We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Using computational biology to hasten the effort, Omega Therapeutics' plan is to "coopt nature's universal biological operating system for gene control and cell differentiation." On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we dig into exactly what that means. We also explore the company's preclinical ambitions, which are diverse, targeting regenerative, multigenic/immunologic, oncologic, and monogenic indications. Om...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Under the leadership of Mai-Britt Zocca, Ph.D., IO Biotech is advancing novel, immune-modulating cancer therapies targeting IDO (indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase). Though promising, the target fell out of favor after some high-profile misses – most notably Merck's Phase 3 failure with pembrolizumab in 2018. But Immunome's dual mechanism of action is renewing interest in the target, and Dr. Zocca is gaining confidence as the company&apos...
Sep 12, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. With a unique multi-target approach, what it considers the world's best adjuvant, and a host of learnings from the successes and failures of COVID-19 vaccine efforts, Longhorn Therapeutics is gaining steam in its pursuit of a universal influenza vaccine. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Longhorn Vaccines & Diagnostics Co-Founder and President Jeff Fischer gives us a transparent look at the science and the partnerships tha...
Sep 05, 2022•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Lisa Deschamps' story is one of determination and fortitude. She got her start in the life sciences where it begins and ends for many— "carrying the bag" in big pharma sales—then proceeded to crush the odds on her way to the C-suite at Novartis. Today, she's CEO at AviadoBio, a disruptive gene therapy startup prepping an intra-thalamic Frontotemporal Dementia candidate for the clinic with a heavy Series A in its hip pocke...
Aug 29, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While many clinical-stage biopharmas are contracting or holding the line through the current market slump, Portage Biotech leaders Ian Walters, Allan Shaw, and company are making moves. The company recently acquired Tarus Therapeutics and iOx Therapeutics Ltd., extending its pipeline and positioning itself to meet some aggressive investor expectations. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Shaw dissects the deals, digging into the M&am...
Aug 22, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Raman Sehgal has made a career out of putting his energy— and he's got a lot of it— into building biotech outsourcing companies and the people who make them run. After years spent supporting several from within, he launched ramarketing, a firm dedicated to helping CROs, CDMOs, CPOs, and other providers to the biotech ecosystem build their businesses, in 2009. He's also an international best-selling author (The Floundering Founder),...
Aug 15, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Vaxxinity CEO Mei Mei Hu, J.D. leads a company with some lofty ambitions. The democratization of healthcare, interplanetary colonization, and development of accessible therapeutic vaccines to serve and enable both. Those big-picture visions have helped the company establish itself as a pioneer of the "third biologics revolution." On this week's Business of Biotech podcast, Mei Mei joins me to share Vaxxinity's strategy, w...
Aug 08, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. As biotech capital markets continue to restrict access to funding for emerging biopharmas, you might be surprised by how many federal dollars get left on the negotiating table. To that end, James Thomas Coates, Ph.D. and his team at Decisive Point have carved out a niche in the venture capital space. The firm specializes in helping biotech startups realize direct routes to millions of dollars in federal funding from a host of not-so-intuitiv...
Aug 01, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Among the more prevalent genetic conditions, Duchenne muscular dystrophy affects an estimated one in 3,500 male births worldwide. It's caused by mutations of the DMD gene, which regulates the production of a protein called dystrophin. Approved DMD treatments haven't demonstrated strong clinical outcomes, but James McArthur, Ph.D. and his team at PepGen are seeking to change that with a pipeline of disease-modifying peptide-conjugat...
Jul 25, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While renal disease treatment technologies have seen moderate incremental improvements, there hasn't been a step-change advance in diabetes care since the discovery of insulin more than 100 years ago. Working with manufacturers of existing diabetes therapeutics in addition to advancing its own pipeline, Arecor is developing enhanced reformulations of tried-and-true therapeutics like insulin to improve a long-static standard of care. Are...
Jul 18, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Serial inventor and entrepreneur Alex Blyth had long held interests in health and science, but losing his mom to pancreatic cancer was the inflection point that launched LIfT Biosciences in 2016. Now, the preclinical company is on a mission to develop the world's first 'off-the-shelf' cell therapy to destroy all solid tumors, irrespective of strain or mutation, beginning with pancreatic cancer. On this episode of the Business ...
Jul 11, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Immunome CEO Purnanand Sarma, Ph.D. joins the Business of Biotech for a discussion on precision antibodies and his company's discovery platform, which identifies novel therapeutic antibodies and their antigen targets by leveraging highly educated memory B cells from patients who have learned to fight off their disease. It’s kind of like picking an all-star team of players who have been in the game, and who are well-trained to win. On to...
Jul 04, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Swiss-Italian biopharma company Philogen was co-founded in 1996 by three brothers, all of them PhDs. This unique family affair has fueled the development of an incredibly deep and advanced pipeline of no fewer than ten therapeutic products, most of them in oncology, contributing to 16 active clinical trials, three of them at Phase 3. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, co-founder, CEO, and CSO Prof. Dario Neri shares the incredible s...
Jun 27, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. FibroBiologics Chairman, CEO, & Founder Pete O'Heeron shares the journey that led him from clinical care to biopharma entrepreneurship, and he's joined by Chief Scientific Officer Hamid Khoja, Ph.D., who explains the manufacturing technology that's driving the company's exploitation of fibroblasts to develop regenerative therapies for indications ranging from degenerative disk disease and multiple sclerosis to cancer ...
Jun 20, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. To fully appreciate the work Pyxis Oncology is doing in its development of site-specific ADCs for a number of oncological indications under the leadership of Lara Sullivan, M.D., you need to understand the work that shaped her leadership style. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. Sullivan shares the science and technology driving progress at Pyxis, but she also serves up a master class on change management, honed during her tenur...
