Business Of Biotech

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Kristin Yarema, Ph. D. thinks the progress of CAR T therapeutics is allogeneic. In fact, she says CAR T-cell therapies have to become a one-to-many proposition, if their early autologous success can possibly live up to the promise of offering widespread accessibility to life-saving treatments. Dr. Yarema is the newly-appointed CEO at Poseida T...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Flagship Pioneering’s ProFound Therapeutics is on to something, and it could be something big. It began with a simple question:  What if more RNAs were being translated into proteins? Answering that question took ProFound deep into the translatome, where it’s now studying the full compendium of RNA sequences that are being translated into prot...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While organic chemistry lectures caused many of his peers at NYU to wring their hands, gnash their teeth, and question life choices, then-19-year-old Enrique Diloné ate those classes for lunch. They inspired him to earn a Seton Hall Ph. D. in chemistry, and to go to work as a big bio research scientist. Along the way, Dr. Diloné got bit by the...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Data drives decision-making at Aulos Bioscience. It's also driven the career trajectory of its CEO. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech podcast, we get an introspective walk through Aron Kinickerbocker's strategically-orchestrated career path, from his early days in the labs at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Genentech to...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Syncromune's Sync-T solid tumor therapeutic platform is, in a word, complex. The company's three phase 1 programs combine T-cell science with a proprietary drug delivery device to target solid tumors, specifically metastatic breast, non-small-cell lung, and castrate-resistant prostate cancers. But, while orchestrating a successful dr...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Built on the back of hepatocyte growth factor discoveries by Harvard Drs. Reza Dana and Sunil Chauhan, ClarisBio is rewriting the ophthalmology rulebook. CEO Clark Atwell acknowledges that it's not the first to bring topically-administered biologic therapies to the front of the eye, but if successful in the clinic, its Neurotrophic Kerati...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. When we last caught up with Brian Culley, CEO at Lineage Cell Therapeutics, it was January, 2021. A pandemic was raging. His company was moving mountains to keep its OpRegen dry AMD clinical trial together, and did so despite lockdowns that kept a largely aged patient population from setting foot anywhere near a healthcare clinic. Lineage emer...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. The cell therapy company Arcellx has, by any and every measure, been outperforming its peers. Its stock has rallied on the back of the strong performance of its multiple myeloma candidate, and the promise of its AML, MDS, and solid tumor pipelines is attracting the kind of interest it takes to be in it for the long run. Asked about his company...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. If there's anyone qualified to analyze an early-stage therapeutic technology and place bets with other people's money, it's scientist-turned-venture capitalist Jonathan Behr, Ph. D.  He built a distinguished venture capital career on the back of an MIT Ph. D. in biological engineering, having co-founded no fewer than 7 life scie...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Just a few years ago, Daiichi Sankyo wasn't considered a player in the oncology therapeutics space, and it certainly wasn't a player in ADCs. But then, just a few years ago, who was? Fast forward to 2023, and we see an ADC arena that drove nearly $100 billion in M&A, licensing, and partnership deals, and a Daiichi Sankyo that can...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Mythic Therapeutics Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder Brian Fiske, Ph. D. broke some unwritten protocol with his rapid and multifaceted transition from academia to industry. He calls his many, and sometimes concurrent, early experiences as an MIT Ph. D. student, a Flagship Ventures Fellow, a Bain consultant, a hospital researcher, and a...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. This isn't your typical drug sponsor + CDMO story. In fact, CTMC's Jason Bock, Ph. D. says you shouldn't even classify his company a CDMO. He's not wrong. While some of the company's services aren't dissimilar from those offered by a contract developer, CTMC began with a more fundamental mission in mind -- to help...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Back by popular demand, biopharma industry opinionator extraordinaire Allan Shaw rejoins the Business of Biotech to expose the murky role Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) play in the last, costly mile of the drug distribution supply chain. Allan pulls no punches in his criticism of the current rebate structure and shares why the model leaves p...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. From San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to Tel Aviv’s Silicon Wadi, software business entrepreneur Yochi Slonim made a name for himself in global tech hubs around the globe. Notably, he was co-founder of billion-dollar Mercury Interactive, which HP acquired for $4.5 billion, and previous to that a leader at Tecnomatix, which sold to UGS and was ac...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. As if Orna Therapeutics' CEO Thomas Barnes, CEO isn't a enough to draw you in to the Business of Biotech, we teamed up with Advancing RNA Editorial & Community Director Anna Rose Welch to co-host this week's episode. Together, Anna Rose and I press Dr. Barnes on his transition from academia to biotech, the therapeutic propos...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Novel technologies aren’t interesting to Rahul Kakkar, M.D. unless they help patients. Sounds rational, but it’s actually a unique perspective in a platform-crazed biotech industry. Dr. Kakkar’s worldview is shaped by his work as a physician—work he continues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital even as he builds Tome Biosciences, where he serves a...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. This episode of the Business of Biotech begins with a personal story about my dad and the standard of care in bladder cancer, before shifting to the work that Dr. Bobby Reddy and his team at ImmunityBio are doing to change that standard of care. They're painfully close. Dr. Reddy, Chief Medical Officer at ImmunityBio, gives us a long look...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Ampersand Biomedicines CEO Jason Gardner, D.Phil. first took the leap from a global pharmaceutical giant to a startup at the forefront of transplant medicine innovation. Since that time, he's seen most of the ups and the downs that come with biotech leadership, and in his latest venture with the Flagship Pioneering -backed Ampersand , he&...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. We've really been looking forward to dropping this episode with Karen Harris, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Mission-Related Investing at the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation. While the markets have warmed a bit since we recorded this episode, Karen's thoughtful perspective on the sometimes tumultuous Alzheimer's...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Few drug discovery and development concepts are as hyped, and as such, draw as much polarity from drug developers, as machine learning and artifical intelligence. One company on the bullish end of the spectrum is Flagship Pioneering's Generate Biomedicines, which bills itself at the "intersection of machine learning, biological engin...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Gavin Samuels, M.D. found his work as an intensive care physician boring. After earning his M.D., he did that for a few years before moving into intensive care management roles. It wasn't until he left the hospital and entered biopharma that he found his footing, cutting his teeth in business development at places like Merck, Pfizer, Quar...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Rob Williamson's mind and hands have shaped more than 20 biotech startups, leading some to IPO and landing others firmly in Big Bio through acquisition by companies like Merck. Hanging around as many successful exits as Williamson has seen, one might become expert via osmosis. But Williamson isn't passive about honing his vision for...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In biotech, when "one of these things doesn't look like the other one," it can be a blessing or a curse. On one hand, scientific novelty is praised and rewarded. On the other, unfamiliarity breeds skepticism from the investment community. Brian Finrow, J.D. embraces that reality and the challenges that come with it. Despite an a...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Multimodal approaches to the delivery of radiologically active compounds have created a fertile environment to for players in the space to put on a precision medicine clinic, so to speak. What’s more, Radiopharmaceuticals create a unique business opportunity given the closely-related and necessary companion diagnostic arena. On today’s episode...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While you might be aware that Sail Biomedicines  was just formed up in Q4 of last year, the product of Flagship Pioneering’s decision to merge Senda Biosciences and Laronde, two of its programmable medicine platform companies. What you likely haven’t heard is the inside story on how the merger was executed, how the two companies are integratin...