Discovery/R&D

41. Live Biologics & The Microbiome With 4D pharma's Duncan Peyton 5/9/2022

    4D pharma's flagship early-stage clinical candidates are live biotherapeutics, a relatively new class of biologics that seek to impact disease state by modulating the microbiome. CEO Duncan Peyton is leading the effort to understand how the health of the microbiome relates to a wide range of diseases, including immuno-oncology, central nervous system disorders, respiratory disease, auto immune indications, and gastro intestinal disease. 4D pharma is even working on a live biotherapeutic vaccine platform. Join Duncan on this episode of the Business of Biotech as we discuss this new frontier of therapeutic exploration.

42. Engineering Proteins For Food Allergies With Ukko's Dr. Anat Binur 10/25/2022

    Anat Binur, Ph.D. is CEO and Co-Founder at Ukko, where she's leading an effort to create new allergy therapeutics by engineering the proteins that induce immune response in people who suffer from food allergies. The effort at Ukko is deeply rooted in computational biology. The company leverages artificial intelligence to analyze how the allergen proteins interact with patients' blood in an effort to determine the specific attributes of the proteins that trigger immune response. Then, it applies a unique combination of compute power and biology to identify and understand the changes it wants to engineer and predict the best possible designs. Learn how Ukko is fostering a culture of IT and biology collaboration and what lured this dynamic entrepreneur into biopharma on this episode of the Business of Biotech.

43. Pioneering Antiviral Conjugates With Cidara's Dr. Jeff Stein 3/1/2021

    Cidara Therapeutics President and CEO Dr. Jeff Stein joins the Business of Biotech to discuss his career mission to battle microbial organisms and his company's development of a novel approach to producing immunotherapeutic antivirals that couple potent antivirals to a human antibody fragment. We discuss the company's manufacturing approach, which Dr. Stein anticipates yielding a low-cost alternative to standards of care in multiple antiviral indications.

44. Establishing Research With Horizon Therapeutics' Robert Stoffel, Ph.D. 7/26/2023

    Horizon Therapeutics has made plenty of waves in the biotech news cycle of late. Its formal establishment of a research team – comparatively pragmatic as that may be – could have impactful, long-term consequences.

45. CAR T-cells For Ovarian Cancers with Anixa Biosciences' Amit Kumar, Ph.D. 3/8/2022

    While success has been seen in animal models, solid tumors have proved a vexing challenge for CAR T-cell therapies. On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, we're joined by Anixa Biosciences Chairman, President, & CEO Amit Kumar, Ph.D. Dr. Kumar shares on the company's progress with a CAR T-cell therapy that aims to attack both tumor cells and the tumor vasculature, in hopes that it might be the first to destroy solid breast and ovarian cancers.

46. Innate Immunity & Mouse Models With LIfT Biosciences' Alex Blyth 7/11/2022

    Serial inventor and entrepreneur Alex Blyth had long held interests in health and science, but losing his mom to pancreatic cancer was the inflection point that launched LIfT Biosciences in 2016. Now, the preclinical company is on a mission to develop the world's first 'off-the-shelf' cell therapy to destroy all solid tumors, irrespective of strain or mutation, beginning with pancreatic cancer. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Blyth shares the company's scientific approach and progress, and we explore the shortcomings of legacy clinical protocols including the inherent problems and limitations of mouse models.

47. 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.

48. High-Throughput Discovery With BIOPTIC's Andrey Dobry 1/19/2025

    Andrey "Dobry" Doronichev, the innovator who made YouTube mobile, is now revolutionizing biotech with his startup, BIOPTIC. In this episode of The Business of Biotech, Dobry explains how AI and advanced screening are reshaping drug discovery. Learn more about BIOPTIC’s bold vision, the challenges of data access, and overcoming skepticism in the biotech industry.

49. 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.

50. Gene Therapies For Ocular Disease With SparingVision's Stéphane Boissel 3/28/2022

    Since assuming the President and CEO role at SparingVision in August 2020, Stéphane Boissel has been making big moves in the arenas of talent acquisition and IP expansion. Those efforts are securing the company's development of a number of genomic medicines to address inherited retinal disease. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Boissel shares the company'S foundation story and the role venture philanthropy played in it, his strategy for attracting and retaining big-league talent, and the why behind his vigorous allegiance to internal development.