BIOS: Recent Episodes
Alix Ventures
BIOS Podcast brings together cutting-edge insights from Life Science industry leaders at the forefront of innovation.
Join us in hearing from Founders, Investors, Professors, & Pharma operating at the intersection of Technology & Biology.
By Alix Ventures: Driving Patient Impact - Supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to drive radical advances in human health.
Learn more @ BIOS.community / Alix.vc
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Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Professor Dane Wittrup attended the University of New Mexico as an undergraduate, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering in June, 1984. Wittrup went on to attend the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he worked with Prof. James Bailey on flow cytometry and segregated modeling of recombinant populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Biology in 1988, he spent a brief time working at Amgen before becoming an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September of 1999, where he is now the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering, in addition to working with the Koch Institute as the Associate Director for Engineering.
w/ Special Guest Host: Jacob Becraft - Co-Founder & CEO @ Strand Therapeutics
Jake Becraft is a synthetic biologist and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, and serves on its Board of Directors. Together with colleagues at MIT’s renowned Synthetic Biology Center, he led the development of the world’s first synthetic biology programming language for mRNA. Jake has been featured in Fierce Biotech, Bloomberg, the Boston Business Journal, and BioCentury, among others, for his vision and mission at Strand of applying this unique platform for real world disease applications. He has also been the recipient of prestigious national and international awards for his scientific and entrepreneurial achievements, including the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Award, the Andrew Viterbi Fellowship of MIT, Amgen Fellowship, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb 2018 Golden Ticket for recognition of Strand as an innovative startup. Beyond his work at Strand, Jake’s broader interests span synthetic biology, biologically engineered organism-machine interfaces, and the intersection of tech and biotech methodologies. He is an advocate among the life science entrepreneurial ecosystem for supporting young founders in biotech entrepreneurship. Currently, he serves on the advisory board of Starlight Ventures, an early stage venture firm, and also serves on the Executive Board of Public Health United, a non-profit focused on helping scientists better communicate their research for maximum impact. Previously, he served as a Science and Technology advisor to legislators in the Massachusetts State Legislature. Jake received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT and his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating Magna cum Laude with distinction. He is an author or inventor on numerous high profile publications, patents and white papers, including in top tier journals such as Nature Chemical Biology and PNAS.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Holden Thorp became Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals on 28 October 2019. He came to Science from Washington University, where he was provost from 2013 to 2019 and professor from 2013 to 2023. He is currently a professor at George Washington University and on leave to serve as the Editor-in-Chief at Science.
Thorp joined Washington University after spending three decades at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he served as the 10th chancellor from 2008 through 2013.
Thorp earned a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from UNC in 1986. He earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1989 at the California Institute of Technology, working with Harry B. Gray on inorganic photochemistry. He completed postdoctoral work at Yale University with Gary W. Brudvig, working on model compounds and reactions for the manganese cluster in the photosynthetic reaction center. He holds an honorary doctor of laws degree from North Carolina Wesleyan College and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Thorp cofounded Viamet Pharmaceuticals, which developed VIVJOA (oteseconazole), now approved by the FDA and marketed by Mycovia Pharmaceuticals. Thorp is a venture partner at Hatteras Venture Partners, a consultant to Ancora and Urban Impact Advisors, and is on the board of directors of PBS, the College Advising Corps, and Saint Louis University. He serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Yale School of Medicine and the Underwriters’ Laboratories Research Institutes.
Thorp is the coauthor, with Buck Goldstein, of two books on higher education: Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century and Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and its Colleges and Universities, both from UNC Press.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Darrell Irvine obtained an Honors Bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from the University of Pittsburgh. As a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, he then studied Polymer Science at MIT. Following completion of his PhD, he was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow in immunology at the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. He is presently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also an Associate Director for the Koch Institute and serves on the steering committee of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. Irvine is the founder of Elicio Therapeutics, Strand Therapeutics, and Ankyra Therapeutics. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the MGH Cancer Center, the University of Toronto Medicine by Design Consortium, Venn Therapeutics, Alloy Therapeutics, Jupiter Therapeutics, Parallel Bio, Surge Therapeutics, and Gensaic Therapeutics.
w/ Special Guest Host: Jacob Becraft - Co-Founder & CEO @ Strand Therapeutics
Jake Becraft is a synthetic biologist and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, and serves on its Board of Directors. Together with colleagues at MIT’s renowned Synthetic Biology Center, he led the development of the world’s first synthetic biology programming language for mRNA. Jake has been featured in Fierce Biotech, Bloomberg, the Boston Business Journal, and BioCentury, among others, for his vision and mission at Strand of applying this unique platform for real world disease applications. He has also been the recipient of prestigious national and international awards for his scientific and entrepreneurial achievements, including the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Award, the Andrew Viterbi Fellowship of MIT, Amgen Fellowship, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb 2018 Golden Ticket for recognition of Strand as an innovative startup. Beyond his work at Strand, Jake’s broader interests span synthetic biology, biologically engineered organism-machine interfaces, and the intersection of tech and biotech methodologies. He is an advocate among the life science entrepreneurial ecosystem for supporting young founders in biotech entrepreneurship. Currently, he serves on the advisory board of Starlight Ventures, an early stage venture firm, and also serves on the Executive Board of Public Health United, a non-profit focused on helping scientists better communicate their research for maximum impact. Previously, he served as a Science and Technology advisor to legislators in the Massachusetts State Legislature. Jake received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT and his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating Magna cum Laude with distinction. He is an author or inventor on numerous high profile publications, patents and white papers, including in top tier journals such as Nature Chemical Biology and PNAS.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Stan Lapidus is an inventor and entrepreneur who currently serves on a number of healthcare and medical technology boards.
He’s been founding CEO of three medical diagnostics companies. Two of them have been among the most successful diagnostics startups of all time: Cytyc Corp., which he founded in 1987 and which revolutionized early detection of cervical cancer through its development of the modern Pap test—the ThinPrep. The two ThinPrep prototypes are at the Smithsonian’s American Museum of National History. And, EXACT Sciences, which he founded in 1995, which pioneered non-invasive early detection of colorectal cancer through its Cologuard test. Since its introduction, Cologuard has become the fastest growing test in the history of the diagnostics industry.
Stan holds 37 patents, primarily in methods for early detection of cancer. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2014 for his work on the early detection of cancer. He also served as an instructor at MIT from 2001 to 2017.
Stan graduated from Cooper Union in New York City with a BS degree in electrical engineering.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David joined Seagen as Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors in 2022, bringing more than 30 years of drug development, deal making, commercialization and people leadership experience on a global scale. Prior to Seagen, he was executive partner at Flagship Pioneering. From 2010 to mid-2016 he served as Chief Executive Officer of Novartis Pharmaceuticals, a division of Novartis AG.
Previously, David started and led Novartis’ Oncology and Molecular Diagnostic units. Over the course of his career, he led the development and commercialization of over 30 new molecular entities, including major breakthroughs such as Glivec, Tasigna, Gilenya, Cosentyx and Entresto.
Mr. Epstein holds a B.S. Degree in Pharmacy from Rutgers University College of Pharmacy and an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He serves as a member of the board of directors for OPY Acquisition Corp. I and Senti Biosciences, Inc.
w/ Special Guest Host: Brian Fiske - Co-Founder & CSO @ Mythic Therapeutics
Brian co-founded Mythic in 2017 and currently serves as Mythic’s Chief Scientific Officer. Prior to Mythic, he was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Ohana Biosciences and a Senior Associate at Flagship Ventures, where he also co-founded KSQ Therapeutics. During his time at Flagship, Brian successfully led R&D teams to key milestones, recruited 25+ FTEs across all levels of seniority, and raised $34M across multiple rounds of financing. In 2016, he was nationally recognized for healthcare entrepreneurship by Forbes 30 under 30.
Prior to Flagship, Brian completed his PhD in biology in Matt Vander Heiden’s lab at MIT where he published over 10 papers in the field of cancer metabolism. He also worked closely with Agios Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AGIO) on their cancer metabolism programs, which have since translated into four clinical programs that include two approved drugs. He holds an AB summa cum laude in Biochemical Sciences with a secondary field in Economics from Harvard University.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Vijay Kuchroo is the Samuel L. Wasserstrom Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Senior Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Co-Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, at the Brigham Research Institutes, Boston. He is also an associate member of the Broad Institute, and a participant in a Klarman Cell Observatory project that focuses on T cell differentiation. He is the founding Director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His major research interests include autoimmune diseases—particularly the role of co-stimulation—the genetic basis of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis and multiple sclerosis, as well as cell surface molecules and regulatory factors that regulate the induction of T cell tolerance and dysfunction. His laboratory bred several transgenic mice that serve as animal models for human multiple sclerosis. The Kuchroo laboratory was also the first to describe the TIM family of genes, and identified Tim-3 as an inhibitory receptor expressed on T cells, which is now being exploited for cancer immunotherapy. He was first to describe the development of highly pathogenic Th17 cells, which have been shown to induce multiple different autoimmune diseases in humans. Kuchroo is the lead author on a paper describing the development of Th17, which is one of the most cited papers in the field of Immunology.
Kuchroo came to the United States in 1985, as a Fogarty International Fellow at The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD for one year, before joining the department of pathology at Harvard Medical School, as a research fellow. Later, he joined the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a junior faculty member in 1992.
He obtained his degree in Veterinary Medicine from the College of Veterinary Medicine, Hisar, India. Subsequently, he specialized in pathology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1985. He received the Fred Z. Eager Research Prize and medal for his Ph.D. research work at the University of Queensland. Based on his contributions, he was awarded the Javits Neuroscience Award by the National Institutes of Health in 2002 and the Ranbaxy prize in Medical Research from the Ranbaxy Science Foundation in 2011. He was named Distinguished Eberly Lecturer in 2014, and obtained a Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty Lecture/Prize in 2014.
