We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. We spend a lot of time talking with our guests about building biotech companies. That’s true of this episode too, but today we’re taking a step further with John Leonard, M.D., longtime CEO at Intellia Therapeutics. In addition to how he’s built late-clinical stage Intellia, Dr. Leonard shares the foundational elements of a biotech community, particularly around rapidly-advancing technologies such as CRISPR, and what biotech ecosystems offer...
Jan 15, 2024•55 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Relatively new CEO Joseph Ferra has orchestrated some pretty significant change at Elevation Oncology in the two(ish) years since the Business of Biotech last hosted the company. In that short time, Ferra advance from CFO to CEO, a move that aligned very closely with the company's difficult decision to shelve the late phase 2 anti-HER3 monoclonal antibody candidate it was founded on. Those big moves set the stage for Elevations' ne...
Jan 08, 2024•50 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. A new year marks a fresh start for biotech partnerships, and to kick off 2024, we're highlighting a good one. Fina Biosolutions' Dr. Andrew Lees recently signed on with Scorpius BioManufacturing to support his company's growth plan. On today's episode of the Business of Biotech, Lees sits down with Scorpius VP of commercial operations Steve Lavezoli for a frank conversation on the ups, downs, and expectations of a biotech...
Jan 01, 2024•52 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Merry Christmas, Business of Biotechers! On this Christmas Day release, we’re taking a trip to the land down under to visit with Dr. Sam Costello, a former gastroenterologist-turned managing director and co-founder at Adelaide, Australia-based BiomeBank. We covered some ground on this one, most notably the unique path BiomeBank took to chalking up the first donor-derived microbiome therapeutic approval of its kind, anywhere in the world. In ...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 6 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, we welcome two extraordinary guests - Dr. Neela Patel, a molecular biologist-turned-Chief Business Officer, and Dr. John Mulligan, an academic-turned-founder of newly-formed Bonum Therapeutics. Together, Neela and John will pull back the curtain on Bonum's transition from its predecessor, Good Therapeutics, which was fueled by a high-profile asset sale to Roche. The asset, a PD-1-r...
Dec 18, 2023•1 hr 9 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. During his leadership of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief during the George W. Bush administraion, Dr. Mark Dybul, M.D. shepherded programs credited with saving more than 25 million lives. For many years after that public service drew to a close, he continued the mission as executive director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria--working in lockstep with not only the world's leading scientists, b...
Dec 11, 2023•1 hr 4 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Combined Therapeutics President & CEO Dr. Romain Micol is operating his company in a very noisy space, where hundreds of new biotechs have popped up on the coattails of a COVID-driven renewal of interest in mRNA vaccines. Micol recognizes that noise and the competition it brings for capital and mindshare. He's not only aware of it — he welcomes it. On this quick episode of the Business of Biotech podcast, Micol shares the unique app...
Dec 04, 2023•28 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. When it comes to landing and executing strategic partnerships, Regeneron puts on a clinic. Partnerships, acquisitions, licensing agreements, and other deals large and small with Intellia, Decibel Therapeutics, BARDA, Alnylam, and Sonoma Therapeutics are just a sampling of those making news this year alone. The man behind much of that dealmaking is none other than Nouhad Husseini, SVP and Head of Business Development and Corporate Strategy at...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr 3 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. From his vantage point as an independent biotech journalist, Luke Timmerman has been watching the expansions and retractions of the industry for a couple of decades now. His unique perspective is hard to equal, and that perspective is, despite tough markets and tepid public sentiment, decidedly bullish. Luke's optimism is fed by sound logic gained from a career spent in observation mode, watching the development of purpose-built tools m...
Nov 20, 2023•54 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Earlier this year, Shawn Davis, Ph.D. left a pretty comfortable position at AstraZeneca (and Amgen before that, and Milliken, and others, before that) to lead Liberate Bio. He brought along another industry notable in Merck/Intellia alumnus Walter Strapps, Ph.D., who serves as CSO at Liberate. Why'd they do it? Because RNA delivery is such a crucial step toward revolutionary genetic medicine, but it's tough science. They think they...
