Jill Wykosky, PhD

Venture Partner

Jill Wykosky is a Venture Partner at Raven. Prior to Raven, Jill was most recently Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Nocicera Therapeutics, a company developing non-opioid pain therapeutics. Jill was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Takeda Pharmaceuticals and has an established track record in drug discovery and development, having served as Head of Neurogastroenterology Research at Takeda. During her eleven-year tenure at Takeda, Jill built a biology and pharmacology team within the Gastroenterology Drug Discovery Unit and led a dynamic team across Research sites in San Diego, CA and Cambridge, MA focused on preclinical discovery from target identification and validation through early clinical. Jill’s role also included working across discovery, development, and commercial to establish a Disease Area Strategy for Neurogastroenterology and Motility Disorders, including a new research area in GI Neuroinflammation. Jill has led drug discovery programs across small molecule, peptide, antibody, and cell therapy modalities and has had key leadership roles in other companies spun out of Takeda. Jill’s academic career in Oncology research focused on the discovery of novel targeted therapies for the treatment of brain tumors and the modeling of resistance to small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitors in glioblastoma. Jill completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Tumor Biology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) San Diego Branch. Jill holds a PhD in Molecular Medicine from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and a BS in Microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh.