En Li, Ph.D. is Co-Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Salubritas Therapeutics, Inc. He also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of K36 Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Prior to founding Salubritas, Dr. Li spent approximately 18 years at Novartis, where he held senior leadership roles including Vice President at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and General Manager of the Novartis R&D Center in Shanghai, China. In Shanghai, he built and led an interdisciplinary organization of more than 300 researchers and physician-scientists, overseeing drug discovery programs across multiple therapeutic areas, including cancer epigenetics, liver and metabolic diseases, and regenerative medicine. Under his leadership, the team delivered more than 20 novel targets and drug candidates into the global pipeline and advanced several programs to clinical proof-of-concept.
Before joining Novartis, Dr. Li was an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. His academic research focused on epigenetics and mammalian development. His laboratory discovered the human de novo DNA methyltransferases DNMT3A and DNMT3B and made seminal contributions to understanding the role of DNA methylation in mammalian development and human disease. His group also elucidated key functions of the TGF-β, BMP, and activin/nodal signaling pathways in mesoderm induction, organogenesis, and cardiovascular development in mouse models.
Dr. Li has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific publications and review articles. He earned his Ph.D. at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.