NEW YORK, Feb. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- VaynerX, the modern integrated advertising company founded by Gary Vaynerchuk, and The Marketing Academy (TMA), led by Founder & Global CEO Sherilyn Shackell, today announced a shared commitment to accelerating the growth of the next generation of marketing leaders around the world.
This shared vision was underscored at VaynerX's Future CMO Summit (FCMO) at The Ranch at Rock Creek in Montana, a two-day, invite-only gathering of 20 emerging marketers nominated by senior brand leaders. Designed as an immersive professional development experience, the Summit created space for honest dialogue, real-time learning, and reflection on what modern CMOs must know to lead in today's culture, creator, and AI-driven landscape.
At the heart of the effort is a unified belief from Vaynerchuk and Shackell: The most important person in the room is the future CMO and the industry has a responsibility to actively foster and invest in that talent now.
"Marketing is in the middle of a massive shift," said Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX. "Tomorrow's CMOs must be fluent in culture, creators, AI, and speed, and most importantly, lead with empathy and accountability. Nurturing that talent early is essential for the future of our industry."
"Our mission is to develop extraordinary leadership in exceptional talent," said Sherilyn Shackell, Founder & Global CEO, The Marketing Academy. "By aligning with VaynerX around this shared ambition, we can help rising CMOs build the confidence, capability, and modern skillsets required to thrive in an increasingly complex world."
Together, VaynerX and TMA will champion this next generation of leaders, including 1,400 TMA Alumni, across the U.S., EMEA, and APAC through coordinated development efforts and curated learning experiences. Insights from the FCMO Summit, including the importance of cultural fluency, community-centric leadership, content ecosystem thinking, and AI enablement will guide programming throughout 2025–2026.
Following the FCMO, planned VaynerX and TMA initiatives include:
- Curated leadership development sessions and modern skill-building experiences
- Roundtables and intimate gatherings for emerging CMOs
- Cross-regional connections and mentorship from VaynerX and TMA leaders
- Ongoing thought leadership exploring the evolving CMO role
The shared goal is clear: to equip rising marketing leaders with the tools, perspective, and community they need to shape the next era of global brand-building.
For more information and to stay updated on future VaynerX events, visit https://vaynerx.com/.
About VaynerX:
Launched January 2017, VaynerX is the most contemporary family of companies, working together to build and grow brands. Subsidiaries include VaynerMedia, Eva Nosidam Productions ChukMedia, Gallery Media Group, Tingley Lane Trading and VaynerSpeakers.
About The Marketing Academy
The Marketing Academy is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to developing leadership capability in talented marketers. With highly selective Fellowship and Scholarship programs for both emerging talent and CMOs across UK, EMEA, U.S., Australia and APAP, The Marketing Academy has become one of the most sought-after leadership accelerators in the industry.
Press Contact:
comms@vaynermedia.com
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VaynerX and The Marketing Academy Unite Around a Shared Vision: Developing the Future Generation of Global CMOs
HANGZHOU, China, April 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A team led by principal investigators Bobo Dang and Ting Zhou at Westlake University/Westlake Laboratory reported in Science a high-throughput platform for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. Their work, titled "A high-throughput selection system for fast-acting covalent protein drugs," opens new avenues for next-generation biologics.
Covalent small-molecule drugs have shown great success in cancer therapy by forming irreversible bonds with their targets. This has inspired efforts to extend covalent strategies to protein therapeutics, especially engineered miniproteins. However, their development is limited by a kinetic mismatch: Miniproteins are rapidly cleared in vivo, whereas covalent bond formation is typically slow. In addition, high-throughput platforms for systematically optimizing covalent protein reactivity have been lacking.
To address this challenge, the researchers proposed that precise spatial positioning of chemical warheads within protein scaffolds could enable molecular preorganization, thereby accelerating covalent bond formation without increasing intrinsic reactivity (Fig. 1).
Based on this concept, the team developed a high-throughput platform that combines yeast surface display with chemoselective protein modification to screen diverse crosslinkers and millions of protein variants. By optimizing warhead placement and the local chemical environment, the platform enables rapid and irreversible target engagement.
Using this platform, the researchers developed a covalent antagonist targeting PD-L1, termed IB101. Structural analysis revealed that IB101 forms a defined binding pocket that precisely positions the warhead in a reactive conformation, greatly accelerating covalent bond formation. Functionally, IB101 effectively blocks the PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint pathway and demonstrates strong antitumor activity in mouse models. Notably, despite its short in vivo half-life, IB101 achieves durable target engagement and tumor suppression, outperforming conventional antibody-based therapies under comparable conditions.
The platform was further applied to cytokine engineering, leading to the development of a covalent IL-18 variant, IB201. This engineered cytokine rapidly forms a covalent interaction with its receptor, enhancing signaling strength and duration. In vivo studies showed that IB201 induces potent antitumor immune responses without detectable systemic toxicity. These results highlight the potential of covalent engineering to improve the efficacy and safety of cytokine-based therapies.
Beyond immunotherapy targets, the platform was also applied to develop a covalent inhibitor targeting the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2. This molecule achieves durable viral neutralization, demonstrating the versatility of the approach across different therapeutic modalities.
This study establishes a general strategy for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. By enabling covalent bond formation on timescales compatible with rapid in vivo clearance, the platform overcomes a fundamental limitation in the field.
These findings provide a new framework for designing biologics with both rapid kinetics and sustained target engagement, with broad implications for cancer immunotherapy, antiviral therapy, and beyond.
Media Contact:
Chi Zhang
media@westlake.edu.cn
+86-15659837873
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Fast-Acting Covalent Protein Drugs From a New High-Throughput Platform
