We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. We often talk about biotechs taking "big swings." This week's guest is swinging for the fences with a lineup of gene therapies designed to address multiple forms of hearing loss, which affect multiple millions (if not, billions) of people worldwide. Adding to the challenge she's accepted, Sensorion CEO Nawal Ouzren is architecting an approach that seeks to restore hearing that's been lost due to genetic factors, trea...
Apr 17, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. LyGenesis is developing a pipeline of allogeneic cell therapies using the lymph node as an in vivo bioreactor to grow functioning ectopic organs. What sounds like science fiction to some is starting to look like a life changing therapy for millions of liver, kidney, pancreas, and thymus disease sufferers. The science behind it is being developed not in Boston, not in Philadelphia, nor in San Franciso, but right in the heart of the rust belt ...
Apr 10, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Today's episode of the Business of Biotech covers a lot of ground with Enzyvant CEO Bill Symonds, Pharm.D. Among other things, we discuss the career moves Dr. Symonds has made within the "vant" environment since his involvement in the launch of the original Roivant, the approval of Rethymic, the merger of Altavant and Enzyvant, and the company's intentions for a brand new regenerative medicine manufacturing facility in Re...
Apr 03, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. The more we learn about inflammation and the complex cause/contributor/symptom roles it plays in various disease states, the more business activity we see in the inflammation therapeutics space. But to date, commercial pharmaceutical and biologic efforts have fallen short for patients, says Moonlake Immunotherapeutics CEO Jorge Santos Da Silva, Ph.D. What's the problem, and why does he think his camelid-derived nanobody candidates are p...
Mar 27, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On the surface, the merger of Medsenic (a developer of arsenic salt formulations for therapeutic application in inflammatory conditions) and Bone Therapeutics (which develops allogeneic cell therapies for complicated bone fractures) doesn't look obviously synergistic. But Francois Rieger, Ph.D. says that on the scientific level, it's a perfect union, and the veteran biotech founder says the business should always follow the science...
Mar 20, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Among a growing cluster of Pittsburgh biotechs, you'll find BlueSphere Bio, an early-stage company discovering T-cell receptors to leverage against tumor-specific antigens in individual cancer patients. Its leader, CEO Keir Loiacono, Esq., works with a sense of urgency inspired by his own cancer journey. Business of Biotech host Matt Pillar and guest co-host Jon O'Connell, executive editor at Bioprocess Online, toured Bluesphere&ap...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. SPECIAL EDITION: BoB@JPM Elixirgen Therapeutics CEO Akihiro Ko joins the Business of Biotech for the final episode in our special series recorded at JPM Week in San Francico. Life Science Leader Chief Editor Ben Comer joined us for the conversation. We dive deep into Elixirgen's unique, temperature-controlled in-vivo gene expression technology designed to address common cell therapy administration challenges and unwanted, off-target imm...
Mar 06, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. SPECIAL EDITION: BOB@JPM Flagship Pioneering plucked Michael Severino, M.D. away from AbbVie to run point at Tessera, a startup it's backed to pioneer a new category of genetic medicine it calls gene writing. The Business of Biotech caught up with Severino at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last month. We learned what lured him away from leadership positions at Merck, Amgen, and AbbVie, how gene writing differs from...
Feb 27, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. SPECIAL EDITION: BOB@JPM Bolt Biotherapeutics CEO Randall Schatzman, Ph.D. and CMO Edith Perez, M.D. are no strangers to the Business of Biotech, having previously joined us on episodes 14 and 18, respectively. The last time we spoke with Dr. Schatzman, he was preparing the company for its initial public offering. We caught up with him and Dr. Perez at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last month for a conversation on the ...
Feb 20, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. SPECIAL EDITION: BoB@JPM The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference is a target-rich environment for conversations with the leaders of up-and-coming biopharma companies, so we took the Business of Biotech on the road. On today's episode, we sat down with Matt Coffey, Ph.D., who earned his Ph.D. in 1998 and turned his doctoral thesis into a biopharma company called Oncolytics in 1999. Dr. Coffey shares on his abrupt transition from academia to ...
