Vishwanath R. Lingappa

Vishwanath R. Lingappa is the Founder, Chief Technology Officer, and CEO of Prosetta Biosciences, Inc, in San Francisco. Since founding the company in 2003, he and his colleagues are responsible for bringing in over $35M through non-dilutive government contracts, while advancing several discovery programs into multi-year licensing and commercial development agreements with pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Elanco, and Takeda. Dr. Lingappa oversees all research and discovery efforts. In recent years he has expanded Prosetta’s core technology beyond infectious disease, to central nervous system diseases, oncology, and other therapeutic areas. Dr. Lingappa received a B.A. degree with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 1975, a Ph.D. degree from Rockefeller University in 1979, and the M.D. degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1980. He completed residency training in Internal Medicine before joining the faculty in the Departments of Physiology and Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1982, where he ran an NIH-funded basic research laboratory for over 22 years. It was during this time that the foundational discoveries on which Prosetta’s science is based were made. He has co-authored over 90 publications. He is now an Emeritus Professor of Physiology at UCSF. He is the recipient of a Kaiser Award for excellence in teaching (1990) and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004).