Axial Podcast

Vikas Goyal has one of the best records in biotech having spent over 8 years at SR One partnering with companies like Nimbus and Morphic Therapeutic before joining Pandion Therapeutics (acquired by Merck) full-time after investing in it as well. Now starting Trekk Venture Parners, Vikas' story uniquely blends success across investing, operations, and company building. Starting off his career a...

Max Jamilly is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hoxton Farms, a London-based startup develop cultivated fat as an ingredient for the meat alternatives industry. We discuss his journey from scientist to founder starting at Oxford where Max earned his PhD in synthetic biology. Along with his work at Microsoft Research, Gen9, and in venture capital. Leading up to founding Hoxton with his childhood friend.

Rishi Bedi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Y-Trap a biotech company developing multifunctional fusion proteins for cancer immunotherapy. We discuss the founding story of Y-Trap, the current status of protein engineering and computational biology, along with his career leading up to Y-Trap. Rishi's experience spans machine learning, immuno-oncology, and drug development. Previously, Rishi built th...

Eric Ward is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of AgBiome, an agtech company that analyzes crop microbiomes to develop crop protection products & traits. Founded in 2012, AgBiome has no managers; rather, the company uses committees of employees to handle core functions like business development and financials. AgBiome has built a  wide-ranging platform , called Genesis, integrating plant genomics with...

Anand Muthusamy is a graduate student at Caltech working in the Lester Lab at the intersection of chemistry and neuroscience. In our conversation we discuss his journey starting at Penn where he studied biochemistry with a strong grounding in philosophy. Working in the Petersson lab, focused on unnatural amino acid mutagenesis to control enzyme function and organic synthesis for the development of...

Melih Yilmaz is a PhD student at the University of Washington. Where he focuses on computational biology and develop machine learning tools. Advised by William Noble and Sewoong Oh, Melih's current research interests are around proteomics, particularly building deep learning methods to analyze mass spectrometry data. We start off the conversation talking about his journey to biology and conseq...

Peter Turnbaugh is a professor at UCSF studying the human microbiome’s effect on pharmacology and nutrition. In our conversation, we discuss his journey to become a scientist and help pioneer the microbiome field starting in graduate school. We talk about his research as a fellow at Harvard then professor at UCSF, and his lab’s current work. A key theme across the conversation is learning by doing...

In our conversation with Wyatt McDonnell, the Co-Founder and CEO of Infinimmune, we discuss his journey to 10X Genomics, his work there, and the founding of Infinimmune . Wyatt is a world-class inventor & immunologist working across a wide range of projects at 10X from launching BEAM (barcode-enabled antigen mapping), working on the Immune Profiling v2 product, and developing various immune re...

Margaux Pinney is a Sandler Fellow at UCSF and in our conversation we discuss her journey to become a scientist & leader in her field and her work around enzyme evolution. The Pinney Lab studies how enzymes work, how they got there, and how they will adapt in the future. Margaux grew up in a small town outside of Seattle; Black Diamond, WA named after the high quality coal the town used to pro...

Excited to put out a conversation with Devon Cayer, Co-Founder and CEO of  1859 , a platform biotech company merging pico-scale screening and AI to scale small molecule discovery. We talk about his story that led him to founding 1859, how the company was built, and the long-term vision. Devon discusses how to set and measure core metrics for drug discovery platforms and business model design....

In our conversation with Abhishek Jha, Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata , we talk about what it takes to build a SaaS company in biotech, the impact of AI on life sciences, & the prerequisites to build a startup. Abhishek and I discuss his journey as an academic scientist to Agios Pharmaceuticals to founding Elucidata in 2015. From his journey, a key quote is that “life doesn’t let you do a con...

In our conversation, Bryan discusses everything from directed evolution and drugging RNA to what it takes to start a lab. The Dickinson Lab  at the University of Chicago is a unique group composed of biochemists & synthetic chemists to cell biologists & synthetic biologists. The lab set up shop in 2014 to use chemistry to control biology with both evolutionary and rational methods. Br...

