Bioverge: Recent Episodes
The Bioverge Podcast
The Bioverge Podcast, hosted by healthcare investor Neil Littman, focuses on the intersection of bio + tech, and the entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders who are transforming healthcare to bring science fiction to life.
Kiersten Stead, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of DCVC Bio sits down with Neil to discuss her firm’s approach to deep tech investing in biotech, her focus on platform technologies, and how to separate what’s real from what’s hype in AI
Andrew Lo, Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, sits down with Neil to discuss his application of portfolio theory to address the challenges of funding drug development and how a Netflix subscription model can address the coming crisis in funding high-priced curative therapies approaching the market.
Faizzan Ahmad, Co-Founder and CEO of Cure8bio, sits down with Neil to discuss its growing portfolio of regenerative medicines in development, its hub-and-spoke business model designed to leverage resources and reduce risk, and its push toward curative therapies.
Nathan Hunkapiller, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Curve Biosciences, sits down with Neil to discuss liquid biopsies, the company’s efforts to expand the use of these blood-based tests to improve the treatment of chronic diseases, and how it is enabling earlier intervention.
Drew Titmarsh, Co-Founder and CEO of Dynomics, sits down with Neil to discuss that lack of innovative therapies to treat heat disease, the company’s discovery platform that uses engineered cardiac organoids that function like adult human heart tissue, and how the company is using this to develop precision therapies to address the root causes of heart failure.
David Li, Co-Founder and CEO of Meliora Therapeutics, sits down with Neil to discuss why the mechanism of action for cancer therapies in development is poorly understood, how this leads to a high and costly clinical failure rate, and how Meliora's platform technology uncovers the true mechanism of action of a drug and it enables it to identify promising drug scaffolds to accelerate the development process.
Anat Burkovitz, CEO of TrojanBio, sits down with Neil to discuss its AI-drive antibodies platform, how it enlists the viral immune system in the fight against cancer, and why she thinks the technology will broaden the population of patients who will benefit from immunotherapies.
Amit Etkin, Founder and CEO of Alto Neuroscience, sits down with Neil to discuss the lack of innovation in psychiatric medicines, how the company has identified AI-derived brain biomarkers, and how that is fueling its pipeline of precision therapies to treat mental health disorders.
Vineeta Agarwala, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's Bio + Health Fund, sits down with Neil to discuss their investment process, how technology is transforming biotech and healthcare, and why she thinks drug development is becoming more and more like software development.
David Kirn, Co-Founder and CEO of 4DMT, sits down with Neil to discuss the limits of existing AAV vectors and how his company is using its Therapeutic Vector Evolution platform to invent customized vectors that allows it to take a disease specific approach to unlock the potential of genetic medicines.
David Kirn, Co-Founder and CEO of 4DMT, sits down with Neil to discuss the limits of existing AAV vectors and how his company is using its Therapeutic Vector Evolution platform to invent customized vectors that allows it to take a disease specific approach to unlock the potential of genetic medicines.
Peter Kolchinsky, Founder and Managing Director of RA Capital Management and Founder of the nonprofit No Patient Left Behind, sits down with Neil to discuss his book “The Great American Drug Deal,” policy fights over pricing, and his organization’s efforts to make medicines affordable for all Americans.
Kriya Therapeutics Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO Shankar Ramaswamy sits down with Neil. He discusses how the company is changing the way gene therapies are designed, developed, and manufactured in an effort to cut costs, accelerate the time to market, and expand the reach of gene therapy to a broad universe of disease.
Francisco Gimenez, a member of the 8VC investment team, sits down with Neil to discuss how his background in data science and bioinformatics shapes his investment approach and the potential to transform drug development with technology.
D.A. Wallach sits down with Neil to discuss his journey from recording artists to venture investors, his co-founding of Time BioVentures, and his vision from transforming biotechnology and healthcare with technology.
Daniel Dornbusch, CEO of Excision BioTherapeutics, sits down with Neil to discuss his company’s efforts to develop CRISPR-based therapies to cure HIV and other viral infectious diseases.
Khosla Ventures Partner Gwen Cheni sits down with Neil to talk her migration from Wall Street to early-stage TechBio companies, how that has shaped her approach to investing in start-ups, and what emerging technologies excite her today.
Ramsey Homsany, co-founder and president of Octant Bio, sits down with Neil to discuss the company’s efforts to tackle complex diseases with next-generation small molecule drugs by harnessing synthetic biology to better understand the biochemical mechanisms of its targets, his unusual path to leadership of a biotechnology company, and Octant’s collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb to apply its platform technologies to a set of inflammation-related pathways.
On this episode, David Fajgenbaum, co-founder of Every Cure, sits down with Neil to discuss his new nonprofit, which is seeking to unlock the potential of already approved drugs to treat diseases for which they have not been approved. Fajgenbuam, co-founder and executive director of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, recounts the story in his book Chasing My Cure and how he saved his own life by finding a drug to repurpose to treat his rare disease.
Joseph Antoun, CEO of L-Nutra, sits down with Neil to discuss how his company is using state-of-the art science and randomized, placebo-controlled clinical studies to use diet to extend healthy lifespans and treat a wide range of diseases.
