Company & Leadership - Vetigenics Team and Board Members

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Company & Leadership

Our Mission: Devoted to developing antibody-based therapies that allow pets with chronic diseases to thrive, not just survive.

Founding of Vetigenics

Vetigenics is a pet health biopharma company devoted to enabling pets to live their best lives. Vetigenics was established in 2017 to address the growing need within the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to generate fully canine research antibodies to treat dogs with cancer, as a parallel patient population to inform cancer treatments for humans. Vetigenics continues to support this important research in collaboration with the NCI, as well as ensure these therapies are available to veterinarians to treat pets with cancer and other chronic diseases.

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Pioneers in pet and human antibody therapeutics

Vetigenics scientific founders, Nicola Mason, BVetMed, Ph.D. and Don Siegel, Ph.D., M.D. of the University of Pennsylvania are internationally recognized leaders in veterinary medicine, immunotherapy, and phage display technology. Their complementary expertise naturally resulted in an unrivaled ability to generate and validate best in class antibody-based therapeutics to treat chronic diseases in both pets and humans.

Board of Directors

Leadership Team

Chand Khanna
DVM, PhD, Dipl ACVIM

Dr. Chand Khanna is the founder and Board Chair of Ethos Discovery, a non-profit incubator of scientific innovation with a deep interest in solving complex medical problems and improving patient outcomes.

Dr. Chand Khanna is a graduate of the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, in Saskatoon. He then received specialty training in the fields of veterinary internal medicine and oncology, first at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, and then at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Khanna is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Oncology). Following this clinical specialization, Dr. Khanna received a Ph.D. in Pathobiology from the University of Minnesota and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Lee Helman in the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He was recently awarded honorary membership as a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Pathology.

Following his post-doctoral fellowship, Dr. Khanna continued his work at the National Cancer Institute as the Head of the Pediatric Oncology Branch’s Tumor and Metastasis Biology Section and Founding Director of the Center for Cancer Research, Comparative Oncology Program. In 2011, Dr. Khanna was granted full tenure and promoted to the position of Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute. His research interests and responsibilities focused on the problem of cancer metastasis and the development of new options to treat patients with metastasis. He has over 100 publications in the area of cancer biology and therapy. He is the editor of a recently published textbook entitled, “Therapeutic Strategies in Veterinary Oncology

Dr. Khanna has held leadership roles in both veterinary and human oncology, including, president of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, chair of the Children’s Oncology Group Bone Biology Subcommittee, Director of the SARC (Sarcoma Alliance for Research through Collaboration) Developmental Therapeutics Committee. Dr. Khanna is a founding member of the Canine Comparative Oncology and Genomics Consortium. Dr. Khanna is a two-time recipient of the NCI Distinguished Mentor Award and was the 2010 recipient of the NCI Award for Outstanding Research. Dr. Khanna currently serves on the boards of life sciences biotechnology companies involved in human health and animal health and is Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board of the Osteosarcoma Institute.

Despite many roles throughout his professional career, Dr. Khanna self identifies as a clinician first. He was an active clinician within his referral oncology practices, The Oncology Service, based in the greater Washington, D.C. area, until 2021. He is also the founder of Animal Clinical Investigation, a contract research company involved in complex medical problems seen in pets.

Nicola Mason B.Vet.Med, Ph.D.,
DACVIM (Internal Medicine), FCPP, MRCVS

Professor of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania, Founder of Vetigenics, and a pioneering expert in Comparative Immunotherapy

Dr. Nicola Mason is Co-Founder of Vetigenics and serves as Co-Chair of its Scientific Advisory Board. She is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine and holds the James & Gilmore Endowed Chair Professorship. She received her veterinary degree from the Royal Veterinary College, London and her Immunology Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She performed her post-doctoral fellowship in cancer immunotherapy at the Abramson Cancer Center at the School of Medicine at Penn.

Dr. Mason’s translational research focuses on a comparative approach to accelerate the clinical implementation of effective immunotherapies – including engineered T and iNKT cells – for both human and canine patients with cancer and autoimmunity. Innovative clinical trials in pet dogs with spontaneous tumors including osteosarcoma, B cell lymphoma and high-grade glioma provide important safety and early efficacy data for both human and canine patients alike. Dr. Mason’s research using adoptive cell therapies is funded through federal and private foundation grants.

Dr. Mason leads the NIH/NCI supported pre-medical cancer immunotherapy network for canine trials (PRECINCT). The network is comprised of veterinary and medical clinician scientists, including oncologists, internists, surgeons and pathologists who share a passion for comparative translational research. Through innovation and collaboration, the network supports and accelerates immunotherapy research in canine cancer patients through NIH/NCI funded clinical trials.

Dr. Mason co-founded Vetigenics in 2017 to bring effective, non-immunogenic and affordable therapeutic antibodies and their derivatives to the companion animal space. These efforts aim to see the success of immunotherapies in the human arena translated into canine patients and working with Dr. Siegel, they have built the means and mechanisms to bring novel, effective antibodies, bi-specific T cell engagers, Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells, etc. into the canine clinic. Furthermore, isolated antibodies can also be employed in advanced veterinary immunodiagnostics, allowing for deeper insights into correlative biomarkers of clinical responses in dogs.