Greg is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF studying macrophage immunometabolism in cancer and infection. What makes him truly unique is his ability to do groundbreaking research while training to qualify for the Olympic Trials marathon. Although Greg didn’t make it to the Trials due to injury, he did get a Nature Metabolism publication for his work connecting mitohormesis to immunity, with im...

Keisuke Goda has set the standard for sorting cells based on images. As a professor at the University of Tokyo leading a lab of 53 scientists, Keisuke is developing new tools to explore biology at different scales. During grad school at MIT, he studied gravitational waves in the LIGO group where a collaboration at Caltech led to an opportunity to move into biology at UCLA. By bringing LIGO te...

Nina is one of the up-and-coming superstars in biotech. Having just earned her PhD in bioengineering at Stanford in the Sunwoo Lab this summer, she has the scientific horsepower and storytelling ability to make a large impact on drug development, business, and the lives of patients. At the age of 8, Nina was diagnosed with an ovarian teratoma. In some ways, that shifted Nina towards a career in sc...

Hannes  is a graduate student at MIT working towards a PhD in computer science. Within the span of a few months, he has been able to publish two ICML papers: one focused on  molecular property prediction  and the other developing a model, called  EquiBind , for drug binding prediction. Hannes, advised by both  Regina Barzilay  and  Tommi Jaakkola , is doing...

We talk with Justin Farlow, Co-Founder and CTO of Serotiny about his journey from UCSF to founding a company with his brother, Colin. In this conversation, Justin discusses his initial discovery of engineer-able biology from a physics lens to earning his PhD at UCSF under Zev Gartner while being in the epicenter of both synthetic biology and software startups. Then he goes into his journey as a fo...

King is currently a graduate student in the Howard Chang Lab at Stanford. In this conversation, we discuss everything from the beginning of his scientific career to extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) and cancer drug development. King went to college at the University of Washington where he became passionate about developmental biology. The beauty of a FISH experiment hooked King to lab work and set him...

Really excited to put out this conversation with Kadi Saar , an outstanding inventor and world-class computational chemist, where we discuss her career spanning childhood interests to graduate research to her work now around high-throughput structural biology and condensates. Kadi is a rising star in life sciences building out new experimental and computational tools to probe biology and advance h...

We discuss Bruce's career from being pre-med and getting into research while at Washington University in St. Louis to working at Intrexon and going to grad school at Caltech afterwards. While at Intrexon, he saw the need for better tools to scale biology and decided to go to Caltech to pursue his ideas. At Caltech, he was advised by Prof. Frances Arnold, who pioneered the protein engineering techn...

We discuss Nader 's career from learning structural biology in the Marqusee and Alber Labs at UC Berkeley to his pioneering graduate work at MIT with Forest White and Li-Huei Tsai and now at Stevens at Harvard Medical School. The conversation is centered around the 2 groundbreaking papers he published while earning his PhD: 1. Phosphoproteomics identifies microglial Siglec-F inflammatory response...

We discuss Diego's career from building GeneWeave (acquired by Roche) to Endpoint Health now. Endpoint is pioneering a new business model merging diagnostics, data, and drug development to start with patient data and back into a therapy. The company is using their platform to develop first-line medicines for indications in infectious diseases with no approved therapies and beyond. Truly, Endpoint...

We discuss James' and Deniz's careers from how they first met to founding Seven Bridges and Totient and now building AbSci after Totient was recently acquired. With experience leading teams in the 100s spanning genomics and SaaS to drug development and even paint from James' childhood entrepreneurial pursuits, both have an incredible amount of wisdom on scaling technology companies. We touch on Ab...

We discuss Jacob's career going from physics to biology and making the transition from academia to industry. Building and leading data science teams at GNS Healthcare, Indigo, and now EQRx, Jacob is one of the best data scientists in biotech. In our conversation, we talk about ways to generate standardized data for machine learning models, building interdisciplinary teams, and implementing relevan...

We discuss Brian's career starting at Trinity in Dublin to Stanford, 23andMe, and Hexagon. In our conversation, we talk about the interplay between computation and biology, business models in biotech, and what it takes to build world-class teams. Brian really has the superpower of building and being part of talent hubs. If he ever wants to, I know he would build the best talent agency in biotech.