We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. The latest in our series of Business of Biotech podcasts recorded in-person at JPM in San Francisco features an inspiring conversation with Affinia Therapeutics CEO Rick Modi. Modi shares on how his upbringing in Kenya shaped his adversity-embracing worldview, and how that worldview contributes to his biotech leadership. We cover his transition from pharmaceutical work in Iowa to a career in biotech, the gene therapy advances Affinia is buil...
Mar 10, 2025•52 min•Ep. 244
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, recorded on-site at the 2025 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, we explore a new approach to biotech financing with XOMA Royalty's Owen Hughes and Brad Sitko. The CEO and CIO, respectively, share an innovative royalty aggregation model that mitigates risk while enabling immediate capital access to biotech firms. We learn the differences between royalty financing and equity-based funding, how the...
Mar 03, 2025•56 min•Ep. 243
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Recorded in-person at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Franscisco, this episode finds Matt Pillar and Ben Comer exploring the evolution of gene therapy with Dr. Tom Chalberg, Founder, Chairman, & CEO at Genascence. We discuss ATMPS' transition from treating rare diseases to addressing common conditions like osteoarthritis, share insights on the delivery mechanism and regulatory challenges in the space, and get into the nut...
Feb 24, 2025•48 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Ran Zhang was hire number one at Landmark Bio back in 2021. Today, she's CEO of the 70+ employee cell and gene therapy manufacturer. We caught up with her and Life Science Leader chief editor Ben Comer at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco for a discussion on Landmark's role in addressing the ATMP patient access and cost reduction challenges. Along the way, we cover innovations in distributed manufacturing, non-vi...
Feb 17, 2025•37 min•Ep. 241
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. From the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Peter Anastasiou, CEO of Capsida Biotherapeutics, discusses his journey from big pharma to biotech and the challenges he's faces on the leading edge of first-gneration gene therapies. Anastasiou discusses the in-house manufacturing quality advantage, how building that capacity opened the door to important partnering opportunities, the company's preparation for clinical tria...
Feb 10, 2025•45 min•Ep. 240
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. From the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Stefan Scherer shares insight from 3T Bioscience's transition from clinical medicine to drug development, and his experiences in biotech leadership along the way. Dr. Scherer discusses the balance between promising advances in T-cell therapy and the challenges associated with navigating a biotech from platform development to lead candidate status -- including staffing up for...
Feb 03, 2025•43 min•Ep. 239
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Life Science Leader's Ben Comer and Acumen Pharmaceuticals' Dr. Jim Doherty join the Business of Biotech to discuss Dr. Doherty's lifelong, singular focus on researching therapeis for CNS diseases. We cover the historical challenges associated with the development of new therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease, advances in the space, the controversies that have ensued on the heels of recent amlyloid-targeting drug approvals, and ...
Jan 27, 2025•48 min•Ep. 238
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Andrey Doronichev, known to many simply as Dobry, is perhaps best known for taking YouTube mobile. You heard that right. If it weren't for him and the teams he led, YouTube might still be a desktop experience. He went on to lead product strategy at Google before launching the startup Optic in 2022. What's that got to do with biotech, you ask? Well, it's Optic where he feels his greatest contributions are to come, and his sight...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 237
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In close partnership woth Johns Hopkins and TriLink BioTechnologies, Jeff Coller, Ph.D. and Michelle Kim, Ph.D. have built a sandbox for RNA developers and aspirational RNA business builders to play in. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, we team up once again with Advancing RNA's Anna Rose Welch to learn about the venture, dubbed the Johns Hopkins University RNA Innovation Center. Anna Rose and I query Drs. Coller a...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 236
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Dr. Tal Zaks is back, along with Advancing RNA's Anna Rose Welch, for part 2 of "Story Time With Tal." On this week's episode, we turn from his time navigating medical affairs as CMO at Moderna during the COVID 19 pandemic to learn about his latest venture, an mRNA startup called Exsilio Therapeutics. We cover the foundational aspects of the company's start, from the science it's developing, who's been recr...
