Dr. Mason Freeman is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the lipid metabolism unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, and director of the translational medicine group at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Computational and Integrative Biology and the Massachusetts General Hospital clinical research program. He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He served as an intern, resident, endocrinology fellow, and chief resident in medicine in the department of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He trained as a post-doctoral research fellow in the laboratories of Alex Rich and Monty Krieger at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Freeman laboratory explores lipid trafficking in and out of macrophages and has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1990. Dr. Freeman also oversees a clinical development team, which created a novel oral anti-diabetic drug that is now entering phase three clinical trials.
On a leave of absence from Harvard in 2005-2007, Dr. Freeman directed the Novartis translational medicine program for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and served as the company’s global head of biomarker development. Dr. Freeman has provided consulting services to numerous life science startup companies, either independently or through his work at 5AM Ventures, an early-stage life science venture firm that has helped create more than 20 companies. In addition, Dr. Freeman serves on the board of Envoy Therapeutics, a neuroscience company acquired by Takeda in 2012, and holds a key medical advisor role at Relypsa, which developed the first chronic oral therapy for hyperkalemia.