Trevor Martin, co-founder of CEO of Mammoth Biosciences, sits down with Neil to discuss the power of CRISPR as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool, his company's efforts to discover new CRISPR enzymes, and how the company is building a therapeutic pipeline through partnerships and on its own.
David Johnson, founder and CEO of GigaMune, sits down with Neil to discuss his company's efforts to develop in vivo cell and gene therapies to treat cancer and autoimmune conditions.
Jack O’Meara, co-founder and CEO of Ochre Bio, sits down with Neil to discuss the large unmet health need created by chronic liver disease and the company’s efforts to develop RNA therapies address it.
Tim Lu, co-founder and CEO of Senti Bio, sits down with Neil to discuss how his company is using synthetic biology to engineer cell and gene therapies with programmable gene circuits to make therapies that are safer, more effective, and precise.
On this episode, Neil sits down with Samantha Dale Strasser, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Pepper Bio, to discuss the company’s computational drug discovery platform and how its transomics approach can lead to the discovery and development of safer and more effective drugs.
Matt De Silva, founder and executive chairman of Notable Labs, sits down with Neil to discuss his company’s predictive precision medicine platform and its move to leverage its platform to develop its own precision cancer therapies.
Dennis Purcell, founder of Aisling Capital and former managing director of the Life Sciences Investment Banking Group at Chase H&Q, sits down with Neil discuss where biotech has been and what's ahead for the sector.
On this episode, Arnaud Lacoste, chief scientific officer of Aurion Biotech, sits down with Neil Littman to discuss the company’s experimental cell therapy to restore vision in patients with corneal endothelial disease.
Kareem Barghouti, co-founder and CEO of VastBiome, sits down with Neil to discuss how his company is using AI to map the gut microbiome to discover novel therapies.
This week Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Enveda Bio sits down with Neil to discuss AI in drug development, and the challenges of managing and forging a TechBio culture.
Lindy Fishburne, managing partner of Breakout Ventures, sits down with Neil to discuss investing in seed- and early-stage bioscience companies, and what she learned working with entrepreneurial scientists at Breakout Labs.
Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, sits down with Neil to discuss the COVID-19 delta variant, our failures to evolve with the virus, and what steps need to be taken to combat the ongoing pandemic.
Pete Schultz, CEO of Scripps Research, sits down with Neil to discuss his efforts to create a self-sustaining nonprofit drug discovery and development institute and it’s work to advance small molecule regenerative therapies from the lab to the clinic.
James Valentine, an attorney with Hyman, Phelps & McNamara specializing in regulatory law, sits down with Neil to discuss the FDA’s accelerated approval of Biogen’s Aduhelm for Alzheimer’s disease and offers a contrarian take on the controversy.
Juan Scarlett, managing director of OneValley Ventures, sits down with Neil to discusses OneValley's efforts to democratize entrepreneurship and his approach investing in pre-seed and seed funding rounds.
Amy DuRoss, co-founder and CEO of Vineti, sits down with Neil to discuss how the company’s platform technology addresses the unique supply chain management challenges of cell and gene therapy companies.
Brian Culley, CEO of Lineage Cell Therapeutics, sits down with Neil to discuss his company’s efforts to develop off-the-shelf cell therapies to treat degenerative retinal disease, spinal cord injury, and cancer.
Craig Laferrière head of vaccine development for Novateur Ventures, joins Neil to discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different COVID-19 vaccines in use and in development.
Rachel Kuperman, CEO of Eysz, sits down with Neil to discuss her company’s efforts to develop a digital health platform using passive eye-movements as input to measure, diagnose, and predict neurological disease starting with epilepsy.
Anthony DePasqua, CEO of EnClear Therapies, sits down with Neil to discuss the company’s technology in development to remove toxic proteins from cerebrospinal spinal fluid to treat patients with ALS and other neurodegenerative conditions.
Arvind Gupta, founder of IndieBio and co-lead of the engineering biology practice at the venture capital firm Mayfield, and Po Bronson, author and managing director and partner at IndieBio, sit down with Neil to discuss their new book Decoding the World, IndieBio, and the future of biotech.
About ten years ago, futurist Sonia Arrison in her book “100 Plus” explored the coming age of longevity and the broad impacts it would have. Now, as a venture investor, she’s backing companies that are positively impacting longevity through her 100 Plus Capital. In this episode, Neil talks to Arrison about the area of longevity, her investment approach, and how the field has evolved.
Greg Simon, former president of the Biden Cancer Initiative and former executive director of the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force, discusses his long career in healthcare that has cut across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. His work has extended from FasterCures, which has sought to build a patient-centric system to accelerate the development of therapies to the healthcare investment platform Poliwogg, which sought to democratize healthcare investing. Neil speaks to Greg about what he’s learned from his work, the themes that unified his career, and his own cancer diagnosis has changed his perspective
In November, voters approved a new $5.5 billion bond measure that extends the life of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The measure passed with far less fanfare than the original proposition that established the institute in the midst of a national controversy over embryonic stem cell research. With the passage of the new measure, the institute is expanding its work in emerging areas of regenerative medicine including cell and gene therapies and increasing its focus on translational research and clinical development. We spoke to Jonathan Thomas, chairman of the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee, which oversees the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, about the progress CIRM has made to date, what the new funding will enable, and how the institute hopes to help shape the future of regenerative medicine.