Maryam Elfeki, Ph.D.

Maryam Elfeki is a technical specialist within the firm's Intellectual Property practice group. Maryam has extensive experience working with startups, bioinformatics, and natural products drug discovery and development. As an entrepreneurial scientist, she marries innovative science and business acumen to develop and facilitate the advancement of groundbreaking ideas via the development of commercialization, plans, partnerships, securing funding, and performing discoveries.

Prior to joining Lathrop GPM, Maryam co-founded Cryptyx Bioscience, Inc., in which she was the Chief Operating Officer, a biotechnology company that aims to uncover and commercialize small molecule cures from natural sources that cannot be accessed with other methodologies. Cryptyx aims to uncover and commercialize novel small molecule cures from microorganisms using patented technology (HiTES, High-Throughput Elicitor Screening) from the Seyedsayamdost lab at Princeton, where Maryam completed her postdoctoral research. HiTES elicits the production of microbial secondary metabolites that are not synthesized under standard growth conditions, thereby tapping into the vast collections of undiscovered "cryptic" metabolites encoded in bacteria. She has a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Illinois Chicago, where she led the development of a research collaboration on bacterial natural product genetics and coordinated research efforts across two multidisciplinary labs and one international lab, resulting in two first-author publications in one of the best pharmacognosy journals.

• Boys & Girls Club; Chicago Cares, Expand Your Horizons program
  • An organization dedicated to increasing the participation, retention, and advancement of girls and women in STEM fields. 
• Egyptians Aboard for Development, Founding member of the Chicago Chapter

• PEC VentureWell Pitch Competition, First-place winner, January 2022
• Princeton Keller Center 15th Annual Innovation Forum Pitch Competition, Second-place winner, October 2020
• Myron Goldsmith Scholarship, February 2018
• Center for Clinical and Translational Science/College of Pharmacy Predoctoral Education for Clinical and Translational Scientists Fellowship, August 2015