Dr. Samuel Waksal is the Founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Graviton Bioscience Corp. Prior to founding Graviton Bioscience he founded Équilibre. Dr. Waksal founded ImClone Systems – the developer of Erbitux, as well as Cyramza, the first anti-VEGFR-2 antibody – serving as its Chief Executive Officer and President. ImClone Systems was acquired by Eli Lilly & Company in 2008. Dr. Waksal is responsible for four cancer-field antibodies available on the global market, as well as many others currently in clinical trials.

In 2015, Dr. Waksal founded MeiraGTx (NYSE: MGTX), a London- and New York-based company, which focused on gene regulation, ocular gene therapy, xerostomia, and neurodegeneration. He was also a founding director of Medicis Pharmaceuticals, a dermatology company, acquired by Valeant in 2013. Dr. Waksal founded Kadmon Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: KDMN) in 2010 – a publicly traded New York City-based biopharmaceutical company focused on pioneering medicines in the areas of oncology, infectious diseases, immunology and metabolic diseases – serving as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He also founded Merlin (a core part of Somatix), one of the earliest gene-therapy companies.

Dr. Waksal spent the first half of his career in academic medicine. He was a professor of pathology and the director of the Division of Immunotherapy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He also served as visiting investigator at the National Cancer Institute, Immunology Branch, a research associate in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University Medical School, an assistant professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, and a senior scientist at the Tufts Cancer Research Center. Dr. Waksal was a scholar of the Leukemia Society of America, has been a visiting professor at the Pasteur Institute in France, as well as the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He was also a member of the Board of Advisors of Rockefeller University. Dr. Waksal serves as a Visiting Fellow in Neuroscience at Weil Cornell Medical College, Feil Family Brain & Mind Research Institute in New York.

Dr. Waksal has published over 60 papers in such journals as Cell and Nature, as well as authoring chapters in biological texts. He is the recipient of numerous patents globally in the areas of cancer and immunology. For almost 15 years, Dr. Waksal served as the Chairman of the New York State Council for the Humanities at the behest of the Governor of New York State. Dr. Waksal has served as a board member for several public and private companies. He is also a regular guest host on CNBC’s Squawk Box.