LifeSci Partners Podcast

For the computer expert/CEO of Anima, Yochi Slonim, it’s all the same – lots of instructions and lots of code. It could be code for AI, it could be codons for the translation of proteins. With the elucidation of unique codon pairings by mRNA Lightning, Slonim can turn expression on or off, or up or down, depending on the therapeutic need, like say, in CNS disorders. Eli Lilly has taken notice. So...

Your GI team can’t help you if they can’t see what’s wrong. An endoscope might encounter clotted blood in the esophagus from chronic bleeds, or remaining stool in the colon after an insufficient prep. Either way, it would be nice to have a device that clears the way for precise imaging. The Pure-Vu® System, by Motus GI, offers both, and at a savings of time, and money. In this podcast, Tim Moran,...

Three facts: 1) World Diabetes Day is November 14th, which marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery and isolation of insulin. 2) There are an estimated 463 million diabetes patients worldwide – and that number is rapidly rising. 3) Access to care remains a major hurdle for diabetes patients, but today GBS is developing an affordable, smartphone-compatible, needle-free glucose monitor. Endocrin...

He’s got patents, patience, and a plan – and a five-year runway to execute. Listen in as Dr. Amit Kumar, CEO of Anixa Biosciences, tells a tale of novel vaccines for breast, and ovarian cancer, and a new kind of CAR-T therapy – also for ovarian cancer – called a CER-T: a Chimeric Endocrine Receptor T cell. Is it worth your investment? Cleveland Clinic, Moffit Cancer Center, and investigators at NI...

From a doctorate at the SALK Institute overlooking La Jolla Cove, to an MBA from INSEAD, the world-leading business school located near Paris, NOXXON CEO Aram Mangasarian knows his way around different environments. Now he’s focused on tackling the tumor micro-environment (TME) and targeting the chemokines that drive tumor immunosuppression. Lead asset, NOX-A12, has generated exciting early result...

After spending the first half of her career developing medical devices for others, Kathy Lee-Sepsick, founder, and CEO of Femasys sets out to address the often-overlooked needs of a woman’s reproductive health – and she can’t be more passionate about the mission. Not only is Lee-Sepsick the company’s founder and CEO, but she’s also the inventor of Femasys’ two key reproductive health technologies:...

From a famous pub in Oxford to a lab on California’s coast, Gritstone founder, and CEO Dr. Andrew Allen tells the story of how his dream, inspired by a legend in cancer immunotherapy, became the reality that is Gritstone bio, a company developing both off-the-shelf and personalized vaccines for cancer – and now COVID – with antigens discovered by their proprietary, machine learning platform, EDGE™...

Listen in while Vincerx CEO, Dr. Ahmed Hamdy shares his experience with life-changing events, a date with the cancer target CDK9, and the utterance of every investor’s favorite magic word: “Platform.”

Combining his medical expertise with his business acumen, Angion’s CEO, Dr. Jay Venkatesan, is focused on meaningfully improving both health outcomes for patients in need and economic outcomes for the healthcare system. After successes at McKinsey, Bain, Ayer Capital, and Alpine BioVentures, Dr. Venkatesan is now seizing on what he describes as a rare opportunity to lead Angion, whose products hav...

Dr. Marshall Fordyce, CEO of Vera Therapeutics still treats patients – it is a calling he will always hear. It took him to the bedside at HIV clinics in the East to leadership roles in developing life-saving drugs at Gilead in the West. Entrepreneurship flowed from experience, and Vera Therapeutics came to be. Focused on nephrotic autoimmune disease, hear how Fordyce brought his heart and mind to...

Christopher Giordano, MS, explains how an American English major studying at Oxford University lucked into marrying a Welsh girl he convinced to move to North Carolina’s Research Triangle – a hotbed of literary studies. From that beginning – somehow – Giordano got a "real job" in drug development, rising through the ranks to become president of a business unit in healthcare giant, IQVIA, and event...

You can fight fire with fire – it’s a thing. The problem is having anything left to salvage after the fire is out, and thus the conundrum of IL-2: the cytokine’s ability to supercharge T cells against cancer has been known for years, but the problem has always been its profound toxicity. Fahar Merchant, CEO of Medicenna explains how directed evolution has allowed him to turn the agent of wildfires...

