Alice McConnell | Chief Executive Officer
Speragen, Inc

My professional interests have always been driven by my deep desire to improve communities and solve problems. I have years of experience administering both private and government contracts, designing, planning, coordinating, scheduling, estimating, and managing large complex multi-year engineering projects. I earned my Professional Engineer’s as a Civil Engineer in 2003. In 2009 my daughter, Evie, was born. Not long after in 2011 her little brother Jack came along. Shortly after Jack was born, Evie was diagnosed with Succinic Semialdehyde Dehydrogenase deficiency (SSADHD). A rare inborn error of GABA metabolism. Jack was tested and he was also diagnosed with SSADHD. Their diagnosis led me to put my PE license on inactive status and submerged myself into the world of rare diseases. I quickly understood after hitting a wall with traditional pharma companies that due to our current diagnosed population size that we were going to need a different model to commercialize a treatment. This awakened me to the complexity of developing a treatment for an ultra-rare disease which led to the formation of Speragen. I co-founded Speragen in 2015 to bring a therapy for SSADHD. Speragen is focused on newborn screening, diagnostics, and patient focused drug development for SSADHD and other disorders of GABA metabolism.