Jun 13, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this, the 100th episode of the Business of Biotech podcast, our dear friend, frequent guest, and business of biotech brainiac Allan Shaw joins us to dissect the beleaguered biotech capital markets. We pick apart what's driving sentiment, whether the industry is over-inventoried, what's getting funded , what's not, and why, and what biotech leaders should be doing in an investment landscape marked by hyper-discernment. We al...
Jun 06, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Ampio Pharmaceuticals is currently weaving the gauntlet of a clinical hold triggered by COVID's disruption to clinical studies of its lead candidate Ampion, and recently launched an independent investigation into that trial and others. On this episode, Ampio Pharmaceuticals chairman and CEO Mike Martino joins the Business of Biotech for a candid discussion on the company, the candidate, the disruption, and the go-forward plan. Access th...
May 30, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. As COVID-19 cases climb yet again, the Business of Biotech catches up with Tonix Pharmaceuticals CEO Seth Lederman, M.D. for a conversation on his company's multi-pronged strategy to advance vaccine and therapeutic candidates to address the disease and its variants. In addition to sharing on his journey from academia to industry, Dr. Lederman discusses his company's approach to grabbing its share of the highly competitive, and high...
May 23, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Fresh on the heels of his appointment as President & CEO at Silence Therapeutics, Craig Tooman joins the Business of Biotech to share how he applies his finance-minded leadership to steward the advance of the company's deepening pipeline of gene silencing candidates. Tooman also shares insight into the IP and the people responsible for managing that deep pipeline, which spans indications from hematology to cardiovascular disease to ...
May 16, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. 4D pharma 's flagship early-stage clinical candidates are live biotherapeutics, a relatively new class of biologics that seek to impact disease state by modulating the microbiome. CEO Duncan Peyton is leading the effort to understand how the health of the microbiome relates to a wide range of diseases, including immuno-oncology, central nervous system disorders, respiratory disease, auto immune indications, and gastro intestinal disease...
May 09, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Purespring Therapeutics launched in 2020 on the back of IP developed by renowned kidney researcher Prof. Moin Saleem, who spent decades working on podocytes when podocytes weren’t cool. Just two years later, the company boasts three gene therapy assets and a platform developed expressly to identify new therapeutic targets to address kidney disease. These assets promise to change the "dialysis or transplant" ultimatums associated wi...
May 02, 2022•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Opus Genetics is an early-stage gene therapy company launched just last year and in unique fashion on the back of the patient advocacy group the Retinal Degeneration Fund. Already, its pipeline has developed into three candidates, the lead among them addressing Leber congenital amaurosis. Opus CEO Ben Yerxa, Ph.D. serves in triplicate as CEO at the RD Fund, Foundation Fighting Blindness, and Opus Genetics. His plate is full, but he's a ...
Apr 25, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Context Therapeutics Co-Founder & CEO Martin Lehr shares stories from his self-described "recovery from venture capital," the work his company is doing in gynecological cancers, and how his small company manages a modality-agnostic approach and investigator-sponsored trials across multiple clinical candidates, four of which are in phase 2 clinical trials. We also discuss his "extracurricular" work with BioBreak , Life...
Apr 18, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. When Tuyen Ong was a child, he and his family escaped Vietnam by boat in the dead of the night, bound for an Indonesian refugee camp. They spent a year in that camp before emigrating to the U.K., where Ong’s underprivileged adolescence found him growing up in the projects of London. Against the odds, Ong worked his way to UCL for an education that culminated with an M.D. Today, he’s CEO of Ring Therapeutics , a promising emerging biotech bac...
Apr 11, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In this wide-ranging discussion, IgGenix CEO Jessica Grossman, M.D. discusses the application of and market opportunity for antibody therapy for severe allergies, the gender gap in the biopharma c-suite, why women work harder than men, what it means to be a female biopharma leader, and IgGenix's approach at isolating and re-engineering allergen-specific IgE antibodies into IgG antibodies designed to alleviate — and possibly prevent — al...
Apr 04, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Since assuming the President and CEO role at Sparingvision in August, 2020, Stéphane Boissel has been making big moves in the arenas of talent acquisition and IP expansion. Those efforts are securing the company's development of a number of genomic medicines to address inherited retinal disease. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Boissel shares the company's foundation story and the role venture philanthropy played in it, ...
Mar 28, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Allan Shaw waxes on his expectations for mergers, acquisitions, and collaborative partnership opportunities for new and emerging biotechs in 2022 and beyond. We tackle questions biotech leaders should be asking about intentionality, what's attractive to potential suitors, and why startups that aren't prepared to take a candidate to the finish line have already conceded a major factor in p...
Mar 21, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. This episode of the Business of Biotech is fire. In fact, it's an interview with SalioGen Therapeutics Chairman and CEO Ray Tabibiazar, M.D., whose last name literally translates to "Dr. Fire." Learn how he got that name, what's shaped his technology-agnostic philosophy on therapeutic development, the advantages of a genome engineering technology that leverages proprietary mammal-derived enzymes, rather than viruses, and ...
Mar 14, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While success has been seen in animal models, solid tumors have proved a vexing challenge for CAR T-cell therapies. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, we're joined by Anixa Biosciences Chairman, President, & CEO Amit Kumar, Ph.D. Dr. Kumar shares on the company's progress with a CAR T-cell therapy that aims to attack both tumor cells and the tumor vasculature, in hopes that it might be the first to destroy ...
Mar 07, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. With its hypothesis-free, target-free, AI-driven drug discovery platform, Fountain Therapeutics is turning the traditional drug discovery pathway on its ear to address a variety of age-related disease. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Fountain CEO William Greene, M.D. joins us to discuss the approach, its rationale, and how the company is applying substantial support from the likes of Eli Lilly, Alexandria Venture Inve...
Feb 28, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
