Beyond Biotech - the podcast from Labiotech

Today I’m joined by not one, not two, but three guests with their takes on the biotech year ahead. In December we tasked Labiotech journalists Jules Adam, Roohi Peter, and Willow Shah-Neville with the task of identifying the five biotech players that they thought would be the ones to watch in 2026 . Now you can read that article at Labiotech-dot-EU, and we’ve linked it in the show notes here in yo...

Welcome to our first episode for 2026. Today, we're joined by Hakan Goker, Managing Director at M Ventures , the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA. With over two decades in biotech investing, Hakan has driven transformative deals in oncology, autoimmune diseases, and beyond, including standout 2025 investments like FoRx Therapeutics and portfolio milestones such as Artios&...

Welcome to our final episode for 2025. We’re taking a little break for the holidays but we’ll be back again on Friday 9th of January to kick off our year with the Managing Director of Merck KGaA’s M Ventures, Hakan Goker. Today, though, I’m joined by Ester in t’Groen of Johnson & Johnson . Fresh off the American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting in Orlando, where J&J presented ove...

In this episode we sit down with Martin Beck, Senior Vice President and Head of the Inflammation Business Unit at Boehringer Ingelheim . Martin grew up just down the road from the company’s headquarters in Germany, joined as a scholarship student more than 20 years ago, and never really left – and you’ll hear why he still loves it. We spend most of the episode focused on a disease that doesn’t get...

Cancer is one of the biggest health challenges worldwide. While progress has been made, millions of patients are still in need of new treatment options that better address the complexities of their disease. BeOne Medicines is creating the world’s next-generation cancer treatments with relentless innovation, aiming to deliver therapies to more people around the globe. This week, I'm sitting do...

Daiichi Sankyo has been pioneering ADCs since 2010, with a pipeline targeting over 30 indications and potentially reaching 400,000 patients. In today’s episode I’m joined by Dr. Markus Kosch, Head of the EU Oncology Business Division at Daiichi Sankyo. A physician by training with a deep academic background in oncology, Markus has spent over two decades advancing cancer care, from clinical practic...

Two weeks ago, the biopharma industry gathered in Vienna, Austria, for BIO-Europe. Tens of thousands of one-on-one meetings were organized between innovators and out-licensors with top pharma companies and venture capitalists eager to partner and invest.  For the large pharma firms, it’s a chance to learn about new science and keep tabs on evolving assets. For smaller biotechs, though, it can be t...

Last week saw more than 5,900 people from 3,200 companies gather in Vienna, Austria, for the continent’s largest biopharma partnering conference, BIO-Europe . Over three days the world’s top pharma companies, most innovative biotechs, and life science professionals from 60 countries took more than 32,000 one-on-one meetings, made the connections, and sealed deals that will drive the industry forwa...

Urinary Tract infections, or UTIs, affect millions worldwide, driving sepsis, antibiotic overuse, and microbial resistance. Current diagnostics rely on either slow lab cultures or unreliable dipsticks, and often lead to delayed or unnecessary treatment. Llusern’s Lodestar DX changes that: a point-of-care test that detects 96% of key UTI pathogens in just 35 minutes, no lab required. In this episod...

Today, I’m joined by Héctor García Martín, a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A pioneer in metabolic engineering and computational biology, Héctor has spent over a decade decoding microbial systems, everything from termite guts to genome-scale flux models, to unlock sustainable biomanufacturing. Now, he’s leading the charge in self-driving labs: AI-powered, robotic systems...

Today we’re diving into the world of expression systems with Iskandar Dib, of Validogen and we’ll explore the remarkable potential of Pichia pastoris , a methylotrophic yeast that’s revolutionizing pharmaceutical protein production and beyond.  From industrial enzymes to biomaterials, food, feed, and diagnostics, Pichia offers a reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient platform for recombinant prote...

In today's episode, we welcome Clarke Futch, Chairman and CEO of HealthCare Royalty Partners, or HCRx. HCRx are pioneers in royalty-based financing, with a thirty year track record in biopharma investing. Clarke has led more than 60 royalty acquisitions totaling nearly $4 billion and raised over $8 billion across various vehicles, executing more than 165 transactions that have fueled breakthr...

