Jordan Koehn

About Jordan Koehn

Jordan Koehn, PhD, co-founded ForagR Medicines alongside Kevin Weeks, PhD, and Andrea Epperly, PhD. ForagR Medicines is an innovative biotech company, launched in 2024, dedicated to advancing transformative RNA-targeted small-molecule therapeutics poised to significantly enhance human health. Koehn lead’s the ForagR Medicines drug discovery platform as Head of Platform and Chemical Genomics.

A Leader in Biotechnology

Dr. Jordan Koehn has conducted extensive research throughout his academic and professional career. His career goal is to address major unresolved challenges in human health and disease as a leader in biotechnology. During his postdoctoral research with Dr. Kevin Weeks at UNC, Koehn invented the transcriptome-wide RNA-ligand discovery technology that has now evolved into the ForagR Medicines drug discovery platform. Using this technology, he explored how higher-order RNA structure mediates biological function. Koehn identified numerous novel RNA structural and regulatory elements by discovering and characterizing function-modulating small-molecule ligands that bind these structures.

Koehn also recognized that small molecules that interact with RNA have potential as a broad new class of therapeutics. RNA is an especially attractive drug target when the proteins involved in a given disease are difficult to drug. He is an expert in developing innovative technologies to create RNA-targeted medicines using small molecule synthesis and chemistry, molecular and cellular biology, RNA structural biology, and high-throughput chemical genomics.

Koehn has leveraged his expertise to become the lead developer of the ForagR platform and currently leads the team executing the ForagR platform technology. He has extensive experience managing research projects and interdisciplinary teams and led a highly successful collaboration with the BASF Corporation to apply the ForagR platform technology to develop novel insecticides and crop protection agents.