We are changing neurodegenerative disease care as we have lived it

Sandra is the mom of spunky 4 and 6 year old girls. She is a former founding CEO in the nonprofit sector and has served in senior roles for the City of Chicago, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Department of Education and the White House. 

Sandra is married to and a caregiver for Brian Wallach who was diagnosed with ALS, a currently terminal illness, in 2017 when they were 37 years old and had their whole lives before them. After the diagnosis, Sandra co-founded I AM ALS with her husband to drive an impactful advocacy agenda based on community organizing principles.

Brian Wallach was diagnosed with ALS in November 2017. At the time of his diagnosis, he was 37, with two daughters under three. Since then he has become an outspoken, well known and impactful patient advocates. He is married to co-founder, Sandra Abrevaya, whom he met on the 2008 Obama campaign. Brian was an avid skier who ran the 400 at Yale. His favorite movie is Big Fish and his favorite band is the National.

In addition to co-founding the nonprofit I AM ALS, Brian was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Illinois from August 2014 to April 2018 and from July 2011 to April 2013, Brian served as Senior Vetting Counsel at the White House in the Obama Administration. Brian received his BA from Yale University and his JD from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Peter entered the healthcare space after Brian’s diagnosis, originally focusing on investing in targeted therapeutics that had the potential to be truly disease altering in ALS. With Synapticure, Peter hopes to resolve the lack of early intervention, access to quality care, holistic patient data and clear subgrouping of people living with ALS. These shortcomings of the current system have hindered the success of ALS trials broadly and made it difficult to bring forward drugs that focused on specific subsets of the ALS patient population and could better the lives of all people living with ALS.

Prior to working to help solve ALS, Peter worked in the cleantech industry before becoming a consultant at Bain & Company in their Chicago office. Peter received his MBA from Columbia University and undergraduate degree from The University of Virginia.

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Dr. Andrews has over 15 years of experience caring for people with neuromuscular disorders, primarily Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. In addition, she has extensive experience conducting and overseeing clinical trials in both the academic and industry setting and has held several leadership positions in organizations that focus on ALS clinical trials and care.

Dr. Andrews received B.S. from Union College, M.Sc. in Biostatistics (Patient-Oriented Research) from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and M.D. from Albany Medical College. Dr. Andrews completed her residency in Neurology at the University of Connecticut and completed fellowship training in both Neuromuscular Medicine and Clinical Neurophysiology at Columbia University. Dr. Andrews is board certified in Neurology, Neuromuscular Disease, and Electrodiagnostic Medicine.

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Jason Langheier, MD, MPH, is the CEO and Founder of Foodsmart – the leading provider of telenutrition and value-based foodcare -- making eating well simple and affordable for millions of Americans. Dr. Langheier did neuroscience, genetics and bioinformatics research at Williams, Duke, Cambridge and NIH, and received his MD from Duke, and his MPH from Harvard. Applying behavioral neuroscience and nutritional epidemiology training, he developed the pediatric obesity clinic at Boston Medical Center (Nutrition & Fitness for Life), Fitness Forward and the Coach K Drive 2 Fitness. He was the CTO and Co-Founder of Proventys (now US Oncology/ McKesson), collaborating with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network to deliver personalized cancer care decision support. He is an active member of the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) Board of Directors, and loves hiking, playing sports and music with family and friends.

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Jonathan Hirsch is a company founder, investor, and advisor at the intersection of healthcare, life sciences, and data. Jonathan founded Syapse in 2008, and during more than a decade of building the company, Jonathan defined and implemented a vision for transforming cancer care through precision medicine and real world evidence. Jonathan serves on the Advisory Boards of companies including Freenome, VizAI, and PaigeAI, and has helped shape the regulatory use of real world evidence through creating and serving as Principal Investigator for a Research Collaboration with the FDA. Jonathan has catalyzed national cancer data sharing networks, including serving on the White House Cancer Moonshot Data Sharing Working Group. As both an active investor and partner in venture funds, including the Kleiner Perkins seed fund and Rebel Fund, Jonathan has incubated and invested in dozens of companies at the intersection of healthcare and technology.

Chris is an experienced multi-disciplinary legal advisor and a former attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in New York and San Francisco. He graduated from Columbia Law School with high honors in 2009 and holds an A.B. from Princeton University.

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Christie Byrne is the Head of Product at Synapticure. She previously worked at Cricket Health, a start-up focused on early-intervention for chronic kidney disease patients, where she oversaw development of clinical products. Prior to transitioning into the digital health sector, Christie worked in clinical research at the Parkinson’s Institute, as well as at UCSF in the Memory and Aging Center, where she helped lead Care Ecosystem, a study designed to expand access to dementia patients via a remote care model. Having studied behavioral neuroscience in college, and after watching multiple family members battle neurodegenerative diseases, she feels a sense of urgency to help patients gain access to personalized, life-saving treatments, and is passionate about making that world a reality at Synapticure.

Graham is the Interim Chief Technology Officer at Synapticure, and a managing partner at GV. He was an engineering director at Google following the 2006 acquisition of JotSpot, which he co-founded with Joe Kraus. Graham was one of the original six founders of Excite.com and was the chief technology officer of the company until its sale to @Home. In 1999, Graham left Excite@Home to co-found DigitalConsumer.org, a 50,000-member non-profit consumer organization dedicated to protecting fair-use rights for digital media.

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Geoffrey Clapp has been involved with digital health before it was called digital health. As a founder, operator, and investor Geoff has helped lead and guide some of the most important and influential companies to fuse healthcare and technology. At Synapticure he is a partner to the leadership team and key advisor on technology and product directions. He is currently the SVP of Renal Care and Transplant for Optum.

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Chhaya Shadra is the former Vice President/Head of Product Management at Verana Health. She is an epidemiologist-informatician by training, bringing her deep understanding of public health systems engineering to care coordination and digital health. In her early career Chhaya worked in the field of public health in India, delivering WHO/UNICEF sponsored programs for the prevention of Hepatitis and Lung Cancer and for the promotion of healthy behaviors among underserved populations. Working with real populations provided a unique sense of empathy enabling Chhaya to look at data points as more than just numbers - in fact as real people. Her data and informatics expertise subsequently blossomed at innovative companies like Optum, Syapse and Flatiron Health. Having spent 20 years at the intersection of health and data, Chhaya’s recent work has focused on product vision, strategy and information architecture for integrated real world based precision learning health systems with one goal in mind - to generate evidence that moves the healthcare industry towards a holistic care paradigm and away from the currently siloed anatomically organized care.

Aaron Gitler is the Stanford Medicine Basic Science Professor in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. He received his B.S. degree from Penn State University and did his PhD studies on cardiovascular development in the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan Epstein at the University of Pennsylvania. Then he performed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT. In 2007, he established his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and moved to Stanford in 2012. His laboratory has been using a combination of yeast and human genetics approaches to investigate pathogenic mechanisms of ALS. He and his colleagues discovered mutations in the ATAXIN2 gene as a genetic contributor to ALS and has identified several therapeutic targets for ALS. He is a scientific co-founder of Maze Therapeutics