Feb 13, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. SPECIAL EDITION: BoB@JPM The Business of Biotech podcast took to the streets of San Francisco during the 41st Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. This week's episode features a conversation with Sangamo Therapeutics CEO Sandy Macrae, Ph.D., who rationalizes the company's aggressive pipeline development and its decision to invest in multinational AAV and cell therapy manufacturing facilities in France and California. Dr. Macra...
Feb 06, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Is it past time for a new approach to the COVID vaccine? Ocugen Chairman of the Board, Founder & CEO Shankar Musunuri, Ph.D. says yes, and his ideals would mark significant improvements: fewer shots, better durability, less post-vaccination transmission, and safety proven by time-tested technology. How would such a vaccine be produced? Dr. Musunuri lays out the manufacturing science— and why the improved COVID vaccine his company is curr...
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Call it fortuitous, good planning, instinct, or a combination of all three, but Nadim Ahmed's educational foundation— earned before the IT/Biology combination was cool— is serving him well as CEO at Cullinan Oncology. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Ahmed shares his story and that of Cullinan Oncology's drug discovery efforts, which have yielded a wide range of multi-modal candidates spanning a range of cancer indicatio...
Jan 23, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. After more than 21 years leading process, product, and technical development efforts at Merck and Takeda, Piper Trelstad, Ph.D. joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (MRI) in January, 2022. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we'll dive into how the MRI, a full-fledged clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, is tackling health problems that challenge some of the world's most vulnerable populations...
Jan 16, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Gain Therapeutics' newly-appointed CEO Matthias Alder offers up a deep, yet abundantly clear explanation of how his company is applying compute power to speed up drug discovery. At Gain, computational models help researchers winnow down not just which molecules might have therapeutic effect, but also how adept those molecules will be at binding--and staying bound--to their target. It's not just theory, either. On this episode of th...
Jan 09, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Join Matt Pillar for a conversation with Carine Boustany, PharmD and SVP, US Research Site Head and Global Head of Immunology and Respiratory Diseases at Boehringer Ingelheim. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we walk through the story leading up to the recent approval of spesolimab. In September 2022, spesolimab was approved in the USA for the treatment of generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP) flares in adults. Dr. Boustany shares ...
Jan 02, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Recursion's unique, technology-aided approach to drug discovery has yielded one of the deepest, fastest-growing pipelines in emerging biotech. It starts with a 20-petabyte-and-growing database designed to create comprehensive "maps of biology" that enable insight into the relationships between molecules and cell types. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we take a deep dive into the approach—and what Recursion intends ...
Dec 26, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Friend and frequent guest Allan Shaw rejoins the Business of Biotech to reflect on his recent presentation on innovative biotech financing at the BioFuture event in NYC. We also dig into Bruce Booth's "Atlas Venture Year In Review ," revisiting and unpacking some quoteworthy material and metrics from both sources. Allan offers up plenty of prognostication and professional insight in a preview of what's to come in 2023, co...
Dec 19, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While many gene therapy development efforts focus on rare disease, Xalud Therapeutics is taking a swing that, measured in addressable patient market terms, is considerably bigger. Osteoarthritis, or OA, is a chronic, progressive joint disease that affects over 30 million people in the United States. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we catch up with Xalud Chief Medical Officer Howard Rutman, M.D., MBA for a discussion on the compan...
Dec 12, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In an industry that takes new business naming conventions to extremes, Abpro is a refreshingly clear exception. Brothers Ian Chan (CEO & Co-Founder) and Eugene Chan, M.D., (Chairman & Co-Founder) are antibody pros. The company's pipeline spans no fewer than 8 antibody candidates aimed at COVID-19, cancers including breast, gastric, and liver, and ophthalmologic indications DME and wet AMD. With a scientific advisory board led by...
