Dr. Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan serves as the Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery, a Scientific Advisory Board Member, and a Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Dr. Manoharan has had a distinguished career as a world-leading chemist in the areas of oligonucleotide chemical modifications, conjugation chemistry, and delivery platforms (lipid nanoparticles, polymer conjugates, and complex-forming strategies). Dr. Manoharan and his research group designed, synthesized and demonstrated for the first time the human therapeutic applications of GalNAc-conjugated oligonucleotides at Alnylam, a platform that has revolutionized the nucleic acid-based therapeutics field with several compounds presently in the advanced clinical trials. He is an author of more than 215 publications (nearly 45,000 Google Scholar citations with an h-index of 97 and an i10-index of 380) and over 400 abstracts, as well as an inventor of over 240 issued U.S. patents.
Prior to Alnylam, Dr. Manoharan worked at Ionis (formerly Isis) Pharmaceuticals and LifeCodes Corporation in the field of antisense oligonucleotide therapeutics.
Dr. Manoharan has been recognized as the Lifetime Achievement Awardee of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society for the year 2019. He received the M. L. Wolfrom Award from the American Chemical Society in 2007.