Alex is part of the Strategy team at Octant, with a background in neuroscience and molecular biology. She is passionate about using advancements in experimental tools and knowledge to help identify novel therapeutic strategies for patient populations with a high unmet need.Alex has a Ph.D. from John’s Hopkins, studying translation regulation in neurons, and later completed postdoctoral training in the Doudna lab, working between UC Berkeley and UCSF. Prior to joining Octant, she was Director of Asset Acquisition BridgeBio Pharma, focusing on sourcing, evaluating, and bringing in new therapeutic programs to the company pipeline. Outside of work, Alex spends most of her time hiking, traveling, reading, and trying to keep up with her overexcited dog.

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Amen AM, Loughran RM, Huang CH, Lew RJ, Ravi A, Guan Y, Schatoff EM, Dow LE, Emerling BM, & Fellmann, C (2022). Endogenous spacing enables co-processing of microRNAs and efficient combinatorial RNAi Cell Reports Methods 2, e100239

Amen AM, Fellmann C , Soczek KM, Ren SM, Lew RJ, Knott GJ, Park JE, McKinney AM, Mancini A, Doudna JA, & Costello JF (2021). Cancer-specific loss of TERT activation sensitizes glioblastoma to DNA damage. PNAS 118, e2008772118

IGI Testing Consortium. Blueprint for a pop-up SARS-CoV-2 testing lab (2020). Nature Biotechnology, 38, 791-797

Mancini A, Xavier-Magalhaes A, Woods WS, Nguyen KT, Amen AM, Hayes JL, Fellmann C, Gapinske M, McKinney AM, Hong C, Jones LE, Walsh KM, Bell RJA, Doudna JA, Costa BM, Song JS, Perez-Pinera P, & Costello JF (2018). Disruption of the beta1L Isoform of GABP Reverses Glioblastoma Replicative Immortality in a TERT Promoter Mutation-Dependent Manner. Cancer Cell 34, 513-528

Amen AM, Ruiz-Garzon CR, Shi J, Pham D, Subramanian M, & Meffert MK (2017). A rapid inductionmechanism for Lin28a in trophic responses. Molecular Cell 65, 490-503