Bio

Mona is the Founder, Executive Director, and Chairman of the Board at Music Beats Cancer. She launched the organization based upon the challenges she faced with the funding gap, known as The Valley of Death, when she was founder at Foligo Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology start-up company. She founded Foligo in 2005 to develop and commercialize a DNA-based therapeutic compound, called FOLIGO 002, as a potential treatment for ovarian cancer. While Foligo was able to initially attract funding from various state-run venture programs in Maryland and business plan competitions — Cartier Women’s Initiative Award in 2008 — the company ultimately succumbed to the Valley of Death (the gap in funding from translational research to clinical application). In 2010, Foligo closed its laboratory and research activities due to a funding drought. While there is no guarantee that Foligo’s targeted therapies for ovarian cancer would have worked, there was enough promise in early proof-of-principle studies to carry the work on. Mona realized that breaking this funding bottleneck was a more critical priority than Foligo, and moved to devote herself to Sound Affects and its mission. Mona holds a Doctorate in Biochemistry from the Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest University. She trained as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute where she discovered Foligo’s lead therapeutic compound, FOLIGO 002. Mona was granted the SPORE Fellowship Award for Breast Cancer Research at the Lombardi Cancer Center of Georgetown University, where she continued to develop FOLIGO 002 as a potential treatment for cancer. She subsequently specialized in intellectual property and technology transfer while at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.