Discovery/R&D

1. BoB@JPM: Support Of A Blossoming Pipeline With Sangamo's Sandy Macrae, Ph.D. 2/5/2023

   The Business of Biotech podcast took to the streets of San Francisco during the 41st Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. This week's episode features a conversation with Sangamo Therapeutics CEO Sandy Macrae, Ph.D., who rationalizes the company's aggressive pipeline development and its decision to invest in multinational AAV and cell therapy manufacturing facilities in France and California. Dr. Macrae zeroes in on the relationship between people and processes that's enabled the company to grow to more than 500 associates working on nearly 20 cell therapy, gene therapy, and genome engineering programs. 

2. Tick-Derived Therapeutic Molecules With Akari Therapeutics' Rachelle Jacques 11/14/2022

   Ticks are a scourge. They're vectors of multiple serious and debilitating diseases, and evolution has made them perfectly adept at attaching to their hosts—and potentially spreading those diseases virtually undetected— that ability owing to anti-inflammatory and anesthetic proteins in their saliva. But the emerging biotech Akari Therapeutics thinks there's a broad range of medicinal value in those proteins. They've painstakingly developed a recombinant version of one such tick saliva-derived protein, called nomacopan, and put it to work in phase 3 trials to treat rare but deadly severe hematopoietic stem cell transplant-related thrombotic microangiopathy (HSCT-TMA). On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Akari President & CEO Rachelle Jacques tells us about the redeeming qualities of tick saliva and how her company is putting it to work.

3. Biotech Collaboration Strategy With IGI's Cyril Konto, M.D. 11/20/2025

   On this week's Business Of Biotech episode, Cyril Konto, M.D., president, executive director, and CEO at Ichnos Glenmark Innovation (IGI) talks about the promise of multi-specific antibodies, funding the company during the 'biotech winter,' closing a $700 million upfront licensing deal with AbbVie, the impact of China's rising biotech sector, and the keys to successful collaboration.

4. Gynecological Cancer Therapies With Context Therapeutics' Martin Lehr 4/18/2022

   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 in phase 2 clinical trials. We also discuss his "extracurricular" work with BioBreak, Life Science Leader, and Life Science Cares, and why those organizations are important to him personally and professionally.

5. Democratizing Biologics With Lumen Bioscience's Brian Finrow, J.D. & Craig Behnke, Ph.D. 12/1/2021

   Making powerful and curative biologic therapies accessible to patients from all walks of life, and all corners of the globe, requires radically innovative thinking. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Lumen Bioscience's Co-Founder and CEO Brian Finrow, J.D. and EVP of Production/Development Craig Behnke, Ph.D. discuss a novel approach: developing therapeutic proteins from readily-available food algae spirulina. It's driving a diverse pipeline of candidates into the clinic, for indications reaching from the gut to the heart and lungs.

6. The Business And Science Of Obesity With Roger Cone, Ph.D., Founder Of Courage Therapeutics 7/9/2025

   On this week's episode, Roger Cone, Ph.D., Founder and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at Courage Therapeutics, talks about discovering obesity-related protein receptors in the brain, how he spun his academic discoveries out into a biotech company developing new obesity drugs, the need for obesity treatments with fewer side effects than currently available GLP-1 therapies, and the value of pairing scientific leadership with a strong business partner as CEO.

7. Expanding The Proteome with ProFound's John Lepore, M.D. 7/28/2024

   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.

8. Engineering B Cells With Immusoft's Sean Ainsworth 12/5/2025

   On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Sean Ainsworth, CEO and Chairman at Immusoft, talks about transitioning from the research bench to entrepreneurship, his M&A experiences as a biotech founder, and why engineered B cell therapies offer a better, more patient-friendly administration for lysosomal storage diseases currently treated with enzyme replacement therapies.

9. Epigenomic Programming With Omega Therapeutics' Mahesh Karande 9/21/2022

   Using computational biology to hasten the effort, Omega Therapeutics' plan is to "coopt nature's universal biological operating system for gene control and cell differentiation." On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we dig into exactly what that means. We also explore the company's preclinical ambitions, which are diverse, targeting regenerative, multigenic/immunologic, oncologic, and monogenic indications. Omega is leaning heavily into computational biology along the way, having mapped what CEO Mahesh Karande characterizes as 95% of the IGD landscape. Learn how Karande intends to maintain momentum on this episode of the Business of Biotech.

10. Precision Radiopharmaceuticals with Ratio's Jack Hoppin, Ph.D. 2/21/2024

    Multimodal approaches to the delivery of radiologically active compounds have created a fertile environment 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.