Elizabeth Wood, PhD

Elizabeth Wood is the founder and CEO of JURA Bio, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on developing innovative therapies, primarily in the field of immune modulation and cell therapies. Their approach combines cutting-edge advancements in synthetic biology, bioinformatics, and immunotherapy to address unmet medical needs, especially in oncology and autoimmune diseases. One of the company’s key strengths lies in its interdisciplinary approach, bringing together experts from diverse scientific domains to accelerate the development of novel therapeutic platforms.

JURA Bio recently announced the development of a novel generative machine learning architecture for the design of proteins called variational synthesis, a breakthrough in the synthesis bottleneck constraining our ability to build and test AI-designed proteins at scale. Variational synthesis has applications in enhancing drug discovery and understanding complex biological systems, leveraging machine learning and synthetic biology for precision medicine. It also allows us to build and test trillions more AI-designed candidates from generative models in the real world.

JURA Bio’s mission is to develop next-generation therapies that push the boundaries of personalized medicine, using cutting-edge biotechnological tools to improve patient outcomes across multiple disease areas.

Before starting JURA, Wood was a post-doc in the lab of Adam Cohen at Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Physics. She began her PhD with Angela Belcher and Markus Buehler at MIT, and finished it under the supervision of Claus Helix-Nielsen at The Technical University of Denmark, Departments of Physics and Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has also worked at the University of Copenhagen’s SBiN Lab with Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, integrating computational methods with experimental studies to better predict RNA structure and to understand how the ability of proteins to change their shape helps modulate their function.

Wood is a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute, where she serves on the steering committee of MIA. From 2019-2021 she served as the primary organizer of the NeurIPS Workshop Learning Meaningful Representations of Life. She currently serves on the board of Pure Home Water Ghana and Project Clio, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to advancing the study of the health impacts of pregnancy and understudied autoimmune diseases.

You can find her on Google Scholar, Linkedin, and Bluesky