Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan, PhD

Dr. Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan serves as the Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation, a Scientific Advisory Board Member, and a Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2003, he was the founding chemist hired at Alnylam as the Head of the Drug Discovery. He and his team pioneered the discovery and development of numerous chemical modifications, GalNAc conjugation chemistry, lipid conjugates (the first in vivo demonstration of RNAi in 2004) and Lipid Nanoparticles (LNP) delivery platform that made RNA interference-based human therapeutics possible. This work led to the approval of five RNAi therapeutics: ONPATTRO® (patisiran, 2018), GIVLAARI® (givosiran, 2019), OXLUMO® (lumasiran, 2020), LEQVIO® (inclisiran, 2020, 2021) and AMVUTTRO® (vutrisiran, 2022). Dr. Manoharan has had a distinguished career as a world-leading chemist in the field of oligonucleotide therapeutics. Prior to joining Alnylam, he worked at Isis (Ionis) Pharmaceuticals fro