LifeLines by Biocom California

Decades ago, the terms “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” were associated with rogue robots and nefarious computers in sci-fi books and movies. Today, these technologies are a part of our everyday lives and as innocuous as predictive text appearing in a messaging app, a robot on wheels delivering food to your table at a restaurant, or a student using Chat GPT for writing prompts. But...

Mention Orange County to the average person and images of Disneyland, Laguna Beach and high-end shopping malls may come to mind. Life science industry insiders know that beyond the county’s famous landmarks is a nascent biotechnology hub—more than 63,000 people there were employed by the sector last year, and the number of startups establishing roots in Orange County is growing. In 2020, biotech s...

The San Francisco Bay Area is known as the “birthplace of biotech” and a center of the tech world, but did you know the local biomedical industry—companies developing new drugs and foods, medical devices and equipment, digital healthcare, and more—number in the thousands in the region? And that where a life science company first sets up shop in the Bay Area can indicate where it may move to in the...

How does a biotech startup manage to forge $125 million in partnerships with AbbVie and  Eli Lilly in just under two years post-inception? Our next guest, Peter Anastasiou, CEO of Capsida Biotherapeutics  since 2022, attributes much of the company's rise to addressing unmet patient needs. First invented by Viviana Gradinaru, director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the...

Kit Pogliano says her colleagues from graduate school would have voted her the least likely person from class to go into university administration, let alone become a dean of an entire school. But after building a 20-year career as a professor, researcher, and leader at University of California, San Diego, she became the first female Dean of the School of Biological Sciences—which U.S. News &...

What do Magic Johnson, the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and a molecule have in common? They each played an unexpected role in changing the course of our next guest, Stanley Lewis, CEO and founder of San Diego-based A28 Therapeutics , on his path toward finding a novel treatment for cancer and advocating for patient diversity in clinical trials. On this episode of LifeLines , Stanle...

Women make up half of the globe’s population, but the dollars devoted to finding treatments for women’s unique health issues—beyond conditions such as breast cancer—are significantly underfunded. Only 1 percent of research dollars are invested in women's health concerns, and women's health represents only 2 percent of the development pipeline of preclinical products for non-cancer related...

Element Biosciences is on a mission to democratize next-generation sequencing by helping scientists overcome a major lack of diversity in genomic studies. A recent article in Nature Medicine cited that as of June 2021, 86 percent of genomics studies have been conducted in individuals of European decent, leaving researchers without adequate data representing our global population. The promise of ge...

Karius’ story is all about equipping doctors with the right information, for the right patient, at the right time. For most immunocompromised patients, it’s a matter (quite literally) of life or death.  When Alec Ford’s daughter was just a toddler, she suffered with asthma and caught a viral infection that led to secondary bacterial infections and was hospitalized multiple times. Alec says he watc...

Biocom California’s new podcast, LifeLines , brings you direct access to leaders in the life science industry for candid one-on-one conversations about the journeys they’ve taken, both professionally and personally, toward bettering human and environmental health. Biocom California is a member and advocacy organization that accelerates life science success in California and beyond. With over 1,700...