When it comes to contraception, most of the innovation in the last century has focused on providing contraceptive alternatives for women. The contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA in 1960, the first IUD approved in 1968, and the female condom in 1993. For men, however, there has been little advancement since the invention of the rubber condom in 1855 and the first vasectomies in humans around...

Raising money in the gene therapy space can be tough right now but, for the right company and with the right team, there is still cash to be found. But how do you connect with investors, how do you get your science in front of the right people, and how do you move from ‘I’m interested’ to ‘I’m signing on the dotted line’? This week I talk with Gerard Caelles, Chief Business Office of Splice Bio ,...

Immunology and inflammation are hot topics in biotech and biopharma, and innovations are emerging that can change the game for patients suffering from autoimmune, gastrointestinal, and metabolic disease. For top pharma companies, identifying these innovations early is essential and, for university labs, spinouts and startups, getting their science in front of the right industry partners is key. So...

Partnering conferences are where many deals in the biotech industry get made. With investors and top pharma companies on hand to meet with founders, learn about new science, and put money on the table for promising biotech, it’s little wonder that the biggest partnering events attract hundreds of innovators and thousands of attendees. One of the largest industry partnering events in Europe is BIOS...

How can you guarantee that top pharma will be interested in investing in your biotech startup? How can you be sure that the target you are focused on will be attractive to industry partners? And can AI help drive this interest and deliver these partnerships? These are questions that this week’s guest, Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs in Israel, is perfectly positioned to answer. AION Labs has an innova...

Lonza is one of the world’s largest contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs), dedicated to serving the healthcare industry. They work alongside a broad range of customers – from emerging biotechs to top global pharmaceutical companies – to transform therapeutic discoveries into life-saving and life-enhancing treatments for their patients.  Founded in 1897 in the Swiss Alps, Lon...

Parkinsons disease impacts some 10 million people worldwide and current approaches to treating the condition almost exclusively focus on addressing symptoms – there is, as of yet, no cure. One Finnish biotech, however, is not focused on alleviating symptoms but on modifying the course of the disease itself. Their hope is to be able to stop and even reverse neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson...

RNAi has changed the way that rare diseases are treated - is it about to do the same for more common conditions? Alnylam was the very first company to translate RNAi from Nobel Prize winning science into a commercially scalable platform. Founded in 2002, the company today has five different RNAi therapies on the market and a pipeline that continues to expand. While their early focus was on rare di...

Nearly 1 billion people around the world suffer from mental health disorders, with the global economic cost of those disorders expected to reach $6 trillion by 2030.   One of the most common of those mental health disorders is depressive disorder, commonly called depression, with some 280 million people suffering from either mild, moderate or severe depression. Conventional treatments for depressi...

The UK is preparing to change the game for healthcare - but why, how, and what will it cost? Recently the UK government announced plans to sequence the DNA of every baby born in that country. A part of the country’s 10 Year Health Plan, the program aims to identify rare genetic diseases early, prevent harms from delayed treatment and reduce future healthcare costs for the NHS. Yet along with those...

Is cultivated meat the future of pet food? And is there a place for cultivated meat on human dinner tables, too? Traditional agricultural methods are slow, require large tracts of land, significant energy and environmental inputs, and – somewhat obviously – the slaughter of hundreds of millions of animals every year. Cultivated meat – that is meat that is grown in a lab – requires little land, les...

With supply chain management and optimization, risk management, and the capacity to address global markets efficiently and effectively top of mind for all growing biotechs, I'm excited to be joined by Alison Pritchard, Vice President, Business Development at Cryoport Systems, to learn more about how they support life science innovators worldwide. Cryoport Systems evolved alongside the life sc...

Inflammatory diseases involve excessive or ongoing inflammation that damages tissues and affects many different human systems, including digestion, immunity, circulation, breathing, and the nervous system. The demand for anti-inflammatory treatments is growing quickly and is tipped to top a quarter of a trillion dollars within the decade as cases increase and new approaches to address inflammation...