Dec 05, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. 2023 is just around the corner, and it's shaping up to be a big year for Umoja Biopharma. The company is on the leading edge of the effort to break the solid tumor barrier with in vivo CAR T-cell therapies, with one such effort currently enrolling patients for a phase 1 trial. It's planning two more INDs in the coming year. This episode of the Business of Biotech finds us getting the inside story from Umoja Chief Operating Officer ...
Nov 28, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Nutcracker Therapeutics is a preclinical biopharma company developing multimodal RNA-based therapeutics for HPV-driven tumors, T-cell lymphoma, and Genitourinary tumors. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Chief Business Officer Geoff Nosrati, Ph.D. offers a comprehensive view of the RNA-based therapeutics landscape and sheds light on what he perceives as an advantageous position at Nutcracker— the capacity to manufacture RNA in-hous...
Nov 21, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Ticks are a scourge. They're vectors of multiple serious an debilitating diseases, and evolution has made them perfectly adept at attaching to their hosts—and potentially spreading those diseases virtually undetected— that ability owing to anti-inflammatory and anesthetic proteins in their saliva. But the emerging biotech Akari Therapeutics thinks there's a broad range of medicinal value in those proteins. They've painstakingl...
Nov 14, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Earlier this month, Surface Oncology shared that it will open a second stage of its monotherapy trial of SRF388, an antibody targeting IL-27, on the heels of a promising phase 2 data readout. Shortly before that release, the Business of Biotech caught up with Surface's CSO Vito Palombella, Ph.D. and CEO Rob Ross, M.D. in the company's Cambridge, MA HQ. We discussed the first-of-its-kind target, the company's "product vers...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. MIT-born startup Elicio Therapeutics' novel Amphiphile Technology Platform is designed to directly engage the lymphatic system in the deployment and delivery of therapeutic payloads. We caught up with Chief Scientific Officer Peter DeMuth, Ph.D. at Elicio HQ in Boston to learn how the platform works, and how it's driving rapid clinical progress for the company's robust pipeline of therapeutic vaccines in oncology, as a cell th...
Oct 31, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Anat Binur, Ph.D. is CEO and Co-Founder at Ukko, where she's leading an effort to create new allergy therapeutics by engineering the proteins that induce immune response in people who suffer from food allergies. The effort at Ukko is deeply rooted in computational biology. The company leverages artificial intelligence to analyze how the allergen proteins interact with patients' blood in an effort to determine the specific attribute...
Oct 24, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In a particularly candid conversation, 4BIO Managing Partner Dmitry ‘Dima’ Kuzmin and Ray Therapeutics Co-Founder & CEO Paul Bresge share the recipe for a successful relationship between biotech VC firm and startup. Bresge offers insight into VC engagement strategy and pitch, Kuzmin dishes on what investors look for in terms of "fundability" and what throws red flags, such as— perhaps ironically— a CEO like Bresge who has a dee...
Oct 17, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. AbbVie VP of Oncology Discovery Research Steve Davidsen, Ph.D. is a living, breathing timeline of the company's cancer research and development efforts. He got his start with the company— Abbott at the time— way back in 1986. As such, he's charted the adoption of multiple advanced technologies that have contributed to the realization of dozens of molecular weapons in the fight against cancer. On this episode of the Business of Biot...
Oct 10, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this episode of The Business of Biotech, Obsidian Therapeutics CEO Paul Wotton, Ph.D. takes us behind the scenes to reveal what precipitated the FDA's clearance of its IND application for a novel, engineered tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy called OBX-115. Learn how the company navigated the regulatory path for a first-of-its-kind biologic therapy developed in partnership with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center th...
Oct 03, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Here's the story of BioStem, it's young founders, and how they reached commercial status in short order with a portfolio of proprietary regenerative wound care products developed from perinatal tissue. Fueled by a personal story of resilience and inspiration, Jason Matuszewski (CEO) and Andrew VanVurst (COO) built a company that's developed a local microenvironment activation platform drawing on a combination of small molecule...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
