A Drug Discovery Leader Built Across Academia, Biotech, and Pharma

Dr. Reza Beheshti Zavareh is a molecular pharmacologist and drug discovery leader with more than twenty years of experience spanning academic research, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical organizations. His work has centered on advancing small-molecule therapeutics from target validation through lead optimization and candidate nomination, with deep expertise in screening cascade design, mechanistic characterization, and the disease-relevant cellular models that guide compound progression and portfolio decisions.

His career spans Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Calibr and The Scripps Research Institute, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, Ferring Research Institute, Trotana Therapeutics, and currently Montai Therapeutics — a trajectory that has given him a working fluency in how discovery science operates differently across academic institutes, global pharma, and venture-backed biotech, and what it takes to translate strategy into execution in each setting.

He has built and led multidisciplinary discovery biology teams, designed and scaled high-throughput and high-content screening platforms, and partnered consistently with medicinal chemistry, computational sciences, DMPK, and translational biology to accelerate design-make-test cycles. He continues to lead from the bench while shaping scientific strategy and organizational priorities — a combination increasingly rare at the seniority his roles have reached.

Building Discovery Capability, Not Inheriting It

At Trotana Therapeutics, Dr. Beheshti Zavareh built the discovery biology and molecular pharmacology function from the ground up as Associate Director — establishing the strategy, infrastructure, and operating model for small-molecule programs spanning RNA biology, oncology, and immunology. He directed multiple discovery programs from target validation through candidate nomination, defining the stage-gate criteria and pharmacology packages that governed progression decisions, and recruited and managed a multidisciplinary team of five scientists and associates.

That mandate extended beyond science. He presented program strategy and key decisions directly to executive leadership and the Board, contributing to portfolio prioritization at the organizational level. He served as site Safety Officer, building a safety-first laboratory culture through training, BSL-2 compliance oversight, and risk assessment. And he provided structured coaching and career development to scientists and research associates across multiple concurrent programs — developing them, in his words, into independent project leaders rather than long-term direct reports.

At Janssen, the mandate was different but the pattern was the same: establish capability that did not yet exist. He built and scaled high-throughput flow cytometry as a discovery platform supporting hit identification, lead optimization, mechanism-of-action studies, and translational pharmacology across immunology, neuroscience, infectious disease, and virology — then trained and managed the scientists and research associates who would run it after he moved on.

Fluent Across the Full Discovery Continuum

Few scientists at the director level remain genuinely hands-on across the full span of modern drug discovery: target-based and phenotypic screening, high-throughput biochemical assays, high-content imaging, high-throughput flow cytometry, biophysical characterization, translational pharmacology, and now AI-enabled discovery. Dr. Beheshti Zavareh has operated at depth in each of these domains rather than delegating them — a breadth that shapes how he designs screening cascades and where he places disease-relevant complexity within them.

His core expertise includes assay design from target validation through candidate nomination, screening cascade architecture and stage-gate decision frameworks, hit identification and lead optimization, SAR support and compound profiling, and mechanism-of-action studies built on biophysical, biochemical, and cell-based platforms. In cancer biology and immuno-oncology, his work spans hematologic and solid tumor signaling, cancer metabolism and glycobiology, tumor microenvironment interactions, T-cell exhaustion, and immune checkpoint pathways including PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4. In inflammation and translational immunology, his experience covers gastrointestinal, cutaneous, and B-cell-driven disease models, integrating histology, cytokine analysis, and translational phenotyping into program-level decisions.

This breadth is what allows him to design screening cascades that integrate biochemical, biophysical, high-throughput, and disease-relevant cellular assays into a single coherent decision framework — rather than treating each as an isolated technical exercise.

Publications Spanning Mechanism, Translation, and Therapeutic Impact

Dr. Beheshti Zavareh's publication record reflects the same continuum his career has spanned — from doctoral work establishing N-glycosylation as a functional regulator of cancer cell migration and metastasis (Cancer Research, 2008; PLoS One, 2012), through postdoctoral contributions at Calibr and Scripps on serine biosynthesis inhibition (PNAS, 2016) and a Cell Chemical Biology study demonstrating that HSP90 inhibition modulates immune checkpoint protein expression with direct relevance to checkpoint blockade combination strategies (2020).

More recent contributions include the identification of small-molecule inhibitors for the NK cell receptor NKG2D (PNAS, 2023) and a contribution to a 2024 Science publication on myeloid reprogramming via JAK inhibition to enhance checkpoint blockade therapy — work situated at the leading edge of immuno-oncology combination strategy. Across 24 publications and more than 1,460 citations, the throughline is consistent: mechanistic rigor applied to questions with direct therapeutic relevance.

AI-Enabled Discovery at Montai Therapeutics

As Principal Scientist, Early Discovery Biology at Montai Therapeutics, Dr. Beheshti Zavareh leads biological and molecular pharmacology strategy for immunology discovery programs within a machine-learning-enabled platform, guiding target progression from validation through early in vivo evaluation. He defines the integrated assay cascades, biomarker strategies, and progression criteria that link in vitro pharmacology, SAR interpretation, and in vivo endpoints — and establishes disease-relevant primary-cell and patient-derived co-culture models to improve translational fidelity and compound prioritization.

A core part of the role is mentoring and training scientists in advanced flow cytometry, laboratory automation, and AI-enabled discovery workflows, and serving as the internal expert for flow-cytometry-based ligand and receptor binding, receptor occupancy, and functional assays — including SOP design, quality control, and CRO oversight. He partners directly with medicinal chemistry, computational, PK/PD, and data science teams to integrate mechanistic and modeling insight into program decisions and portfolio prioritization.