Kuchroo has 25 patents and has founded 5 different biotech companies including CoStim Pharmaceuticals and Tempero Pharmaceuticals. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards and works in advisory capacity to a number of internationally recognized pharmaceutical companies including: Biocon, Syngene, Pfizer, Novartis and Glaxo-Smith-Klein (GSK).
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Weitz is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics & Applied Physics and professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University.
Weitz is best known for his work in the areas of diffusing-wave spectroscopy, microrheology, microfluidics, rheology, fluid mechanics, interface and colloid science, colloid chemistry, biophysics, complex fluids, soft condensed matter physics, phase transitions, the study of glass and amorphous solids, liquid crystals, self-assembly, surface-enhanced light scattering, and diffusion-limited aggregation.
He received his PhD in superconductivity from Harvard and worked as a research physicist at Exxon Research and Engineering for nearly 18 years, prior to becoming a Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, before moving to Harvard in 1999. David is a Founder of many startups, including Raindance Technologies, GnuBio, Capsum, HiFiBio, BioMillenia, 1Cell-Bio, NextGen, Calyxia, Transition Bio and DragonDrop Inn. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Liu is the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice-chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. Liu’s research integrates chemistry and evolution to illuminate biology and enable next-generation therapeutics. His major research interests include the engineering, evolution, and in vivo delivery of genome editing proteins such as base editors and prime editors to study and treat genetic diseases; the evolution of proteins with novel therapeutic potential using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE); and the discovery of bioactive synthetic small molecules and synthetic polymers using DNA-templated organic synthesis and DNA-encoded libraries. Base editing—the first general method to perform precision gene editing without double-stranded breaks, and a Science 2017 Breakthrough of the Year finalist—as well as prime editing, PACE, and DNA-templated synthesis are four examples of technologies pioneered in his laboratory. These technologies are used by thousands of labs around the world and have enabled the study and potential treatment of many genetic diseases. Four base editing clinical trials are already underway to treat leukemia, hypercholesterolemia, beta-thalassemia, and sickle-cell disease, with the first base editing clinical readout occuring last December, when it was announced that Alyssa, a 13-year-old girl in the UK, was cleared of T-cell leukemia by receiving triply base-edited CAR-T cells.
Liu graduated first in his class at Harvard College in 1994. During his doctoral research at UC Berkeley, Liu initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. He earned his PhD in 1999 and became assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University in the same year. He was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and to full professor in 2005.
Liu became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2005 and joined the JASONs, academic science advisors to the U.S. government, in 2009. In 2016 he became a Core Institute Member and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Director of the Chemical Biology and Therapeutics Science Program. Liu has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2022 King Faisal Prize Laureate in Medicine.
He is the founder or co-founder of several biotechnology and therapeutics companies, including Prime Medicine, Beam Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, Exo Therapeutics, Chroma Medicine, Resonance Medicine, and Nvelop Therapeutics.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Chad Mirkin is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the George B. Rathmann Prof. of Chemistry, Prof. of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Prof. of Biomedical Engineering, Prof. of Materials Science & Engineering, and Prof. of Medicine at Northwestern University.
He is a chemist and a world-renowned nanoscience expert, who is known for his discovery and development of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) and SNA-based biodetection and therapeutic schemes, the invention of Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) and related cantilever-free nanopatterning methodologies, On-Wire Lithography (OWL), Co-Axial Lithography (COAL), and contributions to supramolecular chemistry and nanoparticle synthesis. He is the author of over 850 manuscripts and over 1,200 patent applications worldwide (over 400 issued), and the founder of multiple companies, including Nanosphere, AuraSense, TERA-print, Azul 3D, MattIQ, and Flashpoint Therapeutics.
Mirkin has been recognized for his accomplishments with over 250 national and international awards. These include the King Faisal Prize in Science, the Faraday Medal, UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in Life Sciences, Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine, the SCI Perkin Medal, Friendship Award, Nano Research Award, AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Award, Richards Award and Medal, Harrison Howe Award, the Remsen Award, Ralph N. Adams Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, the RUSNANOPRIZE, the Nichols Medal, the 2016 Dan David Prize, the inaugural NAS Sackler Prize in Convergence Research, the RSC Centenary Prize, the Friends of the National Library of Medicine Distinguished Medical Science Award, the 2014 National Security Science and Engineering Fellowship (NSSEFF) Award, the 2014 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (2002-2012), the ACS Nano Lectureship Award for the Americas, the Vittorio deNora Award (The Electrochemical Society), the Linus Pauling Medal, the Thomson Reuters “Nobel-Class” Citation Laureate, RSC’s “Chemistry World” Entrepreneur of the Year Award, a Honorary Membership in the Materials Research Society of India, the Walston Chubb Award for Innovation, an Honorary Degree from Nanyang Technological Univ. Singapore, recognition as the Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Visitor to Singapore, an Honorary Professorship from Hunan Univ. China, the ACS Award for Creative Invention, the Herman S. Bloch Award for Scientific Excellence in Industry, an Einstein Professorship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Edward Mack Jr. Memorial Award, the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Havinga Medal, the Gustavus John Esselen Award, the Biomedical Eng. Society’s Distinguished Achievement Award, a DoD NSSEFF Award, the Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award, the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award, the iCON Innovator of the Year Award, a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Collegiate Inventors Award, an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Dickinson College, the Pennsylvania State Univ. Outstanding Science Alumni Award, the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry, a Dickinson College Metzger-Conway Fellowship, the 2003 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, the Leo Hendrick Baekeland Award, Crain’s Chicago Business “40 under 40 Award,” the Discover 2000 Award for Technological Innovation, I-Street Magazine’s Top 5 List for Leading Academics in Technology, the Materials Research Society Young Investigator Award, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, the PLU Fresenius Award, the Harvard University E. Bright Wilson Prize, the BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, the DuPont Young Professor Award, the NSF Young Investigator Award, the Naval Young Investigator Award, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award.
Mirkin served as a Member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (Obama Administration) for eight years, and he is one of very few scientists to be elected to all three US National Academies (Medicine, Science, and Engineering), and in addition, he is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Materials Research Society, and others. Mirkin has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of over 30 scholarly journals, including JACS, Acc. Chem. Res., Angew. Chem., Adv. Mater., Biomacromolecules, Macromolecular Bioscience, SENSORS, Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Chem. Eur. J., Chemistry & Biology, Nanotechnology Law & Business, The Scientist, J. Mater. Chem., J. Cluster Sci., and Plasmonics. He is the founding editor of the journal Small, one of the premier international nanotechnology journals, and he has co-edited multiple bestselling books.
Mirkin holds a B.S. degree from Dickinson College (1986, elected into Phi Beta Kappa) and a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Penn. State Univ. (1989). He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT prior to becoming a professor at Northwestern Univ. in 1991.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Harvey Lodish is a Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is a Professor of Biology and a Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He serves as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and is an Associate (Foreign) Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
As a member of the Board of Trustees of Boston Children’s Hospital, Professor Lodish chairs the Board of Trustees Research Committee. As the Founding Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center from 2008 to 2016, he oversaw the state’s $1 billion investments in the life sciences.
Starting in 1973, his laboratory concentrated on the biogenesis, structure, and function of several important secreted and plasma membrane glycoproteins. To date, his group has made key discoveries in the fields of red blood cell development and therapeutics, long non-coding RNAs, and adipocyte biology. Most recently, his laboratory developed culture systems for generating mature human red blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells.
He co-founded Rubius Therapeutics, a company that uses gene- and enzyme-modified red blood cells as vehicles for the long- term introduction of many novel therapeutics, immunomodulatory agents, and diagnostic imaging probes into the human body.
Lodish has extensive experience in the biotechnology industry. He was a founding member (1980) and Principal of the consulting company BIA. He was a founder and scientific advisory board member of Genzyme, Inc. He was also a scientific founder of Arris (now Axys) Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. In addition, he was formerly a scientific advisory board member of AstraZeneca, Genset SA, and Dyax Corporation.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Jeff Bluestone is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sonoma Biotherapeutics and the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Diabetes Center of The University of California, San Francisco.
Bluestone is a highly accomplished scientific researcher and international leader in the field of immunotherapy and has published more than 500 papers over nearly four decades focused on understanding the basic processes that control T-cell activation and immune tolerance in autoimmunity, organ transplantation and cancer. His research has led to the development and commercialization of multiple immunotherapies, including the first FDA-approved drug targeting T-cell costimulation to treat autoimmune disease and organ transplantation and the first FDA-approved CTLA-4 antagonist drugs for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. He was part of the team of early developers of a novel anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody, now called teplizumab, a pro-tolerogenic drug that has shown clinical activity in type 1 diabetes, psoriatic arthritis, and the reversal of kidney transplant rejection.
In addition to his research, Bluestone was the founding director of the Immune Tolerance Network, the largest NIH-funded multicenter clinical immunology research program, testing novel immunotherapies in transplantation, autoimmunity, and asthma/allergy. He recently led the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy as president and CEO. He served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel, a board of scientific experts appointed by then Vice President Joe Biden to guide the NCI Cancer Moonshot Research Initiative.
