Diverse in our backgrounds, training, and thinking
United in our mission

As a venture capital investor, his past affiliations include Fidelity Growth Partners-Asia (Partner) and BioVeda China (Managing Partner). Representative Investments include CITIC Pharmaceutical (Board Director, Acting CFO), Cathay Industrial Biotechnology (Board Director), Hile Biopharma (Board Director), Hua Medicine (Shanghai) (Board Director), Innovent Biologics Ltd (Chairman), Adagene (Board Director) and MDDF (Board Director).

As a management consultant, his past affiliations include McKinsey & Company (Brussels), Ernst & Young (Palo Alto) and Life Science Strategic Consulting (Managing Partner, San Francisco Bay Area). As a Ph.D. scientist, he worked with Schering Plough (New Jersey), and is a key member of the discovery team of Zytia / Vytorin – a multi-billion drug. Leon was a Post-Doc at MIT and received his Ph.D. (with top honors) from the University of Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve and his B.S. from Peking University. Leon holds 6 issued US Patents, and is co-author of the 14th and 15th Ernst & Young Biotechnology Annual Report.

Dr. Trainor is a partner at BioMotiv which he joined after leaving Bristol Myers Squibb Company as Vice President of Oncology and Early Discovery Chemistry. At BMS George was responsible for all aspects of medicinal chemistry for the oncology area as well as hit-to-leads activities in support of all therapeutic areas. Prior to being merged into Bristol Myers Squibb, Dr. Trainor was Executive Director for Medicinal Chemistry at Dupont/Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals. His key contribution from that period was the discovery and commercial development of fluorescence-tagged chain terminators for use in automated DNA sequencing. This breakthrough technology was subsequently employed in the sequencing of the human genome, and In 2011, Trainor won the American Chemical Society’s Heroes of Chemistry Award for his work on DNA sequencing. Dr. Trainor did his undergraduate work at Stevens Institute of Technology, received his PhD in Organic Chemistry at Harvard University, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University.

As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Jonathan Weissman’s group at UCSF, Martin spearheaded the development of a functional genomics platform that makes it possible to robustly identify human genes relevant to a cellular process of interest, and to elucidate cellular pathways and networks using systematic genetic interaction maps. One important application of the screening platform is the identification of genes that control the sensitivity of cells to a given drug. This approach can identify the relevant cellular targets of new compounds, predict drug-resistance mechanisms, and guide the rational development of combination therapies.

Currently, the goal of Martin’s research is to understand how human cells maintain their proteins in a functional and balanced state. The cellular pathways safeguarding proteome function and balance are termed the “proteostasis network.” Martin aims to elucidate how the proteostasis network dynamically adapts to the needs of the cell and how it is challenged and rewired in diseases, especially cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Identification of proteostasis factors that control formation, spread, and clearance of protein aggregates associated with neurodegenerative diseases will shed light on the disease mechanisms and reveal potential therapeutic targets.

Martin has received several highly prestigious awards, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2015), the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2015), and the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (2014). The Kampmann lab is affiliated with the Innovative Genomics Initiative and the Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging Research at UC Berkeley and UCSF.