Anastasia Khvorova

Anastasia Khvorova, PhD, has more than two decades of experience pioneering oligonucleotide-based drug development. She began her scientific career in Moscow, where she completed her academic training and earned her doctorate in 1994. The following year, she moved to the United States, where she has conducted research at various universities and held senior positions in the pharmaceutical industry. She has co-founded several start-up companies.

Dr Khvorova has been a professor in the RNA Therapeutics Institute (RTI) and Program in Molecular Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School since 2012. She established the RTI Nucleic Acid Chemistry Center, which provides expertise in RNA chemistry to labs within and outside UMass Chan and is the only non-profit center in North America capable of synthesizing complex RNAs at scales necessary to support both in vitro and in vivo studies.

A prolific innovator, Anastasia holds more than 150 patents and is an elected fellow of National Academy of Inventors. She has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, including seminal articles in Cell, Nature, and Nature Biotechnology (citation index exceeding 2000 per article) defining the field of RNAi drug design and development. Anastasia has served as director-at-large/scientific & research council chair of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and currently is a director of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society.