He was also the Ludwig Professor and director of the Ben May Institute at The University of Chicago and served as a senior investigator at the NCI. Bluestone holds a BS and an MS from Rutgers University and a PhD in immunology from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Frank Nestle is global head of research and chief scientific officer at Sanofi, with responsibility for its main therapeutic research areas of immunology and inflammation, oncology, neurology, rare diseases, hematology, and genomic medicine. Before joining Sanofi in 2016, Nestle was a professor and chair of cutaneous medicine and immunotherapy at King’s College London and practiced medicine at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital. At King’s College, he led research, translational clinical trials, and teams in dermatology, allergology, and immunology. He also held several executive roles, in particular at the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Biomedical Research Center.
Nestle is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a senior investigator emeritus at the National Institute for Health Research, and past president of the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies. He has published over 220 scientific articles and has received several awards and honors, including the Alfred Marchionini Research Award at the 20th World Congress of Dermatology.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Jay Keasling is the Philomathia Professor of Alternative Energy at the University of California, Berkeley in the Departments of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Chief Executive Officer of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Dr. Keasling’s research focuses on the metabolic engineering of microorganisms for degradation of environmental contaminants or for environmentally friendly synthesis of drugs, chemicals, and fuels. Keasling received a B.S. in Chemistry and Biology from the University of Nebraska and M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and did post-doctoral research in biochemistry at Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Carolyn Bertozzi is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Chemical & Systems Biology (by courtesy) at Stanford University, the Baker Family Director at Sarafan ChEM-H, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She completed her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1988 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1993. After completing postdoctoral work at UCSF in the field of cellular immunology, she joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996. In June 2015, she joined the faculty at Stanford University as an Institute Scholar at Sarafan ChEM-H.
Bertozzi's research interests span the disciplines of chemistry and biology. She invented the concept of “bioorthogonal chemistry” and has widely applied such reactions to study biological processes and build new types of molecular therapeutics. As well, her lab studies the roles of cell surface glycosylation in human health and disease. Her lab focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and bacterial infection, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the area of immuno-oncology.
Bertozzi has been recognized with many honors and awards for both her research and teaching accomplishments. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and she is a Foriegn Fellow of the Royal Society, UK. Her efforts in undergraduate education have earned her the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award and the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Some awards of note include the Lemelson-MIT award for inventors, Ernst Schering Prize, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, and just last week, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Joel Dudley is a Partner @ Innovation Endeavors and an experienced leader, medical professional, researcher, and entrepreneur.
Joel previously served as the Chief Scientific Officer at Tempus, a company focused on bringing the power of data and artificial intelligence to healthcare. Before joining Tempus, Joel was an Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and founding Director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He also served as Executive Vice President for Precision Health for the Mount Sinai Health System. Prior to joining Innovation Endeavors, Joel co-founded Onegevity Health (acquired by Thorne), a company developing health intelligence platforms for preventative health, and NuMedii, a company developing machine learning and A.I. approaches for drug discovery. Joel has published 200+ peer-reviewed research papers that have been referenced and featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, CNBC, and other popular media outlets.
Joel earned a BS in Microbiology from Arizona State University and an MS and Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University School of Medicine.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Carlos Bustamante, over the past 15 years, has led a multidisciplinary team working on problems at the interface of computational and biological sciences. Much of his research has focused on genomics technology and its application in medicine, agriculture, and evolutionary biology. His first academic appointment was at Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. There, much of his work focused on population genetics and agricultural genomics motivated by a desire to improve the foods we eat and the lives of the animals upon which we depend. He moved to Stanford in 2010, to focus on enabling clinical and medical genomics on a global scale. He has been particularly focused on reducing health disparities in genomics by: (1) calling attention to the problem raised by >95% of participants in large-scale studies being of European descent; and (2) broadening representation of understudied groups, particularly U.S. minority populations and those from Latin America. Taken together, this work has empowered decision-makers to utilize genomics and data science in the service of improving human health and wellbeing. As Inaugural Chair of Stanford's new Department of Biomedical Data Science, his future goal is to scale these operations from focusing on researchers to consumers and patients, where we ultimately want our work to have the greatest impact.
In 2017, Bustamante was appointed a Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator and, from 2011–2016, he was a MacArthur Fellow. He also received a Stanford Prize in Population Genetics and Society in 2016, a Sloan Research-Fellowship in Molecular Biology from 2007–2009, and a Marshall-Sherfield Fellowship from 2001–2002. Bustamante also has a strong interest in building new academic units, non-profits, and companies. He is Founding Director (with Marcus Feldman) of the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (CEHG), and former Founding Associate Director of the Cornell Center for Comparative and Population Genomics (3CPG).
He serves as an advisor to the US federal government, private companies, startups, and non-profits in the areas of computational genomics, population and medical genetics, and veterinary and plant genomics. He is currently Director of EdenRoc Sciences, Founder @ Arc Bio, & an SAB member of: Embark Veterinary, the Mars/IBM Food Safety Board, & Digitalis Ventures.
Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Lee Cooper is Senior Director of Venture Investments @ Leaps by Bayer, where he aims to contribute to new biotechnologies that enable patients and communities to live healthier lives. Lee is on the faculty of Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and teaches “The Ecosystem for Bio-Innovation.” Prior to joining Leaps, Lee was Entrepreneur-in-Residence with RA Capital and founder of Enlight Bio, a biotech focused on genetic disease. Previously, Lee worked in corporate development for Moderna Therapeutics, leading and supporting transactions, financings, and partnerships to develop novel therapeutics and vaccines.
Lee serves on the Boards of multiple therapeutic platform-focused biotech companies. He is the founder of the Institute for Genetic Disease Prevention and has written on innovation and ethics for Wired, Slate, Neo.Life, and STAT News.
Lee earned his J.D. and M.B.A. from Columbia University, and graduated from Dartmouth College with an A.B. in Religion and Public Policy.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Patrick Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a co-founder and core investigator at the Arc Institute. He is a pioneer of CRISPR technology. In his Lab at Berkeley, Patrick seeks to improve our understanding and ability to control genetic circuits for the advancement of human health. His academic work has been featured in multiple prestigious awards, including Forbes’ 30 Under 30, the NIH Early Independence Award, and the MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 to name a few.
Patrick co-founded Arc to advance our understanding of the root causes of complex diseases. Arc seeks to accelerate discovery by enabling the impactful, potentially risky, long-term, moonshot projects through financial and operational enablement. Without the systemic pressure to constantly write grants, Arc aims to unlock the full potential of the brilliant minds of our country’s top scientists.
Patrick holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Biological Engineering from Harvard, an A.M. in Biology from Harvard, and a B.S. in Molecular & Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Kaufman is a Partner @ Third Rock Ventures.
Before joining TRV, he was Chief Medical Officer and head of translational development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (MRI). He helped establish the Gates MRI as a "nonprofit biotech," developing novel drugs and vaccines for tuberculosis, malaria, enteric diseases, neonatal health, and other global health challenges. Prior to that, Kaufman led translational oncology at Merck Research Laboratories, where he oversaw immuno-oncology translational medicine, novel biomarker development and global translational research partnering. He joined Merck through the Merck Drug Development and Leadership Program, and worked across vaccines, infectious diseases and clinical oncology. Before joining Merck, he was a physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Kaufman received his M.D. from Cornell University School of Medicine and his Ph.D. in immunology and molecular virology from The Rockefeller University. He trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and in infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
He is a member of the board of directors of Hookipa Pharma and a director ex officio of the Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC).
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Chris Garabedian is the Chairman & CEO of Xontogeny where he supports companies with cutting-edge technologies from early development through clinical proof of concept. Chris has decades of leadership experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. From 2011 to 2015, Chris led the turnaround of Sarepta Therapeutics as CEO. Prior to that, Chris served as VP of Corporate Strategy at Celgene and has held multiple executive roles at Gilead across corporate development, marketing, and medical affairs. Chris started his career in the biopharmaceutical industry as a consultant and holds a BS in Marketing from the University of Maryland.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Ben Oakes is Co-founder, President, & CEO @ Scribe Therapeutics. He has contributed to over 25 publications and patent applications across synthetic biology, molecular engineering, CRISPR, and zinc finger-based genetic modification. A previous Innovative Genomics Institute Entrepreneurial Fellow, Ben has been named to the San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40, Endpoints 20 Under 40 in biopharma, Business Insider 30 Under 40 transforming healthcare, and the Biocom Life Sciences Catalyst Awards. He received a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked in the Doudna Lab and Savage Lab developing CRISPR-Cas9 molecules with enhanced characteristics.
Dave Savage is Co-founder & Scientific Advisor @ Scribe Therapeutics. He is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and in 2021 was selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dave is an expert in biochemistry and protein engineering, and his laboratory develops novel tools for studying and manipulating the genome. Previously, he was a Department of Energy Physical Biosciences Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Becky Pferdehirt is a Partner on the a16z bio investing team. She focuses on early stage companies building technology platforms for therapeutic discovery and development. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Becky worked at Amgen where she most recently led business development efforts for therapeutic platform partnerships. Before moving to BD Becky was a research scientist in Amgen R&D, focused on cell and gene therapy technology innovation. Becky completed her postdoctoral education at Genentech studying cancer cell biology and proteomics. She holds a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from UC Berkeley and a BS in Biology from MIT.
