Anabella Villalobos, PhD

Anabella Villalobos joined Metaphore in 2025 as Chief Scientific Officer.

Anabella brings more than 30 years of drug discovery and development experience to Metaphore. She most recently served as Senior Vice-President, Head of Biotherapeutics and Medicinal Sciences at Biogen, where she was responsible for the delivery of differentiated drug candidates for neurological, rare, and auto-immune diseases across multiple modalities, including small molecules, biologics, oligonucleotides, and gene therapy.  Prior to Biogen, she spent 28 years at Pfizer in positions of increasing responsibility, including most recently as Vice President of Medicinal Synthesis Technologies and Neuroscience Medicinal Chemistry. As a leader, her group at Pfizer was instrumental in the discovery of Ogsiveo® (nirogacestat), tavapadon, and other first-in-class therapeutics. She serves on the Board of Directors for Coya Therapeutics.  

Anabella obtained her B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Panama and her Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Kansas where she was a Fulbright-Hayes fellow. She was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University in synthetic organic chemistry for two years.