Jan 06, 2025•54 min•Ep. 235
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Zandy Forbes, Ph.D. learned about business risk mitigation in the riskiest of business environments. She was a public markets healthcare investor on Wall Street for well more than a decade. Her hedge fund experience followed the Human Frontiers/Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellowship at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center that was preceded by an Oxford Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics. Since 2015, she'...
Dec 30, 2024•1 hr 3 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Tal Zaks, M.D. was Chief Medical Officer at Moderna before, during, and immediately following the company's headline role during the COVID pandemic. If that doesn't pique your interest about the stories he can tell, this episode of the Business of Biotech surely will. Tal is now leading a new mRNA-centric startup called Exsilio Therapeutics, which Advancing RNA's Anna Rose Welch and I dig into in part two of our talk with Tal,...
Dec 23, 2024•55 min•Ep. 233
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. This past spring, Xaira Therapeutics launched with $1 billion in backing, a who's-who mashup of Silicon Valley and biopharma stars led by Marc Tessier-Lavigne in the C-suite, and a mission to develop AI-generated drugs. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, we're digging into the company's origin story and its place on the greater techbio landscape with one of the men bearing responsibility for Xaira's l...
Dec 16, 2024•53 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Jerry McLaughlin, CEO and President at Life Biosciences returns for a visit, and he brought a friend in John Maslowski, newly-appointed CEO at Forge Biologics. We revisit progress at Life Biosciences, followed by a deep look into the gears that make the company's contract development and manufacturing relationship with Forge Biologics go. From CDMO selection to contracting and exec...
Dec 09, 2024•1 hr 4 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Revolo Biotherapeutics President and CEO Woody Bryan, Ph.D. is pushing the boundaries of peptide therapeutic delivery. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we dig into Dr. Bryan’s transition to the CEO chair at the company and how that coincided with an aggressive strategic decision to alter the course of administration of its peptide candidates in allergic and autoimmune diseases. That decision didn’t come lightly and its execution w...
Dec 02, 2024•45 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. The notion that political influence has no place in biology appears poised for a test it hasn’t studied for. Trump administration nominations, from RFK, Jr. to HHS and Vivek Ramaswamy to the newly-proposed DOGE, are driving a storm of speculation over the implications for biotech and other life sciences industries. Throw in the increased probability of the Biosecure Act seeing the light of legislation day under a republican congress, and the...
Nov 25, 2024•50 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In August of this year, the first TCR cell therapy to be approved for use in the U.S. was greenlighted by the FDA for patients with unresectable or metastatic synovial sarcoma who have previously received chemotherapy. It marked the first new treatment for those patients in more than a decade; a win for those patients, and a win for Adrian Rawcliffe, who’s had a hand on the wheel at Adaptimmune, the therapy’s developer and manufacturer, sinc...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 2 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Bill and Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute's (Gates MRI) Dr. Claire Wagner joins us to share insights into her work as head of Corporate Strategy and Market Access there. She shares the development of her North Star while working with the incomparable Dr. Paul Farmer in Rwanda, and how that experience translates to the growth of a biopharmaceutical company taking big swings for grossly ...
Nov 11, 2024•47 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Becoming a biotech CEO wasn't on Paul Romness' bingo card. He'd forged his place in the biopharma industry as a foremost public and policy affairs expert. Thirteen years at J&J, more than 5 at Amgen, and half a dozen at Boehringer Ingelheim had earned him the right to coast into a consulting gig that would enable him to finish out his career on his terms. Then his daughter's best friend Olivia, a teenage girl and neig...
Nov 04, 2024•49 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. It might just be coincidence, but it sure seems like Bill Enright has a knack for making big moves at inopportune times, then turning the expected outcome on its ear. For example, he signed on as CEO at Altimmune when the company was struggling mightily. Enright had a turnaround plan in hand, but as he was in the thick of a non-deal road show to execute said plan, Lehmen Brothers collapsed. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we&apos...
