Meena M
Senior Vice President, Translational DMPK & Clinical Pharmacology Stoke Therapeutics
Meena is the Senior Vice President of Translational DMPK and Clinical Pharmacology at Stoke Therapeutics. Prior to joining Stoke in 2018, Meena served as senior director of bioanalytical, pharmacology and biomarker development at Wave Life Sciences. She played a pivotal role
in building Wave’s stereopure oligonucleotide chemistry platform and in guiding the clinical entry of three antisense oligonucleotide programs. Earlier in her career, Meena worked at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals on siRNA chemistry and targeted siRNA delivery. Meena received her Ph.D. in chemistry with Dr. K.N. Ganesh at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India, and did her postdoctoral research on nucleic acid analogs with Professor Larry W. McLaughlin at Boston College
Seminars
This workshop interrogates transcript-level engineering using ASOs, including splice-site modulation, exon inclusion/exclusion control, and regulatory element targeting in mutation-driven CNS disease. Rather than reducing transcript levels, these strategies aim to reshape RNA processing, restore functional protein output, or rebalance isoform expression. The session will examine sequence dependency, structural constraints, and translational durability considerations that define success in nondegradative ASO programs.
Highlights Include:
- When is splice modulation superior to transcript knockdown in CNS disease?
- How do steric-block ASOs achieve durable functional rescue without transcript degradation?
- What are the discovery constraints in identifying effective splice-switching sequences?
- Can gain-of-function ASOs reduce dose burden relative to knockdown strategies?