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Seth Lieblich is a Principal on the 8VC Bio Team. Seth came from Amgen where he was in Amgen Business Development’s technology group where he was responsible for search & evaluation and transactions for platform technologies across a number of therapeutic and functional areas. Seth was also responsible for strategic academic partnerships across all therapeutic and geographic areas. Prior to Amgen, Seth was at ZS Associates where he led teams engaging in market research, sales force design, and strategy. Prior to ZS Associates, Seth was co-founder and COO of Protomer Technologies, a Pasadena-based biologics startup. Seth received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the California Institute of Technology and holds a B.S and M.S. in Biochemistry from Brandeis University.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Michael Jewett is the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, a Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering, & Co-Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology @ Northwestern University. He is also an Institute Fellow at the Northwestern Argonne Institute for Science & Engineering. Jewett’s lab seeks to re-conceptualize the way we engineer complex biological systems for compelling applications in medicine, materials, and energy by transforming biochemical engineering with synthetic biology. Dr. Jewett is the recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award in 2009, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 2011, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2011, the Agilent Early Career Professor Award in 2011, the 3M non-tenured faculty grant in 2012, the Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2015, the ACS Biochemical Technologies Division Young Investigator Award in 2017, and the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator Award in 2018.
w/ Special Guest Host: David Mace
David Mace is Co-founder & CEO @ SwiftScale Biologics, a life sciences startup based in San Francisco, California. SwiftScale Biologics accelerates time to market for protein drugs by turning a labor-intensive drug production scale-up challenge into a computational challenge. Previously David was an Entrepreneur in Residence at 8VC, where he focused on the intersection of biology & computer science. He is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology.
SwiftScale Biologics (@SwiftScaleBio) seeks to bring life-saving drugs to patients faster than previously possible. Specifically, SwiftScale uses cutting-edge cell-free and bacterial production platforms to rapidly produce protein therapeutics. SwiftScale’s technology is faster and cheaper than traditional manufacturing approaches, reducing time and cost to reach clinical trials and market. In Dec 2021, National Resilience acquired SwiftScale. Resilience is a technology focused manufacturing company dedicated to broadening access to complex medicines.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Vik Bajaj is a Managing Director @ Foresite, evaluating and pursuing investments at the intersection of technology and life sciences, including in personalized and precision healthcare.
Prior to joining Foresite Capital, Vik was the chief scientific officer of GRAIL, a life sciences company working to detect cancer early when it can be cured, and remains on its Scientific Advisory Board. He is also the co-founder and former chief scientific officer of Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) and served as chair of its Scientific Advisory Board. A former academic principal investigator, Vik retains appointments as associate professor (consulting) at the Stanford School of Medicine, and as an affiliate scientist of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, for which he serves on the advisory board of the College of Chemistry. He is an advisor to the Department of Defense through the Defense Science Board’s Task Force on Biology.
Vik’s research interests lie at the interface of the physical sciences, engineering, and the life sciences. He and his collaborators have developed nanotechnology probes for the early detection and molecular imaging of disease, spectroscopic tools for imaging objects on the nanoscale, microfabricated and miniaturized analytical and imaging systems for point-of-care testing, methods and devices that dramatically enhance the sensitivity and specificity of MRI, and new tools for clinical bioinformatics and integrative systems biology. Aspects of this work have been commercialized through several startups. At GRAIL, Vik led laboratory and data science teams at the forefront of industrial cancer genomics and diagnostics development.
He holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Vik’s scientific and engineering awards include the Anatole Abragam Prize (2012), the R&D 100 Award for the most promising commercialized technologies (2011 and 2013), and the Department of Energy’s LBL Innovation Grant (2013). In 2011, he was named as a Visiting Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Samir Mitragotri is the Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering. Samir is an elected member of the National Academies of Engineering and Medicine, and elected fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Inventors, the Controlled Release Society, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. He is a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals and currently serves as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Bioengineering and Translational Medicine.
Samir has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of biological barriers and drug delivery systems. His research, which is focused on the fundamental understanding of biological barriers, has led to the development of new materials and technologies for diagnosis and treatment of various ailments including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, skin conditions and infections. Many of his technologies have advanced to human clinical studies and products. Samir’s key technical contributions include the development of novel transdermal and oral delivery systems. Specifically in transdermal drug delivery, Samir has established a fundamental knowledgebase of transport properties of skin and has pioneered numerous technologies including low-frequency ultrasound, pulsed microjet injector, high throughput screening (INSIGHT), in situ hydrogels and ionic liquids for transdermal drug delivery. He has also developed ionic liquid-based technologies for oral delivery of insulin, monoclonal antibodies and other biologics. Samir has also developed unique bio-inspired nanoparticles that hitchhike on circulatory cells to avoid immune clearance and allow targeted delivery to tissues.
Samir is the author of more than 400 publications in the area of drug delivery and biomaterials, has given close to 500 invited and contributed presentations worldwide, and is an inventor on more than 200 pending or issued patents. He is a co-founder of several companies that are developing therapeutic or diagnostic products based on his inventions.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Hans Clevers is Director & Professor of Molecular Genetics @ the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands. He is also University Professor at the University Utrecht and Oncode Investigator. Clevers is one of the world’s leading researchers on stem cells and their potential for regenerative therapy. Over the past decade, his lab has produced vital studies on stem cells and the nature of self-renewal pathways controlling stem cells. Clevers was the first researcher to demonstrate the existence of long-lived stem cells in many tissues, including the intestine and stomach. Starting from the discovery that the TCF gene is the transcriptional endpoint of the WNT pathway, a pathway that is implicated in stem cell control, Clevers demonstrated that one of the TCF genes is essential for the stem cell compartment in the intestine.
w/ Special Guest Host: Xiling Shen - Co-Founder & CEO @ Xilis
Xiling Shen is Co-Founder & CEO @ Xilis. Before Xilis, Shen was the Hawkins Family Associate Professor at Duke University. Shen’s research interests lie in precision medicine and systems biology. His lab integrates engineering, computational and biological techniques to study cancer, stem cells, microbiota and the nervous system in the gut. This multidisciplinary work has been instrumental in initiating several translational clinical trials in precision therapy. He is the director of the Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health (DAP) and a core member of the Center for Genomics and Computational Biology (GCB).
Hans Clevers & Xiling Shen are Co-Founders @ Xilis. Xilis is developing a precision oncology platform that guides treatment decisions for oncologists to improve cancer care outcomes for patients and supports drug discovery and development for pharmaceutical companies. Xilis’ proprietary MicroOrganoSphere™ (MOS) technology consists of miniature patient tumors that capture the full microenvironment and heterogeneity and provides an automated and scalable solution. Using MOS and AI-driven algorithms, Xilis is developing a Xilis Response Score™ for the clinic, enabling oncologists to make informed and timely treatment decisions. Additionally, the MOS technology is speeding up development and clinical trials of cancer drugs by enabling analysis of authentic tumor microenvironments, high-throughput preclinical modeling, and clinical patient selection capabilities.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Stephen Quake is the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering & Professor of Applied Physics @ Stanford University & Co-President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Quake has invented many measurement tools for biology, including new DNA sequencing technologies that have enabled rapid analysis of the human genome and microfluidic automation that allows scientists to efficiently isolate individual cells and decipher their genetic code. Quake is also well known for inventing new diagnostic tools, including the first non-invasive prenatal test for Down syndrome and other aneuploidies. His test is rapidly replacing risky invasive approaches such as amniocentesis, and millions of women each year now benefit from this approach. His innovations have helped to radically accelerate the pace of biology and have made medicine safer by replacing invasive biopsies with simple blood tests.
Quake was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for achievements in single-cell analysis and large-scale integration of microfluidic devices. He has also been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Physical Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Human Frontiers of Science Nakasone Prize, the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award, the MIT-Lemelson Prize for Innovation, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the American Society of Microbiology’s Promega Biotechnology Award, and the Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing’s Pioneer of Miniaturization Award. He has founded or co-founded several companies, including Fluidigm, Helicos Biosciences, Verinata Health, Quanticel Pharmaceuticals, Moleculo, Cellular Research, Immumetrix, and Karius.
Quake received a B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1991 and a doctorate in Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford in 1994 as a Marshall Scholar. He did his postdoctoral work at Stanford in single molecule biophysics with Steven Chu. Quake joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology at the age of 26, where he rose through the ranks and was ultimately appointed the Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics. From 2006 to 2016 he was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
John Flavin is Founder & CEO @ Portal Innovations, a premier venture development engine that builds and invests in early stage life sciences ventures. Portal’s differentiated mix of crafted capital drives companies from scientific ideation to business creation, helping entrepreneurs translate cutting-edge technology into sustainable, global businesses with breakthrough products to help patients.
Prior to launching Portal, John founded and built several life sciences companies including Pyxis Oncology (NASDAQ: PYXS) and civic incubators MATTER and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, a first-of-its-kind, fully integrated academic value creation engine which translates innovation through the launch of new businesses and partnerships at the University of Chicago, 2 national laboratories and Chicago’s South Side by providing entrepreneurship education, incubation space, IP licensing and capital.
John has completed numerous public and private capital financings totaling over $365 million including 3 NASDAQ IPOs and has raised over $135 million in philanthropic and corporate funding to support university technology commercialization and venture start-up activities.
He possesses a deep understanding of academic-to-commercial innovation ecosystem development with a particular focus on the life sciences sector and has established key relationships with a diverse set of prospective partners representing all elements of the life sciences community including corporate, venture capital and academic stakeholders.
