Muthiah (mano) Manoharan PhD

Dr. Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan serves as a Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation, a Scientific Advisory Board Member, and a Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. In 2003, he was the first chemist hired at Alnylam. He and his team pioneered the discovery and development of chemical modifications, GalNAc conjugation chemistry, and LNP delivery platform that make RNA interference-based human therapeutics possible. This work led to the approval of four RNAi therapeutics: ONPATTRO (patisiran, 2018), GIVLAARI (givosiran, 2019), OXLUMO (lumasiran, 2020) and Lequio (inclisiran, 2020). Dr. Manoharan has had a distinguished career as a world-leading chemist in the field of oligonucleotides.

 He is an author of more than 225 publications (nearly 50,000 Google Scholar citations with an h-index of 101 and an i10-index of 399) and over 400 abstracts, as well as an inventor of over 250 issued U.S. patents. Prior to Alnylam, Dr. Manoharan worked in the field of antisense oligonucleotide therapeutics at Ionis (formerly Isis) Pharmaceuticals and LifeCodes Corporation (1988-1990).

Dr. Manoharan received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in chemistry at the American College, Madurai, India. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry (with Professor Ernest L. Eliel) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and carried out post-doctoral research (with Professor John A.Gerlt) in the field of oligonucleotide chemistry at Yale University and at the University of Maryland. Dr. Manoharan is the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (2019), the M. L. Wolfrom Award from the American Chemical Society (2007), and the D. Horton Industrial Carbohydrate Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society (2021).