Oct 28, 2024•44 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While the trend toward CB1 inhibition for obesity took a small hit with the release of Novo Nordisk's small molecule oral cannabinoid receptor (CB1) inverse agonist monlunabant last month, Skye Bioscience Chairman and CEO Punit Dhillon is shaking it off. He's confident that his company's antibody-based approach to CB1 inhibition will make a moot point of the neuropsychiatric side effects that put a damper on Novo's data. ...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Allan Shaw is back with us this week to dig into the complexities of strategic hiring in biotech. We cover strategies for the step-wise assembly of effective executive teams, the importance of aligning key hires with clinical and regulatory milestones, managing salaries in line with cash runways, the pros and cons of fractional/consultative leadership, when it's time to turn fractional into full-time, and a whole-lot more. If you'r...
Oct 14, 2024•52 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Mike Kelly faced a self-reckoning before he took the job as CEO at NervGen, a company developing peptide therapeutics targeted specifically at central nervous system repair. The veteran of life sciences business development knew the ropes of the biotech C-suite. He’d been a CEO twice before. He knew how to launch drugs, having seen commercial success several times before. He even knew how to sell them—he’d started his career carrying the bag...
Oct 07, 2024•59 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. It wouldn't be accurate to say that surgeon-turned-healthcare investment banker and consultant Dr. Ali Pashazadeh traded his scalpels for spreadsheets. In fact, he still wields a scalpel quite frequently, and on this episode of the Business of Biotech podcast, he offers a fantastic reason why. Yes, it's a bit of a departure from our normal routine of biotech founders occupying the guest chair. But, Pashazadeh's no-holds-barred...
Sep 30, 2024•1 hr 17 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Hilary Eaton, Ph.D. was a self-described AI skeptic, particularly as it relates to using the tool in drug discovery. Then, a series of professional and deeply personal life events and medical discoveries put her in a position to confront that skepticism head-on. Today, she's Chief Business Officer at ProFluent Bio, a company that's committed to democratizing access to open-source AI gene editing tools that are custom-built for phar...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 14 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. SR One Capital Management CEO Simeon George, M.D. has a seemingly innate ability to pick winning biotech builders. Early on, he and his firm got behind CRISPR's Samarth Kulkarni, Ph.D., Arcellx' Rami Elghandour, and Nkarta's Paul Hastings, for example. With nearly 50 biotech leaders in SR One's portfolio, there are plenty more where those three came from. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. George, admits that...
Sep 16, 2024•54 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Erik van den Berg is CEO and board member at Memo Therapeutics, and he's a student of biotech chaos. In fact, he's been embracing it with intention for the past 30 years. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, he walks us through the management of that chaos in specific detail. Navigating gluttonous Covid-fueled financial markets. Achieving clinical outcomes during the pandemic. Keeping development on the rails in a protracted...
Sep 09, 2024•54 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. This week, it’s another “Business of Biotech-meets-Business-of-RNA” takeover with Circio CEO Erik Digman Wiklund, Ph.D. and guest co-host Anna Rose Welch of Advancing RNA . While Circio’s legacy is in cancer immunology (it still boasts a cancer vaccine candidate targeting KRAS driver mutations), the company made a bold pivot, of sorts, when it committed headlong to the circular RNA future. Now, it’s in the throes of fine-tuning a platform fo...
Sep 02, 2024•1 hr 5 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Guest co-host Anna Rose Welch of Advancing RNA fame joins us on this week’s Business of Biotech podcast for a conversation with the leaders of RNA upstart Radar Therapeutics. The company’s co-founders, Eerik Kaseniit, Ph.D. (CSO & President) and Sophia Lugo (CEO), are making waves in the mRNA therapeutics space on the heels of the invention of a precision-expressed mRNA technology that laid bare the path to Radar’s inception. On this epi...
Aug 26, 2024•1 hr 3 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. For all the drug commercialization successes he's played a leading hand in during his tenures at GSK, Genentech, and ImClone—Androderm, Augmentin, necitumumab, and Erbitux among them—Michael Bailey concedes that he's likely better known for his failures. After hearing his stories on this episode of the Business of Biotech, I tend to disagree. While he offers a transparent and instructive look at the failures themselves, I'd co...
Aug 19, 2024•58 min
