Mason Freeman

Mason W. Freeman, MD, graduated from Harvard College and received his MD at the University of California, San Francisco. He served as an intern, resident, endocrinology fellow and chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and trained as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He went on to become chief of the Lipid Metabolism Unit at Mass General in 1992, where he oversees an NIH-supported basic science research laboratory that studies cholesterol and lipid trafficking and a clinic devoted to the treatment of lipid disorders. In 2014, Dr. Freeman was asked to lead the new MGH Translational Research Center, a therapeutics development team that is helping investigators and biotech companies create new treatments for diseases ranging from diabetes to cholera. The most advanced of these programs is a novel oral diabetes drug that is in phase 3 development.

From 2005 to 2007, Dr. Freeman served as a head of the Novartis Translational Medicine program for Cardiovascular & Metabolic Diseases as well as global head of Biomarker Development. He serves as a consultant to multiple life science startup companies independently and through his work at 5AM Ventures, an early-stage venture firm. At 5AM, he has contributed to the creation of more than 27 companies, served on the board of Envoy Therapeutics, a neuroscience company acquired by Takeda in 2012, and played a key advisor role at Relypsa, which has developed the first chronic oral therapy for hyperkalemia, a potentially fatal condition affecting patients with kidney and heart disease.