Making medicine from the building blocks of life

Marshon Nguyen

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Marshon Nguyen is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Synthena Pharmaceuticals. He founded the company in Hong Kong in July 2026 and directs its strategy, its platform and its research, with one aim: to turn PDRN into medicines made without animal-derived sources, produced within a defined fragment-length range and studied across five fields of human biology.

His training is in biomedical engineering, with an MSc from the University of Glasgow. He came to PDRN through a question that sits between engineering and biology: a material the body already uses, made today by extraction from animal tissue in fragments of many lengths, could it be made to a defined standard instead? Answering that meant working from plant and microbial sources, which are among the hardest to open, and building a method around each of the three steps, extraction, purification and the defined range.

In November 2025 he presented the work behind Synthena at a scientific meeting, eight months before founding the company to carry it forward. The presentation set out the platform as it stands today: a defined range of 20 to 80 base pairs, tolerability testing from the earliest development batches, and a record that keeps every measurement with its date, its sample, its instrument and the person who made it.

At Synthena he leads a small research team across biochemistry, biomedical engineering, pharmaceutical chemistry and microbial biotechnology. The team is held to one discipline he set from the first batch: a result is repeated before it is believed. He writes on the company's blog about why one substance, and what a defined length means for a medicine.