Discovery/R&D

1. Precision Drug Delivery with Ampersand Biomedicines' Jason Gardner, Ph.D. 4/10/2024

   Ampersand Biomedicines CEO Jason Gardner, Ph.D. first took the leap from a global pharmaceutical giant to a startup at the forefront of transplant medicine innovation. Since that time, he's seen most of the ups and the downs that come with biotech leadership, and in his latest venture with the Flagship Pioneering-backed Ampersand, he's putting all those hard-fought lessons to good use.

2. The AAV Vector Challenge With Selecta's Dr. Carsten Brunn 1/12/2021

   The Business of Biotech kicks off our Cell & Gene Miniseries with Dr. Carsten Brunn, President & CEO at Selecta Biosciences. Guest host Erin Harris, chief editor at cellandgene.com, joins us for a discussion on Selecta's ImmTOR platform and how the company is addressing the immunogenicity of adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors challenge faced by gene therapy companies.

3. 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.

4. New Apps For AI in mRNA With Anima Biotech's Yochi Slonim 5/5/2024

   From San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to Tel Aviv’s Silicon Wadi, software business entrepreneur Yochi Slonim made a name for himself in tech hubs around the globe. Notably, he was co-founder of billion-dollar Mercury Interactive, which HP acquired for $4.5 billion, and previous to that a leader at Tecnomatix, which sold to UGS and was acquired by Siemens. Those big deals that came on the heels of several other Yochi Slonim software startups. But Slonim's not in software development anymore.

5. 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.

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. Leaving The Incubator With Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues 6/28/2020

   A strategic departure from the biotech incubator requires the coordination of moving parts aplenty. Development timelines, seed funding, facilities development, and team dynamics are just a sampling of the critical aspects. It's a move multi-time founder and Zumutor Biologics CEO Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues is well-versed in. Iyer Rodrigues joins us with lessons learned from her time in those trenches.

8. Fibroblasts In Regenerative Medicine With FibroBiologics' Pete O'Heeron & Dr. Hamid Khoja 6/21/2022

   FibroBiologics Chairman, CEO, & Founder Pete O'Heeron shares the journey that led him from clinical care to biopharma entrepreneurship, and he's joined by Chief Scientific Officer Hamid Khoja, Ph.D., who explains the manufacturing technology that's driving the company's exploitation of fibroblasts to develop regenerative therapies for indications ranging from degenerative disk disease and multiple sclerosis to cancer immunotherapies and therapeutics.

9. The AI Impact with Generate:Biomedicines' Mike Nally 3/24/2024

   Few drug discovery and development concepts are as hyped, and as such, draw as much polarity from drug developers, as machine learning and artificial intelligence. One company on the bullish end of the spectrum is Flagship Pioneering's Generate: Biomedicines, which bills itself at the "intersection of machine learning, biological engineering, and medicine."

10. Oligonucleotide Opportunities in DMD with PepGen's James McArthur, Ph.D. 7/25/2022

    Among the more prevalent genetic conditions, Duchenne muscular dystrophy affects an estimated one in 3,500 male births worldwide. It's caused by mutations of the DMD gene, which regulates the production of a protein called dystrophin. Approved DMD treatments haven't demonstrated strong clinical outcomes, but James McArthur, Ph.D. and his team at PepGen are seeking to change that with a pipeline of disease-modifying peptide-conjugated oligonucleotide candidates derived from the company's Enhanced Delivery Oligonucleotide platform. The Business of Biotech caught up with Dr. McArthur at PepGen's Cambridge headquarters to learn more.