Discovery/R&D

81. A Biopharma Pivot Story With Compugen's Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayag 3/15/2021

    Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayag transformed her company from a computational biology service provider to a clinical-stage biopharma with multiple cancer immunotherapy candidates, and she did it in a remarkably short period of time. Listen in as she discusses the human resources, financial, and capital strategies she deployed to build a biotech on the back of computational science, and shares her vision for the future of drug discovery.

82. Multimodal R&D Management With Incyte's Jim Lee, M.D., Ph.D. 1/18/2024

    Success at multimodal, multi-indication, deep-pipelined Incyte—where commercial operations are as familiar as pre-discovery activity is—begins at the earliest opportunity to achieve research and discovery efficiencies.

83. Population-Level Health Impact With Vaxxinity's John Krayacich 6/14/2023

    Vaxxinity’s John Krayacich likes taking big swings and big indications. He’s played key roles on the teams that launched Lipitor, Lyrica, and Neurontin, which have had measurable impacts on global populations of people suffering from cardiovascular disease, CNS disorders, and pain. He found those opportunities at companies like LEO, Novartis, Parke Davis, and Pfizer. Now, Krayacich is taking big swings at a new set of incredibly challenging candidates—immunotherapeutic vaccines for neurodegenerative and chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s, Dementia with Lewy Bodies, Multiple System Atrophy, Parkinson’s, Migraine, and Hypercholesterolemia. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, the Chief Business Officer shares his inspiration and strategy for seeing therapeutics for big, global patient populations through the commercial finish line.

84. Dr. Gaurav Shah: Rocket's Chief Gene Therapist & Virtuoso 8/30/2020

    Rocket Pharmaceuticals CEO Dr. Gaurav Shah shares the parallels between his leadership in the gene therapy space and his successes as a Grammy®-nominated recording artist with the Business of Biotech podcast. This episode is full of actionable insight on the inspiration behind how Dr. Shah manages the science and process side of the business, his employees, financing, and stakeholder expectations by drawing from his passion for—and understanding of—music.

85. BoB@JPM: Self-Replicating RNA With Elixirgen's Akihiro Ko 3/5/2023

    Elixirgen Therapeutics CEO Akihiro Ko joins the Business of Biotech for the final episode in our special series recorded at JPM Week in San Francisco. Life Science Leader Chief Editor Ben Comer joined us for the conversation. We dive deep into Elixirgen's unique, temperature-controlled in-vivo gene expression technology designed to address common cell therapy administration challenges and unwanted, off-target immungenicity effects. Ko also shares progress on the company's ex-vivo candidate EXG-34217, an autologous cell therapy for telomere biology disorders, offers his take on the ever-crowded RNA therapeutics space and how the company is separating itself from the crowd, and much more!

86. Building A Biotech Incubator And Accelerator With Swiss Rockets Founder And CEO Vladimir Cmiljanovic, Ph.D. 8/21/2025

    On this week's episode, ex-handballer Vladimir Cmiljanovic, Ph.D., Founder and CEO at Swiss Rockets, talks about co-discovering bimiralisib with his sister Natasa Cmiljanovic, Ph.D. (and COO at Swiss Rockets), losing his company to a hostile takeover, buying the company back, and building out Swiss Rockets as an incubator with manufacturing capabilities and shared scientific expertise.

87. Antibody Cocktails With Immunome's Dr. Purnanand Sarma 7/6/2022

    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 picking an all-star team of players who have been in the game, and who are well-trained to win. On today's episode we'll learn how they’re discovered, how they’re developed, and how they’re applied in cancer and coronavirus.

88. The Face Of African Biotech with Adrienne Leussa, Ph.D. 6/7/2023

    Dr. Adrienne Leussa is one of our favorite follows. If the booming biotech scene on an incredibly diverse continent of 1.2 billion people interests you, she should be one of your faves, too.

89. Company Turnarounds And AI For Infectious Diseases With Seek Labs' Jared Bauer 2/12/2026

    On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Jared Bauer, Cofounder and CEO at Seek Labs, talks about his adventures in company turnarounds, and setting up Seek Labs to improve patient diagnoses and to discover and develop new treatments for infectious diseases.

90. Computational Drug Discovery With Gain Therapeutics' Matthias Alder 1/11/2023

    Gain Therapeutics' newly-appointed CEO Matthias Alder offers up a deep, yet abundantly clear explanation of how his company is applying compute power to speed up drug discovery. At Gain, computational models help researchers winnow down not just which molecules might have therapeutic effect, but also how adept those molecules will be at binding—and staying bound—to their target. It's not just theory, either. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Alder shares on how the virtual successes seen on Gain's servers have translated in the wet lab, and how they've contributed to the company's fast-growing preclinical pipeline.