Dr. Salzman is a physician, scientist, inventor, and biomedical entrepreneur. He received his undergraduate training in English literature, psychology, and German literature at Yale College. Following this he completed his medical education at Harvard Medical School. After this his pediatric internship and residency were at Columbia University (New York, NY). He continued with post-doctoral fellowships in pediatric critical care, neonatal critical care, immunology, epithelial biology, and pediatric infectious disease at the Weizmann Institute of Science in (Rehovot, Israel), Children’s Hospital Medical Center (Boston, MA), the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA), the University of Massachusetts Medical Center (Worcester, MA), and Beth Israel Hospital Medical Center (Brookline, MA). Prior to his entrepreneurial career in biotechnology, he founded and led the Division of Critical Care Medicine at Children’s Hospital Medical Center (Cincinnati, OH), one of the largest pediatric critical care programs in North America.
As an internationally recognized authority on free radical and oxidant mediated tissue injury, Dr. Salzman invented and developed the first poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitor (INO-1001) and the first adenosine 1 receptor agonist (INO-8875) to enter clinical trials. In addition to 175 peer-reviewed scientific publications, Dr. Salzman holds 40 patents in the fields of medicine, pharmacology, organic chemistry, and medical devices. Dr. Salzman has been funded by the NIH continuously since 1993, authoring 75 federal grants and receiving $75 million in federal grant funding. As a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Dr. Salzman founded and built Inotek Pharmaceuticals, a 140-person biotech company, raised $80M in venture capital, and concluded a $600M license with Genentech based upon a PARP inhibitor that he invented. In his capacity as CEO of Inotek, he brought numerous new chemical entities from conception into clinical stage testing, including a treatment for glaucoma that has demonstrated clinical proof of concept in late Phase 2 clinical trials. In his role as founder and former Chairman of Orphan Technologies, Dr. Salzman built a program of three novel enzyme replacement therapies for rare metabolic diseases. Currently, Dr. Salzman serves as Chairman of Radikal Therapeutics, Inc. (RTX), Salzman Capital Ventures Ltd. (SCV), Herring Creek, Ltd., and Respirometics Ltd., a Board member and scientific advisor to RDD Pharma Ltd., and the Director of Drug Development at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.