John is a frequent key-note speaker, panelist and lecturer on the topics of innovation, entrepreneurship and commercialization and is quoted often in the financial press including Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business and thought leadership media appearances on Bloomberg, WGN, and WTTW Chicago Tonight.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Walt is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering @ Harvard Medical School, Professor of Pathology @ Harvard Medical School & Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute @ Harvard University, Associate Member @ the Broad Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, & is co-Director of the Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation. Walt pioneered the use of microwell arrays for single-molecule detection and genetic measurements, which has revolutionized the process of genetic and proteomic analysis, enabling the cost of DNA sequencing and genotyping to plummet nearly a millionfold in the last decade. Walt is the Scientific Founder of Illumina, Quanterix, and has co-founded multiple other life sciences startups including Ultivue, Arbor Biotechnologies, Sherlock Biosciences, Vizgen, and Torus Biosciences. His lab develops new diagnostics tools and new biomarker assay technologies based on single molecule detection that can address unmet clinical needs in diagnostics. The lab is focused on early detection of breast cancer, detection of active tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, and diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, His lab has also been deeply involved in developing new tools to understand and diagnose COVID-19. Walt’s lab also pursues fundamental research on single enzyme molecules to provide insight into enzyme mechanisms. He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical microwell arrays and single molecules including the 2021 Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and is inducted in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Don Ingber is the Founding Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering @ Harvard University, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his B.A., M.A., M.Phil., M.D. and Ph.D. from Yale University.
Ingber is a pioneer in the field of biologically inspired engineering, and at the Wyss Institute, he currently leads scientific and engineering teams that cross a broad range of disciplines to develop breakthrough bio-inspired technologies to advance healthcare and to improve sustainability. His work has led to major advances in mechanobiology, cell structure, tumor angiogenesis, tissue engineering, systems biology, nanobiotechnology and translational medicine. Through his work, Prof. Ingber also has helped to break down boundaries between science, art and design.
Ingber has authored more than 500 publications and almost 200 patents, founded 7 companies, and has presented over 550 plenary presentations and invited lectures world-wide. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Inventors, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prof. Ingber has been the scientific founder of seven companies: Neomorphics, Tensegra, Boa Biomedical, FreeFlow Medical Devices, Unravel Bio, StataDx, and Emulate.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Dave Mooney is a leader in the fields of biomaterials, mechanotransduction, drug delivery, tissue engineering and immunoengineering. He is interested in understanding how cells sense signals in their environment and how this alters cell behavior. His laboratory develops biomaterials that exploit these signals to regulate specific cells and their function. They were the first to demonstrate in 3-D culture that the mechanical properties of a substrate regulated stem cell fate. His lab also developed the first implantable biomaterial cancer vaccine that contained biochemical cues to recruit and re-educate the immune system to destroy cancer cells. Mooney’s goal is to use our knowledge of cell biology in conjunction with materials to boost therapeutic effects.
Mooney is the Robert Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. He is a member of several national academies and has won numerous awards for his research and his mentorship/teaching. He has published over 400 articles and has been issued numerous patents, several of which have been licensed to companies, resulting in successful commercial products. He is also an active member in major engineering professional societies, an editorial advisor to multiple journals, and serves on several industry and government advisory boards.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Tom lnsel, psychiatrist & neuroscientist, has been a national leader in mental health research, policy, and technology. From 2002-2015, Insel served as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). More recently (2015 – 2017), he led the Mental Health Team at Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) in South San Francisco, CA. In 2017 he co-founded Mindstrong Health, a Silicon Valley start-up building tools for people with serious mental illness. In 2019, Insel served as a special advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom, helping on behavioral health issues. In 2020, he co-founded Humanest Care, a therapeutic online community for recovery. He is currently Chair of the Board of the Steinberg Institute and serves on the boards of Fountain House, Foundation for NIH, and the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy as well as being an advisor to several mental health start-ups. He is the author of the forthcoming book Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, to be published by Penguin Random House in February 2022. With journalist co-founders, he recently launched MindSite News (www.mindsitenews.org), a non-profit digital publication focused on mental health issues. Insel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has received numerous national and international awards including honorary degrees in the U.S. and Europe.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Berry is Founder & CEO @ Valo. Since 2005, he has served as General Partner @ Flagship Pioneering, having founded over 25 companies including Indigo Agriculture, Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB), Eleven Biotherapeutics (NASDAQ: EBIO), T2 Biosystems (NASDAQ: TTOO), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Axcella Health (NASDAQ: AXLA), and Joule Unlimited. David played an instrumental role in the conception and implementation of Flagship Labs, which is the foundation of all of its companies.
David has been broadly recognized as a world-leading innovator: elected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, named as Innovator of the Year by Technology Review from amongst its Annual TR35 list, and selected as one of 12 Innovators Reshaping Reality by the U.S. State Department, alongside pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee. He holds over 200 patents and patent applications. David and his companies have been awarded with over 150 additional awards and honors.
David currently serves on the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UN SDSN), where he was a Founding Leadership Council Member. David received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD from MIT in Biological Engineering.
David received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. from MIT in biological engineering, through the Health Sciences and Technology program completing the fastest dual degree in the modern history of the program, during which he was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize award for the most inventive and innovative student at MIT.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Baker is the director of the Institute for Protein Design, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry, and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington. His research group is focused on the design of macromolecular structures and functions.
He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry with Randy Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley, and did postdoctoral work in biophysics with David Agard at UCSF.
Baker has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Beckman Foundation, and the Packard Foundation. He is the recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Irving Sigal and Hans Neurath awards from the Protein Society, the Overton Prize from the ISCB, the Feynman Prize from the Foresight Institute, the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Sackler prize in biophysics, and the Centenary Award from the Biochemical society. Sixty-five of his mentees have gone on to independent faculty positions, he has published over 500 research papers, been granted over 100 patents, and co-founded 13 companies.
Baker is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a project leader with The Audacious Project.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Jim Collins is The Termeer Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Biological Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science @ MIT. He is also affiliated with the Broad Institute and the Wyss Institute. His research group works in synthetic biology and systems biology, with a particular focus on using network biology approaches to study antibiotic action, bacterial defense mechanisms, and the emergence of resistance. Professor Collins' patented technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharma and medical devices companies, and he has helped to launch a number of companies, including Senti Bio, Sample6 Technologies, Sherlock, Synlogic, and EnBiotix. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Rhodes Scholarship, a MacArthur "Genius" Award, an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Award, as well as several teaching awards. Professor Collins is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and currently carries out a variety of projects in the areas of genomics and proteomics both in yeast and humans. These include the large-scale analysis of proteins using protein microarrays and the global mapping of the binding sites of chromosomal proteins. His laboratory built the first proteome chip for any organism and the first high resolution tiling array for the entire human genome.
He is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Technologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.
Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of big data and implementing it into healthcare.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Alaa Halawa & Ayman AlAbdallah are two integral members of the Mubadala Ventures team & lead the firm’s efforts in TechBio.
Alaa Halawa is the Co-Head of Mubadala Capital Ventures SF, where he focuses on investing in venture and early growth-stage companies at the intersection of life sciences and technology. Among other themes within life sciences investing, Alaa has concentrated on the following: how technology is enhancing the pharmaceutical industry, from drug discovery through clinical trials; and how technology - and in particular bio-informatics, artificial intelligence and machine learning - is enhancing disease diagnosis. Alaa joined Mubadala in 2009 where he worked on designing and implementing the strategy to develop a technology cluster in Abu Dhabi focusing on semiconductor research through partnerships with Silicon Valley companies and academic institutions. Alaa then moved to the Bay Area to support the transition of Executive Leadership in one of Mubadala's key assets in Silicon Valley, GlobalFoundries, where he worked on a series of strategic, corporate development and transformation initiatives. Alaa holds an MBA from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of Jordan.
Alaa sits on the boards of Recursion, Alloy Therapeutics, Outpace, Xilis, Innovaccer, among others.
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Ayman AlAbdallah is a San Francisco-based investor at Mubadala Ventures. In his role, he focuses on early and growth stage investments in technology, healthcare, and life sciences. Prior to Mubadala, Ayman worked in corporate development at Tecan Group (SWX: Tecan) where he co-managed M&A and equity investment efforts in the US and Europe. He began his career as a management consultant at Accenture, where he helped businesses in Canada and the US solve critical strategy and operational challenges. He has also worked with the hedge fund team at OMERS Capital, where he focused on the intersection of machine learning and event-driven investing. In addition to his investing and consulting background, Ayman’s journey includes operating experience having been involved with a number of startups, including Sentinelle Medical (acquired by Hologics), Pullsar Technologies (acquired by Tecan), and Airo Health (Y Combinator, Summer 2016 batch). Ayman completed his M.B.A. and mechanical engineering studies at the University of Toronto where he received the Chalmers award and a fellowship for his engineering research thesis investigating novel Lab-on-a-Chip platforms.
Ayman sits on the board of Xilis, Unlearn, & Ansa
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
David Schaffer is a Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Bioengineering, & Neuroscience @ University of California Berkeley, he also serves as the Director of QB3 - Berkeley.
At Berkeley, Schaffer applies engineering principles to enhance Stem Cell & Gene Therapy approaches for Neuro-Regeneration. This work includes mechanistic investigation of stem cell control, as well as molecular evolution & engineering of viral gene delivery vehicles.
He has Co-founded six companies including: 4D Molecular Therapeutics - which uses a novel technology platform to engineer optimized, proprietary adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors for gene therapy, Ignite Immunotherapies, which is developing novel oncolytic virus technologies as cancer therapies in partnership with Pfizer, Valitor - which is developing a novel protein-polymer conjugation technology to develop greatly enhanced protein biologics for a range of disease targets, Axent focused on stem cell therapies, & two others in stealth.
Schaffer graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering in 1993. Afterward, he pursued a PhD @ MIT with Professor Doug Lauffenburger & conducted a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Fred Gage @ The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, before moving to UC Berkeley in 1999.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Jennifer Friel Goldstein is the Managing Partner for Life Science & Healthcare Practice @ SVB Capital and is a founding member of Venture Forward, a nonprofit that provides resources and education toward developing a diverse, equitable and inclusive venture capital (VC) ecosystem.
