worked on genetically encoded small molecules, and he previously served as a medicinal chemist at GlaxoSmithKline.