Dr. Ezekowitz serves as CEO of Abide Therapeutics, a company he co-founded in 2011 with Professors Dale Boger and Ben Cravatt from the Scripps Research Institute. Prior to creating Abide, Dr. Ezekowitz was Senior Vice President and Franchise Head, Bone, Respiratory, Immunology, Muscle, Dermatology, and Urology at Merck Research Laboratories, where he was responsible for the drug discovery and development process from target identification through proof of concept. He worked closely with his commercial General Manager to develop the life cycle strategy for approved drugs in those areas.

He co-chaired Merck’s Joint Venture with Janssen to oversee the development of Remicade and Simponi in the EU. Prior to Merck, Dr. Ezekowitz was the Charles Wilder Professor of Pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and served as the Chief of Pediatric Services at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children and the Partners Healthcare System. He has served on multiple boards and committees, including the chair position of the Executive Committee on Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Board of Directors of the Partners Healthcare system, and the MassGeneral Physicians Organization.

He has also served on the boards of Anika Therapeutics and Natimmune, a biotech company that he founded. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Oxagen and Abide Therapeutics.He served on many committees at the Harvard Medical School and chaired the committee that led to the establishment of the Academy at HMS and served as a Scholar and Founding Member. He is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and a Fellow of AAAS.

He has also served on multiple NIH subcommittees. In 2008, he was honored with the establishment of the R. Alan Ezekowitz Professorship in Pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School.He directed the Laboratory of Developmental Immunology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a pioneer in the field of innate immunity and has over 150 publications.

His group played a major role in defining the structure and function of pattern recognition molecules like the mannose binding lectin and the macrophage mannose receptor. He was the Principal Investigator of an NIH Program Grant that included Jules Hoffmann (Nobel Laureate 2011 for the discovery of Toll receptors). His group’s contribution was the description of primordial phagocytic receptors. The work was published in Nature, Cell, and Science. Furthermore, his work on phagocyte biology translated the effects of interferon gamma in vitro to create an FDA-approved treatment for patients with chronic granulomatous disease, a rare phagocytic disorder in humans.

Dr. Ezekowitz received his medical training at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. At Children’s Hospital in Boston, he completed a second postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and his clinical training in pediatrics.