She is also an advisory board member of Springboard Enterprises and the Women’s Health Innovation Coalition. Jennifer has more than 20 years of experience in the VC and startup market segments, including leading and building several teams over the past eight years at Silicon Valley Bank. Before that, she was a director on Pfizer’s VC team, where she helped lead or co-lead investments into several life sciences companies. She also led fund of funds investment decisions and independently managed Pfizer’s $250 million private equity (PE) portfolio. Jennifer served as a consultant on PE deals across Europe while at Bain & Company and held operational and research roles at Chiron, Genelabs, and Genencor. Jennifer graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering and a master’s degree in biotechnology from the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an MBA from the Wharton School, where she was named a Joseph Wharton Fellow. She also serves as an independent director at Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Jennifer lives in the Bay Area with her husband and their twin children.
W/ Special Guest Host: Nabiha Saklayen - Cofounder & CEO @ Cellino
Nabiha Saklayen is a bio-inspired physicist and Co-Founder & CEO @ Cellino. Nabiha launched Cellino to converge physics, biology, and machine learning to enable paradigm shifts in autologous regenerative medicine. Nabiha was recognized as a Pioneer in MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators under 35 list for her inventions in laser-based delivery methods and is on the 2019 Forbes under 30 List for Healthcare. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University as an HHMI International Fellow. She made significant scientific contributions to the field of pulsed-laser delivery to cells, with several peer-reviewed papers published, patents pending, and grants awarded. Nabiha grew up in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Germany, and Sri Lanka and currently lives in Boston, MA.
Cellino is on a mission to make personalized, autologous cell therapies accessible for patients. Stem cell-derived regenerative medicines are poised to cure some of the most challenging diseases within this decade, including Parkinson’s, diabetes, and heart disease. Patient-specific cells provide the safest, most effective cures for these indications. However, current autologous processes are not scalable due to extensive manual handling, high variability, and expensive facility overhead. Cellino’s vision is to make personalized regenerative medicines viable at large scale for the first time. Cellino’s platform combines label-free imaging and high-speed laser editing with machine learning to automate cell reprogramming, expansion, and differentiation in a closed cassette format, enabling thousands of patient samples to be processed in parallel in a single facility.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Vijay Pande is a General Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on investments in Biopharma & Healthcare.
As the founding investor of a16z’s Bio Fund, Vijay leads the firm’s investments at the cross section of biology and computer science, including applications in computation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in healthcare; digital therapeutics; diagnostics; and other novel transformative scientific advances applied to industry that take bio beyond healthcare. Op-eds by Vijay defining trends and issues in this emerging space have been published by The New York Times, Scientific American, and Forbes, among others. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University.
Previously, Vijay was the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he led a team of researchers pioneering computational methods and their application to medicine and biology (resulting in over 300 publications, two patents, and two novel drug candidates). Vijay was also concurrently the director of the Biophysics program at Stanford, where he led a team of more than 50 faculty members and propelled the program to the top in the country.
During his time at Stanford, Vijay co-founded Globavir Biosciences, where he translated his research advances into a successful startup that aimed to discover cures for Dengue Fever and Ebola. Vijay also founded the Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project for disease research, which pushed the boundaries of computer science techniques (distributed systems, machine learning, and exotic computer architectures) into biology and medicine, in both research as well as the development of new therapeutics.
Vijay holds a BA in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from MIT. He has been awarded the DeLano Prize in Computation; a Guinness World Record for Folding@Home; the American Chemical Society Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award; and was selected for MIT TR10. In his teens, Vijay was the first employee at video game startup Naughty Dog Software, maker of Crash Bandicoot.
Vijay serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Apeel Sciences, BioAge Labs, Ciitizen, Devoted Health, Freenome, Insitro, Nautilus Biotechnology, Omada Health, Scribe Therapeutics, and Q Bio.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Angelika Fretzen is the Wyss Institute’s Technology Translation Director and COO, applying product and entrepreneurial business development experience to the Institute’s mission of taking impactful technologies in healthcare and sustainability from the lab into their real world application. She leads a team at the Wyss that is dedicated to building a unique model of innovation, technology development and commercialization, in a community of strong collaborators within an extensive ecosystem of universities, hospitals and external business partners.
She earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and gained postdoctoral experience in the laboratory of Professor Gregory Verdine at Harvard University. Following her academic training, Angelika pursued her M.B.A. at Suffolk University, Boston, and subsequently held leadership positions at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, and most recently at Catabasis Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA, where she was Senior Vice President of Product Development. Her industry experience enabled her to gain a deep understanding of the processes involved in developing and de-risking therapeutic products from pre-clinical stages to the clinical market, including the regulatory approval process. For more than 10 years, she also served on the Board of Directors of Bridgewell, a health and human services non-profit organization serving a wide range of constituents in day programs, residential housing and clinical services.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Shaan Gandhi is a Director @ Northpond Ventures and leads the firm’s work in biotechnologies. Shaan is a board director at Aro Biotherapeutics; CAMP4 Therapeutics; Candel Therapeutics; DiCE Molecules; StrideBio, Inc.; Triumvira Immunologics, Inc.; and Vigil Neuroscience. Previously, Shaan was a Principal at the Longwood Fund, where he created and invested in life sciences companies, including Pyxis Oncology, a cancer immunotherapy company focused on novel modulators of the tumor microenvironment, which he co-founded and served as President. Prior to Longwood, he was an attending hospitalist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he also did his residency in internal medicine.
He holds an MD from Harvard Medical School; an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar; a D.Phil. in medical oncology from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a B.S. with honors in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University. Shaan is the Secretary/Treasurer of the Suffolk District Medical Society, the professional medical society of Boston, and a Trustee of the Boston Medical Library.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Jared Friedman is a Managing Director @ Y Combinator, where he works with YC's bio companies. Y Combinator has funded over 400 healthcare and bio companies across all sectors. YC currently funds more healthcare/bio companies per year than any other investor in the world.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Cain McClary is Founder & Managing Partner @ KdT Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on supporting startups re-architecting the world at a molecular level.
Cain is a Physician/Scientist and Venture Capitalist, leveraging technical scientific and medical knowledge/experience as well as an extensive network of scientists, clinicians, entrepreneurs, and funders to guide and invest in young companies at the intersection of computation and science. His experiences on both sides of the table offers unique strategic insights and network opportunities to innovators and investors in these verticals. What he likes to call "translational entrepreneurship".
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Shahram Seyedin-Noor is Founder and General Partner of Civilization Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on supporting cutting edge innovations in health tech and biology.
Prior to founding Civilization Ventures, Shahram was a life sciences entrepreneur and angel investor for more than a decade. Shahram was the founding CEO and later Executive Chairman of Rgenix, a biotech company with multiple first-in-class therapeutics for cancer now in Phase 1b clinical trials. Prior to Rgenix, he was founding CFO and VP of Corporate Development at NextBio, a genomics pioneer acquired by Illumina. Shahram sits on the boards of Foresight Diagnostics and Rewrite and has been one of the first checks into frontier tech companies such as Omada Health, CatalogDNA, Evonetix, BilliontoOne, Lemonaid Health, Avantome (acquired by Illumina), Bina (acquired by Roche), Rocket Pharma (IPO), and Counsyl (acquired by Myriad).
Shahram began his career in Silicon Valley over twenty years ago at Wilson Sonsini and went on to advise some of the world’s preeminent technology leaders while at Goldman Sachs. He earned his JD from Harvard Law School, where he led 175 editors as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard International Law Journal, and obtained a BA in Economics from Pomona College. Shahram founded CV in 2017 to support innovations that could – with some luck and perseverance – improve human health, preserve the world’s natural resources, and further our shared civilization.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Ron Weiss is one of the pioneers of synthetic biology. He has been engaged in synthetic biology research since 1996 when he was a graduate student at MIT and where he helped set up a wet-lab in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. After completion of his PhD, Weiss joined the faculty at Princeton University, and recently returned to MIT to take on a tenured faculty position in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Ron founded and serves as the Director of the MIT Synthetic Biology Center.
W/ Special Guest Host: Jake Becraft
Jake Becraft is a synthetic biologist and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, and serves on its Board of Directors. Together with colleagues at MIT’s renowned Synthetic Biology Center, he led the development of the world’s first synthetic biology programming language for mRNA. Jake has been featured in Fierce Biotech, Bloomberg, the Boston Business Journal, and BioCentury, among others, for his vision and mission at Strand of applying this unique platform for real world disease applications. He has also been the recipient of prestigious national and international awards for his scientific and entrepreneurial achievements, including the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Award, the Andrew Viterbi Fellowship of MIT, Amgen Fellowship, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb 2018 Golden Ticket for recognition of Strand as an innovative startup. Beyond his work at Strand, Jake’s broader interests span synthetic biology, biologically engineered organism-machine interfaces, and the intersection of tech and biotech methodologies. He is an advocate among the life science entrepreneurial ecosystem for supporting young founders in biotech entrepreneurship. Currently, he serves on the advisory board of Starlight Ventures, an early stage venture firm, and also serves on the Executive Board of Public Health United, a non-profit focused on helping scientists better communicate their research for maximum impact. He is also a Termeer Fellow. Previously, he served as a Science and Technology advisor to legislators in the Massachusetts State Legislature. Jake received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT and his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating Magna cum Laude with distinction. He is an author or inventor on numerous high profile publications, patents and white papers, including in top tier journals such as Nature Chemical Biology and PNAS.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
George Church leads Synthetic Biology at the Wyss Institute, where he oversees the directed evolution of molecules, polymers, and whole genomes to create new tools with applications in regenerative medicine and bio-production of chemicals. Among his recent work at the Wyss is development of a technology for synthesizing whole genes, and engineering whole genomes, far faster, more accurate, and less costly than current methods. George is widely recognized for his innovative contributions to genomic science and his many pioneering contributions to chemistry and biomedicine. In 1984, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method, which resulted in the first genome sequence (the human pathogen, H. pylori). He helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. George invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and array DNA synthesizers. His many innovations have been the basis for a number of companies including Editas (Gene therapy); Gen9bio (Synthetic DNA); and Veritas Genetics (full human genome sequencing).
