Meena
Senior Vice President, Translational DMPK & Clinical Pharmacology Stoke Therapeutics
Meena is the Senior Vice President of Translational DMPK and Clinical Pharmacology at Stoke Therapeutics. Meena is recognized authority in antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and siRNA, with deep experience guiding the development of novel chemistries and mechanisms to treat rare genetic diseases. Prior to joining Stoke in 2018, Meena served as senior director of bioanalytical, pharmacology and biomarker development at Wave Life Sciences. She played a pivotal role in building Wave’s stereopure oligonucleotide chemistry platform and in guiding the clinical entry of three antisense oligonucleotide programs. Earlier in her career, Meena worked at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals on siRNA chemistry and targeted siRNA delivery. Meena received her Ph.D. in chemistry with Dr. K.N. Ganesh at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India, and did her postdoctoral research on nucleic acid analogs with Professor Larry W. McLaughlin at Boston College.
Seminars
- What are the biggest chemistry-related barriers preventing today’s brain shuttles from achieving broad and uniform distribution throughout the brain?
- How should developers balance BBB crossing efficiency against intracellular release, tissue penetration, and target engagement when designing next-generation conjugates?
- Which molecular properties are most predictive of successful translation from preclinical brain exposure data to human efficacy?
- Will future breakthroughs come primarily from improved shuttle architectures, oligonucleotide chemistry, payload engineering, or combinations of all three?
- Build physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models that account for CSF volume, turnover rates, and brain tissue penetration to improve dose predictions
- Translate doses from non-human primates to humans using exposure-based rather than simple body weight scaling to improve safety margins
- Integrate target engagement biomarkers and pharmacodynamic endpoints into models that predict efficacious human doses
