Business Of Biotech

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Under the leadership of Mai-Britt Zocca, Ph. D., IO Biotech is advancing novel, immune-modulating cancer therapies targeting IDO (indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase). Though promising, the target fell out of favor after some high-profile misses – most notably Merck's Phase 3 failure with pembrolizumab in 2018. But Immunome's dual mechanism...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. With a unique multi-target approach, what it considers the world's best adjuvant, and a host of learnings from the successes and failures of COVID-19 vaccine efforts, Longhorn Therapeutics is gaining steam in its pursuit of a universal influenza vaccine. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Longhorn Vaccines & Diagnostics Co-Fo...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Lisa Deschamps' story is one of determination and fortitude. She got her start in the life sciences where it begins and ends for many— "carrying the bag" in big pharma sales—then proceeded to crush the odds on her way to the C-suite at Novartis. Today, she's CEO at AviadoBio, a disruptive gene therapy startup prepping an in...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While many clinical-stage biopharmas are contracting or holding the line through the current market slump, Portage Biotech leaders Ian Walters, Allan Shaw, and company are making moves. The company recently acquired  Tarus Therapeutics and iOx Therapeutics Ltd., extending its pipeline and positioning itself to meet some aggressive investor exp...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Raman Sehgal has made a career out of putting his energy— and he's got a lot of it— into building biotech outsourcing companies and the people who make them run. After years spent supporting several from within, he launched ramarketing, a firm dedicated to helping CROs, CDMOs,  CPOs, and other providers to the biotech ecosystem build thei...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Vaxxinity CEO Mei Mei Hu, J.D. leads a company with some lofty ambitions. The democratization of healthcare, interplanetary colonization, and development of accessible therapeutic vaccines to serve and enable both. Those big-picture visions have helped the company establish itself as a pioneer of the "third biologics revolution." On...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. As biotech capital markets continue to restrict access to funding for emerging biopharmas, you might be surprised by how many federal dollars get left on the negotiating table.  To that end, James Thomas Coates, Ph. D. and his team at Decisive Point have carved out a niche in the venture capital space. The firm specializes in helping biotech s...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Among the more prevalent genetic conditions, Duchenne muscular dystrophy  affects an estimated one in 3,500 male births worldwide.  It's caused by mutations of the DMD gene, which  regulates the production of a protein called dystrophin. Approved DMD treatments haven't demonstrated strong clinical outcomes, but James McArthur, Ph. D....

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. While renal disease treatment technologies have seen moderate incremental improvements, there hasn't been a step-change advance in diabetes care since the discovery of insulin more than 100 years ago.  Working with manufacturers of existing diabetes therapeutics in addition to  advancing its own pipeline, Arecor is developing enhanced ref...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Serial inventor and entrepreneur Alex Blyth had long held interests in health and science, but losing his mom to pancreatic cancer was the inflection point that launched LIfT Biosciences in 2016. Now, the preclinical company is on a mission to develop the world's first 'off-the-shelf' cell therapy to destroy all solid tumors, ir...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Immunome CEO Purnanand Sarma, Ph. D. joins the Business of Biotech for a discussion on precision antibodies and his company's discovery platform, which  identifies novel therapeutic antibodies and their antigen targets by leveraging highly educated memory B cells from patients who have learned to fight off their disease. It’s kind of like...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Swiss-Italian biopharma company Philogen was co-founded in 1996 by three brothers, all of them PhDs. This unique family affair has fueled the development of an incredibly deep and advanced pipeline of no fewer than ten  therapeutic products, most of them in oncology, contributing to 16 active clinical trials, three of them at Phase 3. On this...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. FibroBiologics Chairman, CEO, & Founder Pete O'Heeron shares the journey that led him from clinical care to biopharma entrepreneurship, and he's joined by Chief Scientific Officer Hamid Khoja, Ph. D., who explains the manufacturing technology that's driving the company's exploitation of fibroblasts to develop regenerati...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. To fully appreciate the work Pyxis Oncology is doing in its development of site-specific ADCs for a number of oncological indications under the leadership of Lara Sullivan, M.D., you need to understand the work that shaped her leadership style. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. Sullivan shares the science and technology driving p...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this, the 100th episode of the Business of Biotech podcast, our dear friend, frequent guest, and business of biotech brainiac Allan Shaw joins us to dissect the beleaguered biotech capital markets. We pick apart what's driving sentiment, whether the industry is over-inventoried, what's getting funded , what's not, and why, an...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Ampio Pharmaceuticals is currently weaving the gauntlet of a clinical hold triggered by COVID's disruption to clinical studies of its lead candidate Ampion, and recently launched an independent investigation  into that trial and others. On this episode, Ampio Pharmaceuticals chairman and CEO Mike Martino joins the Business of Biotech for...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. As COVID-19 cases climb yet again,  the Business of Biotech catches up with Tonix Pharmaceuticals CEO Seth Lederman, M.D. for a conversation on his company's multi-pronged strategy to advance vaccine and therapeutic candidates to address the disease and its variants. In addition to sharing on his journey from academia to industry, Dr. Led...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Fresh on the heels of his appointment as President & CEO at Silence Therapeutics, Craig Tooman joins the Business of Biotech to share how he applies his finance-minded leadership to steward the advance of the company's deepening pipeline of gene silencing candidates.  Tooman also shares insight into the IP and the people responsible f...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. 4D pharma 's flagship early-stage clinical candidates are live biotherapeutics, a relatively new class of biologics that seek to impact disease state by modulating the microbiome. CEO Duncan Peyton is leading the effort to understand how the health of the microbiome relates to a wide range of diseases, including immuno-oncology, central n...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Purespring Therapeutics launched in 2020 on the back of IP developed by renowned kidney researcher Prof. Moin Saleem, who spent decades working on podocytes when podocytes weren’t cool. Just two years later, the company boasts three gene therapy assets and a platform developed expressly to identify new therapeutic targets to address kidney dis...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Opus Genetics is an early-stage gene therapy company launched just last year and in unique fashion on the back of the patient advocacy group the Retinal Degeneration Fund. Already, its pipeline has developed into three candidates, the lead among them addressing Leber congenital amaurosis. Opus CEO Ben Yerxa, Ph. D. serves in triplicate as CEO...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Context Therapeutics   Co-Founder & CEO Martin Lehr shares stories from his self-described "recovery from venture capital," the work his company is doing in gynecological cancers, and how his small company manages a modality-agnostic approach and investigator-sponsored trials across multiple clinical candidates, four of which are...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. When Tuyen Ong was a child, he and his family escaped Vietnam by boat in the dead of the night, bound for an Indonesian refugee camp. They spent a year in that camp before emigrating to the U.K., where Ong’s underprivileged adolescence found him growing up in the projects of London. Against the odds, Ong worked his way to UCL for an education...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. In this wide-ranging discussion, IgGenix CEO Jessica Grossman, M.D. discusses the application of and market opportunity for antibody therapy for severe allergies, the gender gap in the biopharma c-suite, why women work harder than men, what it means to be a female biopharma leader, and IgGenix's approach at isolating and re-engineering al...

We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. Since assuming the President and CEO role at Sparingvision in August, 2020, Stéphane Boissel has been  making big moves in the arenas of talent acquisition and IP expansion.  Those efforts are securing the company's development of  a number of genomic medicines to address inherited retinal disease. On this episode of the Business of Biote...