George is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Technology Center and Director of the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science. He has received numerous awards including the 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science from the Franklin Institute and election to the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering.
w/ Special Guest Host: Alexander Titus
Alexander Titus is a genomic data scientist and technologist with a background spanning industry, government, and academia. He is the founder and CEO of Bioeconomy.XYZ, a biotechnology publication about great tech and the people making it happen. He's also a strategic business executive at Google Cloud, and previously he was the head of biotechnology at the Department of Defense.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Bob Langer is one of 12 Institute Professors at MIT; being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. Dr. Langer has written more than 1,500 articles. He also has over 1,400 issued and pending patents worldwide. Dr. Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 400 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history (h-index 289 with over 345,000 citations according to Google Scholar).
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Michael Langer is Senior Manager and Head of Search, Evaluation & In-licensing for all new technology and products at Pear Therapeutics. Michael also runs point on platform deals, as well as competitive intelligence at Pear. In addition, he works closely with the Pear fundraising team to build and maintain relationships with prospective investors primarily with sovereign wealth funds and family offices. Michael reports directly to Pear's Founder, CEO and President Dr. Corey McCann.
Michael is an investor, advisor and mentor to startups. Michael is the founding partner at Old Silver VC which is a family-associated investment firm that invests in startups in Healthcare (Biotech and DigitalHealth) and Deep Tech with a focus on materials.
Michael is an active philanthropist. He co-founded the Young Coder's Society which teaches children how to code using Raspberry Pi's. He is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and a Young Leader at the Milken Institute. He serves on The Leadership Board at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, The Discoverers Committee at the Museum of Science and is the Senior Advisor of Special Projects at the Galenus Foundation.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Zavain Dar invests at the intersection and union of cutting-edge biotech and software. He has led Lux’s investments in Primer, a machine intelligence startup; Clarifai, which democratizes cutting edge deep neural networks; Auransa, which is developing novel medicines based on computational insight applied to genomic data; Recursion which uses automation and deep learning to develop drugs for rare diseases; Tempo Automation, which applies software and automation to electronics manufacturing; Rigetti Computing, which is fabricating some of the fastest quantum chips in the world; Braid, which is bringing AI to medical diagnostics; Visor, which aims to simplify tax preparation; Computable Labs, which is building a decentralized data marketplace; Cryptonumerics, a data control company acquired by Snowflake Computing; The Stacks Foundation, which is making Bitcoin programmable; Runway, which is putting machine learning tools into the hands of creators; LabGenius, a protein drug discovery company; Anagenex, a drug discovery company leveraging DNA encoded libraries; Hugging Face, an open-source company democratizing Natural Language Processing; Dyno Therapeutics, an AI-powered gene therapy company; and Thrive Earlier Detection, an early cancer detection company that Exact Sciences agreed to acquire for $2.15 billion in 2020.
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BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Arvind Gupta is a Partner @ Mayfield Fund where he co-leads the Engineering Biology practice. He was the first investor in several breakout biology companies including Geltor, Prellis, Synthex, and Memphis Meats. Prior to joining Mayfield, Arvind was a founder of Indie Bio, the world’s leading biotech accelerator. At IndieBio, he was fundamental to the growth of the accelerator, building a $3.2B portfolio and investing in over 136 companies over five years. He is particularly passionate about conscious capitalism and continues to serve as a Venture Advisor at IndieBio.
Topics:
Career journey from design to biotech investing
Personal mission statements
Synthetic biology guiding the biotech revolution
Conscious capital and engineering biology
What to expect for the future of “tech bio”
How VC will evolve with new capital structures in biotech
Advice for life sciences founders
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
8VC is a Silicon-Valley based technology investment firm investing in visionary teams and backing industry-transforming companies, currently managing $3.5bn in AUM. About one third of their current fund is dedicated towards the BioIT space. 8VC’s portfolio represents a large early crop of now next gen biotech unicorns including but not limited to Orca Bio, Synthego, Resilience, and Lyell Immunopharma which have generated playbooks for others startups to follow.
Francisco Giminez and David Moskowitz are two integral members of the 8VC team which developed the Bio-IT investment thesis.
Francisco is a Partner @ 8VC focusing on Bio-IT investments and Enterprise AI. He received a PhD from Stanford in Biomedical Informatics. During this time, he also worked as a Resident Data Scientist at Formation8 Partners where he helped startups to strategize, prototype, and recruit for data products. He also is the founder of Catenus Science, a data science consulting and recruiting firm that used an apprenticeship model to help early stage companies build data science teams.
David is a Principal @ 8VC who also received his PhD at Stanford as part of the Biomedical Informatics Program. At Stanford, his work was focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to regulatory genomics, epigenetics, and pipeline development for analysis of high throughput sequencing data. Prior to his time at Stanford, David was a Bioinformatic Analyst at Einstein College of Medicine where he worked on the genetics of aging and human disease.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Adam Seabrook is a Principal in B Capital’s Los Angeles office, where he makes investments in Healthcare and Digital Health. Adam serves as Board Member/Board Observer to Evidation Health, SilverCloud Health, Bright.md, Notable Labs and Atomwise. Prior to joining B Capital, Adam worked at Hyde Park Angels, one of the largest angel networks in the US, while pursuing his MBA at the University of Chicago.
Before earning his MBA, Adam was an early employee at Imaging Advantage, a teleradiology startup that was recently acquired by Envision Healthcare. In his role, Adam managed teleradiology implementations at hospitals around the United States, led teleradiology workflow optimization efforts, and helped acquire physician practices as part of a rollup strategy. Adam also co-wrote a proposal to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, from which the company was awarded $6 million to develop a decision support tool for physicians.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Mark Pulido is a 5 time CEO & industry veteran with 4+ decades of leadership experience spanning Health IT, Health Services, Big Pharma, Diagnostics, Private Equity, & Venture Back Startups.
He is the former President & CEO @ ABILITY, a national leader in cloud-based solutions for the healthcare provider marketplace acquired for $1.2B by Inovalon in 2018 - where he currently serves on The Board of Directors. Prior to his role at ABILITY, Mark focused on private equity and investing initiatives as an industry executive at Freeman Spogli. Previously he served as President & Chief Executive Officer @ BenefitPoint, an early stage Sequoia capital-backed employee benefits technology company.
Prior to that, he led several of the most prominent healthcare and information technology companies in the world. Mark served as President & CEO @ McKesson Corporation, a Fortune 10 healthcare services and information technology company; President & Chief Executive Officer @ Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, USA (formerly Sandoz), a research-based pharmaceutical manufacturer; and Chairman, President & CEO @ Red Line Healthcare Corporation, a specialty long-term care distribution and medical billing company. He also served as Chairman of the Board of Directors @ Quidel, a manufacturer of diagnostic testing solutions and as a Board Member of several healthcare and technology companies, including Sunrise Medical, a medical equipment manufacturer; Smile Brands Group, a dental practice management company; Charles Schwab, a financial services company; and Imation, a technology company.
Outside of work, you can find Mark pursuing his passion for wine making at Pulido~Walker Cellars and supporting the community through Pulido~Walker Foundation focusing on education for youth at risk.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Mark Pulido is a 5 time CEO & industry veteran with 4+ decades of leadership experience spanning Health IT, Health Services, Big Pharma, Diagnostics, Private Equity, & Venture Back Startups.
He is the former President & CEO @ ABILITY, a national leader in cloud-based solutions for the healthcare provider marketplace acquired for $1.2B by Inovalon in 2018 - where he currently serves on The Board of Directors. Prior to his role at ABILITY, Mark focused on private equity and investing initiatives as an industry executive at Freeman Spogli. Previously he served as President & Chief Executive Officer @ BenefitPoint, an early stage Sequoia capital-backed employee benefits technology company.
Prior to that, he led several of the most prominent healthcare and information technology companies in the world. Mark served as President & CEO @ McKesson Corporation, a Fortune 10 healthcare services and information technology company; President & Chief Executive Officer @ Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, USA (formerly Sandoz), a research-based pharmaceutical manufacturer; and Chairman, President & CEO @ Red Line Healthcare Corporation, a specialty long-term care distribution and medical billing company. He also served as Chairman of the Board of Directors @ Quidel, a manufacturer of diagnostic testing solutions and as a Board Member of several healthcare and technology companies, including Sunrise Medical, a medical equipment manufacturer; Smile Brands Group, a dental practice management company; Charles Schwab, a financial services company; and Imation, a technology company.
