Discovery/R&D

  1. Gene Tx For Renal Disease With Purespring CEO Richard Francis 5/2/2022

    Purespring Therapeutics launched in 2020 on the back of IP developed by renowned kidney researcher Prof. Moin Saleem, who spent decades working on podocytes when podocytes weren’t cool. Just two years later, the company boasts three gene therapy assets and a platform developed expressly to identify new therapeutic targets to address kidney disease. 

  2. 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.

  3. Circular RNA with Orna Therapeutics' Tom Barnes, Ph.D. and Advancing RNA's Anna Rose Welch 4/28/2024

    As if Orna Therapeutics' CEO, Thomas Barnes, isn't enough to draw you in to the Business of Biotech, we teamed up with Advancing RNA Editorial & Community Director Anna Rose Welch to co-host this week's episode. Together, Anna Rose and I press Dr. Barnes on his transition from academia to biotech, the therapeutic proposition of circular, or "O", RNA and why it holds great potential to best linear RNA constructs, the novel, platform- and partnership-based approaches Orna is taking to address B-cell lymphomas and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, viral vector and lipid nanoparticle complexity, and a whole lot more.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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!

  7. Maximizing mRNA With Precision Nanosystems' James Taylor, Ph.D. 11/8/2021

    Dr. James Taylor believes that genomic medicine will prove the most revolutionary thing the life sciences industries have ever seen, and that it will ultimately become the largest therapeutic class. Dr. Taylor is president and CEO at Precision Nanosystems. He chalks up the genomic nature of biology, the fact that genomes are information-based, the breadth and validation of the genomic medicine toolbox, and the democratization of genomic medicine development as reasons to be bullish. Join Dr. Taylor and me for a conversation on why RNA and DNA delivery are game-changers, and what Precision Nanosystems is doing to push the ball downfield.

  8. Modality-Agnostic Drug Discovery With Cullinan Oncology's Nadim Ahmed 1/23/2023

    Call it fortuitous, good planning, instinct, or a combination of all three, but Nadim Ahmed's educational foundation— earned before the IT/Biology combination was cool— is serving him well as CEO at Cullinan Oncology. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Ahmed shares his story and that of Cullinan Oncology's drug discovery efforts, which have yielded a wide range of multi-modal candidates spanning a range of cancer indications. Our discussion digs into the company's transition from R&D to the clinic, how its built an uncommonly comfortable cash position through partnership, and its ambition to become a fully-integrated commercial-stage biotech.

  9. What's A Biologic Revolution? With Vaxxinity's Mei Mei Hu, J.D. 8/8/2022

    Vaxxinity CEO Mei Mei Hu, J.D. leads a company with some lofty ambitions. The democratization of healthcare, interplanetary colonization, and development of accessible therapeutic vaccines to serve and enable both. Those big-picture visions have helped the company establish itself as a pioneer of the "third biologics revolution." On this week's Business of Biotech podcast, Mei Mei joins me to share Vaxxinity's strategy, what "democratization" and "revolution" really_mean, why traditional vaccines and biologic therapies are converging to form the "third biologic revolution," and a whole lot more.

  10. Pyxis Oncology's Lara Sullivan, M.D. On Site-Specific ADCs And Change Management 6/20/2022

    To fully appreciate the work Pyxis Oncology is doing in its development of site-specific ADCs for a number of oncological indications under the leadership of Lara Sullivan, M.D., you need to understand the work that shaped her leadership style. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. Sullivan shares the science and technology driving progress at Pyxis, but she also serves up a master class on change management, honed during her tenure managing high-stakes product portfolios at Pfizer. If you want to be a better leader, don't miss this one.