Nov 13, 2023•55 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Shortly after Thalidomide became a household word—albeit a very, very bad one—a biotech investor bought it for a couple hundred grand. Who on earth would want a drug pulled from the market for causing birth defects? Steve Gorlin did. Today, Thalidomide is the foundation of cancer drugs worth billions of dollars. Gorlin doesnt own it anymore, but the story of how he got it is just one of the experiences that contributed to the codification of...
Nov 06, 2023•58 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Register for Business of Biotech Live! Legal & IP Protection For New Biotechs here . Get ready to unravel the legal enigmas of the biotech world with me and Keir LoIacono, Esq. The CEO of Blue Sphere Bio, Keir is no stranger to high-stakes decision-making and legal conundrums in the biotech industry. Having served as the general counsel and VP of Corporate Development for Oncosec, lead in-house counsel and senior director for Advaxis, an...
Nov 01, 2023•2 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. What constitutes a healthy, productive, and successful relationship between an emerging biopharma company and its contract develpment and manufacturing outsourcer (CDMO)? Jenny Holt, Chief Development Officer at the biopharma company Ray Therapeutics has some opinions. So does John Maslowski, Chief Commercial Officer at the CDMO Forge Biologics. Think they align? On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we dig into the trust, technical ex...
Oct 30, 2023•1 hr 4 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On a road trip to Boston, the Business of Biotech caught up with podcast alum Dan Passeri, J.D., CEO at Cue Biopharma, and enjoyed a two-for-one with CSO & President Anish Suri, Ph.D. at Cue's headquarters just feet below the Auerbach Center. Among other things, we discussed the duo's complementary leadership approach as the company takes multiple candidates into the clinic, why Passeri leans into his biotech legal background a...
Oct 23, 2023•1 hr 1 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Johanna Kaufmann, Ph.D.'s path to EVP, Oncology at Codagenix is part serendipity and part circumstance, but it's a much larger part hard work. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. Kaufmann gives us an intimate retrospective on her career to date, sharing stories about her rapid ascension from Scientist 1 to executive leadership. We dig into her wild ride through M&A, her time at GSK, and the personal prof...
Oct 16, 2023•1 hr 2 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Leonard Mazur, co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Citius Pharmaceuticals, shares his rollercoaster ride to success in biotech, the founding story of Citius Pharmaceuticals, his engagement with the Department of Defense, and the effort to revive an antibiotic used on the frontlines. Leonard takes us into the complexity of investor relationships, and his personal investment that influences his leadersh...
Oct 09, 2023•1 hr 2 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Don't be offended by the title of today's Business of Biotech podcast. Dr. Quin Wills' application of what's become known as "Wheaton's Law" (look it up) is central to the ambitious goals his company, Ochre Bio, is pursuing: pioneering the value of computational biology in large mol discovery and development, putting an end to the global liver disease epidemic, and changing the costly, high-risk approach to...
Oct 02, 2023•54 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. This week's guest on the Business of Biotech, EVQLV's Andrew Satz, says AI and ML in biopharma are like sex in high school. "Many of the people who say they're doing it really aren't, and the one who really are aren't talking about it," he says. So, when it comes to the computational biology buzz, what’s real? What’s hype? What’s yielding benefit and what’s merely vaporware? In our talks with the leaders of...
Sep 25, 2023•59 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Orca Bio's Dan Kirby has played a hand in prepping more than a few approved biologic therapeutic candidates for commercialization. Equally important, he knows firsthand what makes or breaks post-approval commercial efforts, having played virtually every role there is to play in drug sales and marketing. He "carried the bag" for GSK in his early days, directed oncology marketing efforts at Amgen, and led marketing and U.S. comm...
Sep 18, 2023•52 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Core to the clinical-stage biopharma Life Bisociences belief set is that, "contrary to popular belief, aging is not caused by random wear and tear, but instead is caused by a discrete set of biological mechanisms that can be targeted therapeutically.” The fountain of youth might be a fantasy, but the biology of aging, and more specifically, the science behind the manipulation of that biology, is not only real, it’s become big business. ...