Outside of work, you can find Mark pursuing his passion for wine making at Pulido~Walker Cellars and supporting the community through Pulido~Walker Foundation focusing on education for youth at risk.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Vasudev Bailey, PhD, is a Senior Partner @ ARTIS Ventures where he focuses on investing in novel and breakthrough health and life sciences companies. He is an investor in companies including Eko, Unnatural Products, Aether, IDbyDNA, Freenome, Climax Foods, Lemonaid Health, and board member at Association for Women in Sciences (AWIS), Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering, and The Trevor Project. He is the founder of the ARTIS Ventures Healthcare Pioneers, which brings together some of the world’s brightest minds to accelerate and incubate life-changing ideas in healthcare. He received his PhD at Johns Hopkins where he studied personalized chemotherapy and early cancer detection.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Seth Bannon is a Founding Partner @ Fifty Years, a seed fund that backs entrepreneurs solving the world's biggest problems with technology. Seth has seeded a range of startups shaping the world for the better — companies like Memphis Meats (culturing meat to eat), Solugen (engineering enzymes to produce industrial chemicals sustainably), and Astranis (small satellites to cover the earth with Internet). Seth is also the co-founder of impact.tech, a community of entrepreneurs combining purpose with profit, and was previously the founder & CEO of startup Amicus. A graduate of Y Combinator, Seth was named twice to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurship.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Adam D’Augelli is a Partner @ True Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm founded in 2005 that invests in early-stage technology startups. At True, Adam has led the firm’s investments in Pendulum Therapeutics, Deep Genomics, InterVenn Biosciences, and more.
Prior to True, Adam ran Perfect Wave Records, a small donation-based record label in the Southeast and taught “Digital Frontiers,” a course at the University of Florida exploring how the Internet and Technology are changing the global business landscape.
In this podcast, Adam discusses his investing mentality when it comes to startups representing a range of markets from food, to cancer therapeutics, to security. Through his diverse interests and unique perspective, Adam has cultivated a tried and true model for investing which favors founders who are uniquely positioned to capture nascent markets and build consumer-facing solutions.
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Nan Li is a Managing Director @ Obvious Ventures, where he invests in companies solving the world’s biggest problems in sustainable systems, healthy living, and people power. At Obvious, his investments have included LabGenius, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Darwin AI, Octave Health, Zymergen, and Planet. Prior to joining Obvious, Nan has had a mix of technology, investing, and entrepreneurship experiences including early stage tech investments at Innovation Endeavors, Product, Operations, and Finance at Gigwalk, VC and management consulting at Bain, and PM at Microsoft. Nan is also an adjunct lecturer at Stanford where he teaches a course on symbolic systems in VC and entrepreneurship.
Topics:
Computational biology investments
Understanding the biology of investments
Applying digital approaches to biology
Addressing computational drug design skeptics
Managing fund cycle expectations in deep tech investing
East vs west coast investment mindsets
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Jessica Chao is the Director of the Clinical Innovation Center at UCSF, where she oversees operations and leads partnerships with industry and academia. She is an investor at Iterative VC and has over 15 years of experience as an operator in health services and med tech management. Previously, she has led product design in various San Francisco startups and co-founded Healtho, a consumer health information company. She is also the co-founder of one of the largest health meetups in Seattle, the Seattle Health Innovators. Jessica received her MBA from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School while she concurrently completed her Residency in Health System Pharmacy Administration at Johns Hopkins Medicine. She also holds a Doctorate in Pharmacy and BS in Biochemistry from the University of Washington.
Topics:
The disconnect between innovation and implementation within large healthcare systems
Solutions to solve the implementation and execution issue; how startups should approach pilots
Common mistakes made by startups while trying to understand customer needs or sell into large health systems
How COVID-19 has accelerated both innovation and implementation, and what this means for the future
Practical advice for startups for partnering with/selling to healthcare systems
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Tony Kulesa is a Co-founder @ Petri, an accelerator in Boston that backs companies developing new biotech applications and technologies in healthcare, food, industrial chemicals, and new materials. Co-founded and funded by Pillar, a venture firm co-founded by the CEOs of Cytyc, Ginkgo Bioworks, Iora Health, and 22 Boston companies, Petri draws on the resources of one of the strongest biotech ecosystems in the world to support founders from around the globe. Dr. Kulesa is an inventor and community builder. Previously, he was the founding Director of the MIT BioMakerspace, a community biology laboratory and incubator space, and an Instructor at the MIT Department of Biological Engineering. He holds a PhD from MIT, where his inventions of new platforms for drug discovery and microbial therapeutics were highlighted in Science Editor’s Choice and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. While at MIT, he co-founded and directed 3 courses on biotech and entrepreneurship, including BiomedStartup, a course that coaches 10+ teams per year on research commercialization projects. He was a member of the founding officer team at MIT Biotech Group, and an ambassador for Breakout Labs, venture philanthropy from the Thiel Foundation to support companies bringing radical scientific discoveries out of the lab and into the market.
Topics:
The value of accelerators within the life sciences
Venture creation and innovation within biotech and pharma
Entering the life sciences industry from academia and other industries
The intersection of technology & biology: Silicon meets Boston & the profile of new funds straddling both philosophies
Types of risk within life sciences ventures: technical, biological, market
Impact of Covid-19 on the life sciences industry, both technological and financial
Investing and building in the life sciences revolution
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Robert Pearl is the former CEO @ The Permanente Medical Group (1999-2017), the nation’s largest medical group, and former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group (2009-2017). In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts. Dr. Pearl is nationally recognized as a physician leader on healthcare delivery. He hosts a popular podcast called Fixing Healthcare and is author of a Washington Post Bestseller: “Mistreated: why we think we’re getting good healthcare -- and why we’re usually wrong” (he has generously donated all the proceeds from his book to Doctors Without Borders). More recently, he has started a new weekly podcast - “Coronavirus: The Truth.” He writes regularly on Forbes and teaches at both the Stanford School of Medicine and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dr. Pearl received his medical degree at Yale and completed a plastic surgery residency at Stanford. Visit his website to learn more.
Technology companies have increasingly focused on the healthcare system, and many are excited by their potential to drive change, decrease costs, and improve outcomes. Dr. Robert Pearl discusses hype versus reality in healthcare delivery innovation and how tech can help - but also hurt.
Topics:
How Kaiser Permanente has become a leader in quality, access, and price
The role of tech in the fee-for-service versus capitation debate
Disruption of the fee-for-service system coming from HAVEN, self-insured employers, and off-shore care partnerships
Hype versus reality in tech: how tech often approaches healthcare innovation wrong
The problem with wearables
Misaligned incentives within healthcare and tech
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Rob Chess is a successful and esteemed serial biotech entrepreneur and executive. His resume is incredibly long and impressive. He is the Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ: NKTR), a multi-billion dollar market cap company, where he was previously President and CEO. He is co-founder and Board member (until very recently the Chairman) of Biota Technologies, which uses DNA sequencing to optimize oil and gas production. He is a Lead Director at Twist Biosciences (NASDAQ: TWST), a public company that produces synthetic genes using an innovative high-throughput silicon-based manufacturing process. He was previously Chairman and CEO of OPX Biotechnologies, a renewable chemicals company that was sold to Cargill, and co-founder and President of Penederm, a dermatology company that went public and was acquired by Mylan Laboratories. He served in the White House in the first Bush administration, teaches at the Stanford business school, and is on the board of trustees at CalTech, and sits on the board of various other companies and organizations, among many other accomplishments.
The biopharma industry is undergoing immense change as there are exciting advancements in technology and life sciences, amidst a constantly changing structural environment. Rob Chess discusses keys for success for founders and executives and explores some key trends involving scale, platforms, financing, discovery, and payment reform within biopharma.
Topics:
Keys to success as a founder or executive in biotech
The cyclical nature of platforms, products, and financing in biotech as an industry
Scale in biopharma
The impact of tech-enabled services on biopharma
Direct-to-consumer biopharma
Eroom’s Law and drug discovery
Academia vs industry for life sciences innovation
Business model problems that belie the lack of successes in diagnostics
Incentive structures in healthcare and how to align them
Business school and management in healthcare and biopharma
Payment reform for specialty pharmaceuticals
Why go into healthcare?
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
Ian Tong is Chief Medical Officer @ Doctor On Demand. He is also currently Clinical Assistant Professor (Affiliated) at Stanford University Medical School. Ian has spent his career working to improve access to high quality care and brings this dedication to his work at Doctor On Demand.
Prior to joining Doctor On Demand, Ian held several medical leadership roles. He served as Stanford Internal Medicine Chief Resident; Co-Medical Director of the Arbor Free Clinic; and Founder and Medical Director of The Health Resource Initiative for Veterans Everywhere (THRIVE) at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, which was honored in 2008 by the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs with the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Service to Homeless Veterans. Before becoming Chief Medical Officer, Ian served as Medical Director at Doctor On Demand.
Ian is a National Collegiate Champion in Rugby at the University of California at Berkeley and was named to the All American Team in 1994. He graduated with a BA in English. He earned a medical degree from The University of Chicago – Pritzker and completed residency and Chief residency at Stanford Hospital and Clinics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine.
Ian lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children. He is most proud of the relationships he has built working alongside his family, friends, teammates, students and colleagues to positively impact the lives of others.
The COVID-19 pandemic is creating an inflection point in healthcare delivery and innovation. Telemedicine is playing a central role in combating the novel coronavirus outbreak, and the telehealth industry will emerge from the pandemic with new winners, losers, and structural changes.
Topics:
State of the pandemic and the role of telemedicine in combating it
The impact of COVID on the telehealth industry
Telemedicine winners and losers in aftermath of COVID: from point solutions to integrated longitudinal care
The power of retail clinics both during the pandemic and long term in telehealth and care delivery
Structural and policy changes needed for future pandemics and for the advancement of telemedicine
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.
Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)
BIOS Podcast brings together cutting-edge insights from Life Science industry leaders at the forefront innovation.
Join us in hearing from Founders, Investors, Professors, & Pharma operating at the intersection of Technology & Biology.
By Alix Ventures: Driving Patient Impact - Supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to drive radical advances in human health.
Learn more @ BIOS.community / Alix.vc