PETRI DISH PERSPECTIVES

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we explore Revolution Medicines, the precision oncology company that spent over a decade trying to drug one of cancer’s most notorious targets: RAS. With mutations present in roughly 30% of all new cancer diagnoses, including pancreatic, lung, and colorectal cancers, RAS has long been considered undruggable. Revolution bet their entire c...

Send us Fan Mail After training as a physician, earning an MBA from Wharton, and co-founding Sonara Health, a digital health company that raised over $10 million from the NIH, VCs, Dr. Avinash Jayaraman could have gone in almost any direction. He chose to focus on one of the most urgent and underserved crises in adolescent health: the mental health epidemic driven by technology overuse. In this ep...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to your essential overview of the global biotech and pharmaceutical landscape for September 2026! This month was defined by blockbuster dealmaking, historic FDA approvals, and a growing recognition that pharmaceutical innovation is shifting east. AstraZeneca made a $2 billion strategic bet on Summit Therapeutics and its ivonescimab program, Novo Nordisk paid up to $2.6 bil...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we explore Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, the Chinese pharma giant that started as a state-owned generic drug factory in 1970 and quietly became one of the most important drug companies in the world. Over $15 billion in deals with GSK and Novo Nordisk. The world's top clinical trial sponsor. One of the top five drug pipelines glob...

Send us Fan Mail After years of running a school on the rigid rhythm of bells, Dr. John Murphy walked away from K-12 education and into something he never trained for: performing history at bars. In this episode, John unpacks how a credentialed academic builds an audience outside the walls of a traditional institution, why humor and analogies are the secret weapons of great storytelling, and what...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore Anew Labs , the AI drug discovery company that emerged from one of the most unexpected places in biotech: ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Fresh off a $290 million raise at a $1.5 billion valuation, Anew is betting that artificial intelligence can fundamentally change how we discover medicines, not by making existing...

Send us Fan Mail After a career spent racing against the clock in emergency rooms, Dr. Elliot Justin found himself chasing a very different kind of vital sign, one most men never think to track. Before FirmTech, he built and exited a telemedicine company and a physician staffing group. But it's the wearable ring, designed to quietly monitor erectile function, that's turning heads for an...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we take a step back from individual companies to examine one of the most powerful forces shaping the pharmaceutical industry: M&A, licensing, and the global competition for innovation. We explore how today's pharmaceutical giants were built through decades of consolidation, from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis to some of...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to your essential overview of the global biotech and pharmaceutical landscape for August 2026 ! This month was defined by major dealmaking, a resurgence in biotech financing, and growing questions about where the global biotech industry is headed . Roche made a $2.5 billion bet on Hanmi , McKesson acquired Precision Medicine Group for $2.25 billion , and the investors behi...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore Cellares , the biotech company trying to solve one of the biggest and least discussed challenges in cell therapy: how do you manufacture these complex, personalized medicines at commercial scale? From CAR-T to gene-edited cell therapies, the science may be advancing rapidly, but manufacturing remains labor-intensive, expensiv...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the remarkable rise of Summit Therapeutics , a biotech that transformed itself from an infectious-disease company into one of the most closely watched oncology companies in the world. At the center of the story is ivonescimab , a next-generation bispecific antibody targeting both PD-1 and VEGF and a drug that could potentiall...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the story of Guardant Health , one of the companies leading the shift toward blood-based cancer detection and precision oncology. Founded by genomic scientists Helmy Eltoukhy and AmirAli Talasaz, Guardant is betting that a simple blood draw can reveal critical information about the biology of a tumor, from identifying mutatio...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the story of Epic Systems, the privately held healthcare technology company that has quietly built much of the digital infrastructure behind American healthcare. From Judy Faulkner founding Epic in a Wisconsin basement to becoming the dominant electronic health record platform, Epic has transformed how hospitals, physicians,...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to your essential overview of the global biotech and pharmaceutical landscape for June 2026! This month was dominated by AI cementing itself as a core part of drug discovery, with partnerships spanning Anthropic, NVIDIA, Insilico Medicine, and major pharmaceutical companies. At the same time, billion-dollar licensing deals and acquisitions showed that large pharma is aggre...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we explore the story of Scribe Therapeutics, one of genome editing's most ambitious companies aiming to move beyond first-generation CRISPR. Rather than accepting the size, delivery, and precision limitations of traditional Cas9, Scribe is redesigning the molecular machinery itself, building smaller, faster, and more versatile X-Edi...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the story of Apogee Therapeutics , one of biotech's newest immunology companies aiming to redefine autoimmune disease through next-generation antibody engineering. Rather than chasing entirely new biological targets, Apogee is focused on improving what already works, developing longer-lasting biologics that could reduce...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the story of Conception Bio , one of the most ambitious biotechnology companies working at the intersection of stem cell biology, reproductive medicine, and regenerative science. Their mission? To make eggs from ordinary cells through in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a breakthrough that could fundamentally change how we think ab...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the story of Enveda Biosciences , one of the most exciting AI-native biotech companies redefining how drugs are discovered. While most pharmaceutical companies build vast synthetic chemical libraries, Enveda is using artificial intelligence, metabolomics, and mass spectrometry to unlock the world's largest and largely un...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore the story of Isomorphic Labs , Alphabet's ambitious drug discovery company born out of DeepMind's groundbreaking work on AlphaFold. From solving one of biology's greatest mysteries, protein folding, to building an AI-native pharmaceutical company, Isomorphic Labs is attempting to fundamentally change how medici...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to your essential overview of the global biotech and pharmaceutical landscape for June 2026! This month was dominated by a relentless wave of strategic consolidation and "barbell" deal-making, as Big Pharma aggressively swapped capital for late-stage security while doubling down on early-stage, high-tech innovation. From AbbVie’s multi-billion-dollar immunology p...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we explore how two brothers transformed a small industrial holding company into one of the most influential life sciences organizations in history. We dive into the origins of the Danaher Business System (DBS), the acquisition strategy that reshaped biotechnology, the landmark purchases of Beckman Coulter, Pall, and Cytiva, and why Dana...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we dive into the rise of Hims & Hers Health , the telehealth company that transformed direct-to-consumer healthcare and challenged traditional medicine. Founded in 2017 by Andrew Dudum, Hims & Hers built a billion-dollar business by removing the stigma around men's and women's health, using digital-first care, subscrip...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we dive into the remarkable story of Illumina, from a small sequencing startup born during the Human Genome Project era to the company that transformed DNA sequencing from a billion-dollar scientific challenge into a routine laboratory tool. We explore how Illumina's sequencing-by-synthesis technology became the gold standard for g...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives , we dive into the remarkable rise of UnitedHealthcare and its parent company, UnitedHealth Group. From its origins in the 1970s managed care movement to becoming a healthcare empire worth hundreds of billions of dollars, UnitedHealthcare has fundamentally transformed how healthcare is financed, delivered, and managed in the United States...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to your essential overview of the global biotech and pharmaceutical landscape for May 2026! This month was dominated by a wave of aggressive cross-border M&A and strategic capital deployment, as pharma giants pivoted to secure the next generation of oncology, metabolic, and infectious disease assets. From high-stakes acquisitions aimed at building comprehensive "a...