People

Dr. Catalano is the founder of Cognition Therapeutics and architect of its proprietary and unique biological discovery platform that is based on unbiased phenotypic screens in the target cell population of mature primary neurons. Using her 15 years of industry experience, she and her team discovered and developed the company’s drug candidate CT1812 (Elayta), currently in clinical testing for the treatment of patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

Prior to founding Cognition Therapeutics, Dr. Catalano was director of discovery biology for Acumen Pharmaceuticals, leading the team that discovered Acumen’s lead candidates targeting Aβ oligomers. Earlier at Rigel, she led the team that pioneered the use of high content phenotypic screening to discover the Aurora kinase inhibitor R763. In scientific leadership roles within the neurophysiology and neuroimaging groups at Roche Palo Alto she led exploratory programs against targets involved in anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.

Dr. Catalano received her Ph.D. from U.C. Irvine and postdoctoral training at U.C. Berkeley with Dr. Carla Shatz and at Caltech with Drs. Mary Kennedy and Scott Fraser studying the neurobiology of synaptic plasticity.