Few could have borne the indescribable tragedies Mathai Mammen and his wife, Anna, endured. What could be more painful than losing two daughters, four years apart, when both the kids were just six years old? If Mia died of a still-unknown illness in 2010, an undiagnosed case of appendicitis took away Laine four years later. Mathai and Anna were repeatedly struck by these horrendous personal blows, despite being top health professionals in the US with ready access to the best medical care available globally. Yet, this didn't numb Mammen into inaction. He dedicated himself as a “lifelong tribute to Mia and Laine”, to developing extraordinary medicines for patients with serious diseases that have long remained undruggable.

Mammen (59), whose parents migrated from Pathanamthitta to Canada when he was a toddler, is the chairman and CEO of Parabilis Medicines, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mammen’s career has followed in the footsteps of his mother, Molly Mammen, a technician scientist in a cancer lab at Canada’s Dalhousie University in Halifax.

This March, Parabilis’s newly developed drug, Zolucateride, was approved as an “orphan drug” to treat desmoid tumours by the US Food and Drug Administration. Orphan drug status is granted to medicines that treat rare diseases affecting fewer than 20,000 people in the US. Parabilis is now set to receive $125 million from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop a novel class of therapeutics.

Mammen, a PhD from Harvard University and an MD from Harvard/MIT, earlier headed the R&D of the drug division of Johnson and Johnson. He is on the board of Sandoz and is an advisor to many investment firms. In 2025, Mammen's salary was $1.3 million, and he owns $85 million in stock in Parabilis, a NASDAQ-listed company. His eldest son, Mathew (22), a brilliant student and dancer, plans to pursue a PhD in Physics.

Mammen is among an eclectic set of remarkable people with roots in Kerala who have made a global mark, featured in a recent book edited by two US-based Malayalis, Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. The book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges (Bryant, 2026), includes essays by prominent scholars on Kerala and interviews, published in the Global Indian Times, a US-based free online site. Besides scholarly articles on various aspects of Kerala, the book contains engaging profiles of entrepreneurs, artists, academics, and writers, both well-known and otherwise. All........

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