Sep 11, 2023•1 hr 5 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Within about five minutes of conversation with Protalix CFO Eyal Rubin, I learned that he doesn’t bite his tongue about the rigors of biotech business and finance management, which is precisely why I’m eager to talk with him on today’s episode of the podcast. From commercialization deals with big pharma to being about $50 million underwater to swatting away the day trading armchair quarterbacks on Stocktwits, Rubin’s seen a few things and he...
Sep 04, 2023•52 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In many respects, bringing an established foreign biopharma company to the U.S. market is not unlike starting one up from scratch. In other respects, it's even harder; long-held cultural norms and management styles, region-specific market dynamics, payer system nuance, and political influence must all be re-navigated and re-negotiated without encumbrance. The job's not for the faint of heart, which might be why the Danish company L...
Aug 28, 2023•53 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Since we last spoke in the Spring of 2021, Nevan Charles Elam, JD has managed to advance both of small-but-mighty Rezolute Bio's candidates onto the next phases of their journey. This year, on the back of a $130 million investment, Rezolute Bio is prepping its RZ358 candidate, a monoclonal antibody for congenital hyperinsulinism, for a pivotal phase 3 trial. On this week's epsiode of the Business of Biotech, we're settling in ...
Aug 21, 2023•54 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. The non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) therapeutics market has proven to be an 11/10 on the difficulty scale. Despite billions of big biopharma dollars invested in therapeutic development, and a few close calls, no therapeutics has yet reached the finish line. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, 89bio CEO Rohan Palekar gives us the insider's perspective on the the challenges that heave beset the field, from a rigorous FDA appr...
Aug 14, 2023•53 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. It’s been said that clinical trials are where emerging biotechs go to die. If the science doesn't kill quickly, poor cash management will slowly. And, even when good data opens the cash floodgates, post-round cash management savvy isn't necessarily intuitive to academic and scientific founders. Cash runway preservation is, however, ingrained in the cerebral cortex of one of our favorite mavens of biotech finance markets and managem...
Aug 07, 2023•48 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While Horizon Therapeutics has made plenty of waves in the biotech news cycle of late. While perhaps not as flashy as a perilous multibillion dollar acquisition deal or potential blockbuster readout, its formal establishment of a research team – comparatively pragmatic as that may be – could have long-term consequences that are just impactful. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, we dig into why the company chose to establ...
Jul 31, 2023•47 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. The microbiome therapeutics market has been taking a beating, with several clinical-stage companies failing or flailing at the hands of tough financial markets and regulatory scrutiny. MaaT Pharma Founder & CEO Hervé Affagard knows these perils well. Affagard recently navigated his company through a protracted FDA clinical hold, emerging on the other side with a promising Phase 3 candidate in Graft versus Host Disease. On this episode of...
Jul 24, 2023•49 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Chief Operating Officer is arguably the toughest job in the emerging biopharma C-suite. HR, CMC, regulatory affairs, legal, PR, you name it, the COO touches it, and practically everything rolls up to her. This week's episode of the Business of Biotech brings us to a president and COO who's also a mom, a volunteer, and an advocate for diversity and equality in biopharma. That advocacy isn't just lip service, by the way. Here, R...
Jul 17, 2023•46 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Will machine learning revolutionize biopharma drug discovery? Has it already? This week on the Business of Biotech, we explore the intersection of tech and bio with Dr. James Field, founder and CEO of LabGenius. We'll get an insider's look at the formation of a company bridging the divide between computational and biological sciences, we'll learn why this ML-intensive leader applies a scientist's skepticism to the tech he...
Jul 10, 2023•47 min
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Ahmed Hamdy, MD didn’t ask to be the subject of Nathan Vardi's new book For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug. In fact, that particular chapter of Dr. Hamdy’s career is one he’d rather not relive. But, in display of the resilience required of biotech leadership, Hamdy made a raging comeback. On this week’s episode of the Business of Biotech, we dive into Hamdy’s resurrection; how he shepherded ...
Jul 03, 2023•47 min
