Adam Freund
Founder & Chief Executive Officer Arda Therapeutics
Dr. Freund has over two decades of experience in life science, with and a track record of building and leading teams to translate cutting-edge science into therapies for inflammatory and immunological disease. As Founder and CEO of Arda Therapeutics, Dr. Freund has pioneered the application of single-cell omics combined with targeted biologics to identify and then eliminate pathogenic cells that drive chronic I&I diseases, including fibrosis. Prior to founding Arda, he was a senior leader at Calico Life Sciences, where he helped grow the company from ~15 to 200+ employees and initiated and led multiple therapeutic programs, notably spearheading Calico’s first program targeting a validated longevity pathway, which is now advancing in clinical trials. He has published >30 papers and patents, which have been cited >13,000 times.
Seminars
- Single-cell mapping across hundreds of human donors nominates surface targets that mark pathogenic fibroblasts in IPF and fibrotic liver
- Cell-depleting biologics directed against these targets (ARDA-101, ARDA-204) eliminate pathogenic fibroblasts and cut collagen production in human IPF lung and fibrotic liver tissue, with rapid, target-dependent depletion in vivo.
- Close target-effector cell distance and low pathogenic-cell burden in fibrosis enable efficient tissue-level killing with a wide therapeutic window.
