Our Leadership Team
Vijay Alreja
Vijay Alreja is the founder and director of VJT, a global leader in providing digital x-ray based non-destructive testing equipment and services. A certified Level 3 in RT and NT (Radiography and Neutron Radiography), Vijay started VJT in 1987 from his own garage in NY. Today, VJT has grown into VJ Group (VJG), a multi-national company with offices in China, India, and France, as well as strategic partnerships throughout the world.
Most recently, Vijay was part of the founding team of IITPL, a leading cardiac technology company. Within four years, IITPL has become the top cardiac cath lab provider in India and is now also manufacturing stents and balloon catheters in India. The company has also launched its cath lab products through Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe and is projected to have FDA approval in 2025.
Roger J. Hajjar, MD
Roger Hajjar is the inaugural director of the Gene and Cell Therapy Institute at Mass General Brigham. He received his BS in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University and his MD from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. Roger completed his training in internal medicine, cardiology, heart failure/cardiac transplantation and research fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where he then directed the Cardiology Laboratory of Integrative Physiology and Imaging. From 2007 to 2018, Dr. Hajjar was the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, and the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. From 2019 to 2022, Dr. Hajjar was head of R&D at Ring Therapeutics, a Flagship Pioneering company.
Dr. Hajjar is an internationally renowned scientific leader in the field of cardiac gene therapy. His laboratory has validated several cardiac targets that led to the initiation and completion under his guidance of First-in-Human gene therapy trials in patients with heart failure. He has authored over 500 publications and has received numerous awards for his achievements in the field cardiac gene therapy including the Young Investigator Award of the American Heart Association, the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Johns Hopkins University, the American Heart Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Thomas W. Smith Award of the American Heart Association.
He is the founder of multiple gene therapy companies, multiple of which have had successful exits.
Dhananjay Nawandar, PhD
Dhananjay Nawandar received his BS in Biotechnology from the University of Nebraska Omaha and his PhD in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His graduate thesis work focused on oncogenic viruses led to the discovery of multiple targets for treating Epstein-Barr virus induced tumors using oncolytic therapy.
During his postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, he worked on engineering various Cas enzymes to use them as epigenetic modifiers to regulate gene expression in variety of disease settings. Following that, he joined Ring Therapeutics, a Flagship Pioneering company, as the first employee where he led the virology and vector development team to develop a novel gene therapy platform.