The field of cancer immunotherapy exploded in 2011 with the FDA approval of an utterly novel, so-called “checkpoint” drug, the anti-CTLA-4 agent, Yervoy. The fires of that first-in-class success ignited a drug development rocket – the approval of the checkpoint-targeting drugs Keytruda and Opdivo occurred shortly thereafter. But then came a lot of dark, cold space. Until now. Frederic Triebel, the...

To the oncologist, human physiology is a riot of redundancies, and treating cancer is a game of whack-a-mole – target one mechanism, another pops up. Anat Cohen-Dayag, scientist and CEO of Compugen has known this for years. However, to bring her expertise into the clinical realm, she needed to transform her company from a service provider of computational target discovery, into a savvy team of sci...

GeNeuro's CEO, Jesus Martin-Garcia, a consummate technology entrepreneur, tells his business journey from the birth of telecoms, to the advent of online grocery shopping, to his support and exploration of the final frontier in healthcare - biotechnology. GeNeuro is using human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) to treat autoimmune diseases, including MS, ALS, and the lasting neurological symptoms of...

Can T cells be leveraged as a cancer therapeutic? Check. How about natural killer (NK) cells? Check. Now meet invariant natural killer (iNKT) cells – a potentially game-changing tool to reprogram the innate and adaptive immune system to recognize and attack tumors. In this episode of the Benchtop Bios Podcast, leading life science entrepreneur and former Executive Director at Bristol-Myers Squibb,...

There are no approved treatments to treat dry macular degeneration – a disease of the eye that can lead to eventual blindness. The standard of care for these patients consists of functional/behavioral training to acclimate the patient to their progressive, incurable vision loss. Lloyd Diamond, CEO of Pixium Vision, is convinced that much more can be done. Thus, the advent of Prima: Pixium’s bionic...

From a training at the bedside to a benchtop at the NIH, to the realities of life on the Dark Side, Arcellex CMO, Dr. Chris Heery speaks of his passion of all things immunologic, and in particular, the Arcellx platform that can target, activate, and control a CAR-T cell with their proprietary SparX plug. He also recalls the time he had to face a room full of angry biotech investors (N=50 or more):...

Dr. Jennifer Bath, an expert in antibody discovery, as well as translational work in infectious disease, explains why leaving a tenured professorship was a price worth paying to become the CEO of ImmunoPrecise Antibodies (IPA). Under her leadership, and with B Cell Select, a proprietary discovery platform at her command, IPA is developing a therapeutic antibody cocktail called,  Polytope , th...

Cortexyme CEO, Casey Lynch, discusses her life-long passion for finding treatments for neurodegenerative diseases in general, and Alzheimer’s in particular. She tells how her experience over the years, in different labs, and in different companies taught her that the science behind proposed Alzheimer’s interventions was missing the forest for the trees, and that an entirely different hypothesis su...

Medigene CEO, Dolores Schendel, takes us from her Midwestern roots to the helm of Bavaria’s Medigene AG. Along the way, she explains how her training at the hands of immunotherapy pioneers led to her recent move to deploy a novel molecular switch which protects and energizes Medigene’s TCR-T cells in their attack on solid tumors. (Plus, hear her talk about winning the prestigious Bavarian Order of...

Dr. Coffey explains how a phenomenon first observed over a 100 years ago – that a systemic infection can cure cancer – became the blanket term for a treatment modality bearing his company’s name. From being a lab rat studying reovirus one day, to a company co-founder the next, Coffey’s rise through the corporate ranks (he started out as VP of Product Development), and his pursuit of the scientific...

BiomX co-founder, Jonathan Solomon, gained his early scientific training in physics, and electrical engineering during a ten-year stint in an Israeli army special forces unit – which he can’t really talk about. But what he can talk about is how – with his taste for adventure, a Harvard MBA, and a famous Israeli scientist for a mother – he became the Chief Executive Officer of Biomx, a publicly hel...

Dr. Caligiuri describes his journey from being a liberal arts major at a college in upstate New York, to being a Stanford trained MD, to his current position as President of City of Hope National Medical Center. Along the way Caligiuri shares his thoughts on training to be a hematologist in the late ‘80s – at a time when there were no curative therapies, and such a calling was daunting at best – t...