The Bio Report

AI Dynamics is seeking to make AI accessible. Though its NeoPulse platform can be used across industries, the life sciences is one of the key markets the company is targeting with its technology being used to do everything from target identification for drug development to diagnosing and triaging TB patients by the sounds of their cough. We spoke to Rajeev Dutt, CEO and president of AI Dynamics, a...

Social anxiety disorder can cause debilitating physical and emotional manifestations when a person is doing such things as meeting new people, speaking in public, or interviewing for a job. It can cause sweating, a rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, and dizziness. The fear of embarrassment and humiliation can lead to depression and even addiction. VistaGen Therapeutics is developing intranasall...

Humacyte’s human acellular vessels are experimental, engineered, off-the-shelf replacement vessels that are being developed for vascular repair, reconstruction, and replacement. The vessels are designed to overcome long-standing limitations in vessel tissue repair and replacement. Though not yet approved, the manufactured vessels are getting a real-world test as the company has been providing them...

The emergence of tyrosine kinase inhibitors represented a major advance in the fight against cancer, but the ability of tumors to mutate and develop resistance to these therapies remains a challenge. Theseus Pharmaceuticals is developing what it calls “pan-variant” kinase inhibitors in the hopes of outsmarting tumors by anticipating the range of kinases that may drive their spread and growth as th...

The emerging understanding of the role the microbiome plays in wellness and disease is opening up a large number of potential therapeutic targets in the millions of genes that drive the microorganisms that live within the body. Eligo Bioscience is developing a new class of precision medicines that uses gene editing to address the expression of pathogenic genes in the microbiome to treat not only i...

While cancer immunotherapies have been promising, CAR T cell therapies have been costly, effective on less than half of patients, and focused on hematologic cancers. Cytovia Therapeutics is enlisting natural killer cells, part of the innate immune system, to develop off-the-shelf immunotherapies to treat liquid and solid tumors. The company is leveraging a cluster of technologies to produce CAR NK...

Neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, and frontotemporal dementia have been difficult conditions for drug developers to target. Coya Therapeutics is approaching these conditions as diseases of immune system dysfunction to address the neuroinflammation that underlies them We spoke to Adrian Hepner, president and chief medical officer of Coya, about the role a hyper immune res...

The introduction of precision medicine has revolutionized the treatment of cancer and other diseases, but mental health conditions have not benefitted from the same type of treatment innovation. Alto Neuroscience is working to move psychiatry away from a trial-and-error approach to develop targeted medicines with the use of biomarkers to match the right drug to the right patient. We spoke to Amit...

The use of protein degraders is a promising area of emerging small molecule therapies. Rather than inhibit disease-causing proteins, degraders use a natural cellular process to break them down. Origami Therapeutics is using its proprietary drug discovery platform to develop novel protein degraders to target neurodegenerative diseases. The approach allows the company to target proteins that are con...

Cancer immunotherapies have shown great promise, but many tumors can develop resistance as the changing tumor microenvironment can help cancers evade detection and allow cancer cells to proliferate. Teon Therapeutics is developing immno-oncology therapies for difficult to treat cancers that are designed to have the dual effect of restoring immune activity while suppressing cancer cell proliferatio...

Existing anticoagulants can prevent life-threatening blood clots for people with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The problem is that because of their mechanism of action, they also work to suppress the body’s ability to stop bleeding as it should. As a result, these therapies can be under utilized by patients who need them. Anthos Therapeutics is developing an experimental monoclonal antibo...

Though the search for eternal youth has long been the fodder for myths and legends, science has been pushing us closer toward extending healthy years of life and has set some people off on efforts to defy death altogether. Peter Ward, in his new book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, explores a subculture of immortality seekers who have turned to cryonics, as well as efforts to m...

About 15 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano took at look at how small entrepreneurial biotechs fared against large and mature pharmaceutical companies and found the two sectors were about the same when it came to R&D productivity. Now, a new book From Breakthrough to Blockbuster: The Business of Biotechnology finds that the biotechnology industry is far more effective at brin...

