Discovery/R&D

61. AI-Driven Biologics With Fountain Therapeutics' William Greene, M.D 2/28/2022

    With its hypothesis-free, target-free, AI-driven drug discovery platform, Fountain Therapeutics is turning the traditional drug discovery pathway on its ear to address a variety of age-related disease. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Fountain CEO William Greene, M.D. joins us to discuss the approach, its rationale, and how the company is applying substantial support from the likes of Eli Lilly, Alexandria Venture Investments, R42 Group, Khosla Ventures, and Nan Fung Life Sciences.

62. Commensal Viral Vectors With Ring Therapeutics' Tuyen Ong, M.D. 4/12/2022

    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 that culminated with an M.D. Today, he’s CEO of Ring Therapeutics, a promising emerging biotech backed by Flagship Pioneering, the kingmaker behind the rise of Moderna. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Ong shares on his challenging formative years, the unspoken love between a father and son, facing down racism as a poor Chinese kid in Vietnam and London, and how those experiences shape his leadership at Ring. Oh, and we talk about some pretty cool science, too.

63. Inhalable mAbs & Vaccines With TFF's Glenn Mattes 12/6/2021

    Glenn Mattes' TFF Pharmaceuticals is looking to break the parenteral barrier by manufacturing biologics — mAbs and vaccines, more specifically — that can be inhaled, rather than injected. It's a timely endeavor, and TFF's business model is a collaborative one that seeks to explore dry powder biologic options through partnership, in addition to its own pipeline. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, the veteran biopharma CEO shares the company's vision and the technology that's bringing it into focus.

64. RNA-Engineered Cell Therapy With Cartesian's Dr. Murat Kalayoglu 6/10/2021

    Cartesian President & CEO Murat Kalayoglu, M.D., Ph.D. has led three of his company's six autoimmune, oncology, and respiratory candidates through Phase I/II clinical trials and two more of them are on the cusp of entering Phase I this year. With so many programs in and entering the clinic, he's a great choice for a conversation on GMP expectations for phase I first-in-human trials. Glean insight from Cartesian's experiences and learn about the company's novel approach to RNA-engineered cell therapies for oncology and beyond on this episode of The Business of Biotech.

65. Gene Therapy For Chronic Inflammation With Xalud's Howard Rutman, M.D. 12/12/2022

    While many gene therapy development efforts focus on rare disease, Xalud Therapeutics is taking a swing that, measured in addressable patient market terms, is considerably bigger. Osteoarthritis, or OA, is a chronic, progressive joint disease that affects over 30 million people in the United States. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we catch up with Xalud Chief Medical Officer Howard Rutman, M.D., MBA for a discussion on the company's late-stage plasmid DNA gene therapy that's showing promise in OA and other chronic inflammatory conditions. 

66. Topical Ocular Biologics with Claris Bio's Clarke Atwell 6/30/2024

    Built on the back of hepatocyte growth factor discoveries by Harvard Drs. Reza Dana and Sunil Chauhan, Claris Bio is rewriting the ophthalmology rulebook. CEO Clarke 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 Keratitis candidate will vastly improve the patient experience. Atwell joins this episode of the Business of Biotech. Listen now!

67. Antibodies For Severe Allergies With IgGenix's Jessica Grossman, M.D. 4/4/2022

    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 allergen-specific IgE antibodies into IgG antibodies designed to alleviate — and possibly prevent — allergic cascade.

68. 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.

69. Accelerating ADCs with Mythic Therapeutics' Brian Fiske, Ph.D. 5/26/2024

    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 biopharma consultant indicative of a young man who didn't want to make decisions.

70. Oncology Discovery Advances With AbbVie's Steve Davidsen, Ph.D. 10/25/2022

    AbbVie VP of Oncology Discovery Research Steve Davidsen, Ph.D. is a living, breathing timeline of the company's cancer research and development efforts. He got his start with the company— Abbott at the time— way back in 1986. As such, he's charted the adoption of multiple advanced technologies that have contributed to the realization of dozens of molecular weapons in the fight against cancer. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. Davidsen shares the latest on AbbVie's adoption of computational biology and how it's contributing to discovery and development efficiencies, why he's an AbbVie "lifer," how he manages and motivates a large team of research scientists, and a whole lot more.