Poseida Therapeutics is leveraging its set of platform technologies to develop a range of next-generation cell and gene therapies. By using these technologies, alone or in combination, the company said it’s able to overcome limitations of the current generation of cell and gene therapies. The company’s most advanced candidates in its pipeline include a set of allogenic CAR T therapies. We spoke to...

Though structure-based drug discovery has been long been used, technologic advances have given this approach greater power. ShouTi believes its next-generation, computational, structure-based drug discovery platform will allow it to develop small molecule drugs that are superior in safety and efficacy to biologic and peptide therapies its seeking to replace. We spoke to Raymond Stevens, CEO of Sho...

Virus-like drug conjugates, or VDCs, are a new class of cancer therapies Aura Biosciences is developing to target a broad range of solid tumors. These therapies have a dual mechanism of action. They deliver a toxic payload to cancer cells, but also activate a secondary immune mediated response to kill cancer cells. We spoke to Elisabet de los Pinos, CEO of Aura Biosciences, about the company’s VDC...

While the emergence of CAR-T therapies have been promising, these autologous cellular therapies are costly to produce since they require taking T cells from a patient being treated, altering them, and then infusing them back into the patient. Cellectis is among a growing list of companies pursuing off-the-shelf CAR-T therapies. The company’s U-CARTs, or universal chimeric antigen receptor T cells,...

Though it’s been nearly 20 years since the Human Genome Project provided a blueprint for human biology, it still left much work to be done to understand health and disease at a molecular level. The Sweden-based Human Protein Atlas, which is seeking to map human proteins in cells, tissues, and organs, recently published significant updates to the open-access resource. We spoke to Mathias Uhlén, dir...

In 2020, CSL Behring entered into a global license and commercialization agreement with UniQure for the company’s experimental hemophilia B gene therapy. The expected, one-and-done treatment carries the potential to free people with the genetic bleeding disease from reliance on regular infusions of clotting factor IX for which they are deficient. We spoke to Steve Pascoe, senior vice president and...

The promise of data-driven medicine is that it can accelerate the diagnosis of disease, provide patients with the most effective treatments for their particular conditions, and improve drug development. Sophia Genetics is drawing on extensive information from its global, data-sharing network to make data-driven medicine a reality. We spoke to Emily Paul, product director of platform for Sophia Gen...

The growing convergence of information technology and biotechnology are creating a compelling new group of companies that live in both these worlds at once. Lux Capital, which has long invested in both sectors, has a growing portfolio of these emerging TechBio companies. We spoke to Adam Goulburn, partner at Lux Capital, about his investment process, how he tempers the promise of technology with m...

Cell and gene therapies are among the most promising approaches to treating diseases because they carry the potential to cure chronic and progressive conditions. The problem is that the high cost of producing these therapies, which often need to be tailored to individual patients, limits access to them, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Caring Cross is seeking to change that throug...

KeifeRx is developing a pipeline of orally delivered tyrosine kinase inhibitors to treat neurodegenerative diseases. It has a portfolio of these drugs that it has optimized to penetrate the brain, clear damaged cells, and treat these conditions through the bulk disposal of disease-causing toxic proteins. It believes its approach offers the potential to significantly improve on current treatments,...

When AzurRX BioPharma merged with First Wave Bio last year it renamed itself First Wave BioPharma. The company is developing targeted, non-systemic therapies for gastrointestinal diseases with its lead candidate niclosamide, an approved therapy to treat tapeworms that it believes has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. The company is developing niclosamide in six GI-indications including...

HCW Biologics is developing immunotherapies to target chronic inflammation associated with aging. The company’s therapeutics are designed to disrupt the link between chronic, low-grade inflammation and age-related disorders. The company believes this type of inflammation is a significant contributing factor to cancer and several chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neuro...