Discovery/R&D

71. Building A Cancer Pipeline In A Molecule With Actuate Therapeutics' Dan Schmitt 11/26/2025

    On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech, Dan Schmitt, President and CEO at Actuate Therapeutics, talks about building a company around elraglusib, a GSK-3β inhibitor for cancer.

72. 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. 

73. 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.

74. 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.

75. Turning The Liver Into A mAb Factory With Homology's Arthur Tzianabos, Ph.D. 11/15/2021

    Homology Medicines' approaches to gene therapy and gene editing have the potential to seriously disrupt both the cell/gene therapy space \_and\_ the mAb manufacturing and administration paradigms as we know them. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Homology President & CEO Arthur Tzianabos, Ph.D. shares the company's approach and supports its rationale for investing in its own development and manufacturing capacity.

76. Med Device Meets Biopharma With OncoSec's Dan O'Connor, J.D. 5/17/2021

    OncoSec CEO & Director Dan O'Connor, J.D. joins the Business of Biotech to discuss his company's development of proprietary application and injection technologies for direct delivery of its pipeline of immunotherapeutic candidates and combination therapies into the tumor environment. O'Connor shares leadership lessons gleaned from his service as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps during Operation Desert Shield, and how he's applied those lessons as his company charts the manufacturing and regulatory challenges along its unique development timeline.

77. 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.

78. RNA Delivery Business with Liberate's Shawn Davis, Ph.D. & Walter Strapps, Ph.D. 11/8/2023

    Earlier this year, Shawn Davis, Ph.D. left a pretty comfortable position at AstraZeneca (and Amgen before that, and Milliken – and others – before that) to lead Liberate Bio. He brought along another industry notable in Merck/Intellia alumnus Walter Strapps, Ph.D., who serves as CSO at Liberate. Why'd they do it? Because RNA delivery is such a crucial step toward revolutionary genetic medicine, but it's tough science. They think they can change that.

79. The Discovery Of Microbes And Implications For Public Health Today, With Science Writer Thomas Levenson 6/4/2025

    On this week's Business of Biotech, Thomas Levenson, MIT professor and author of So Very Small: How Humans Discovered The Microcosmos, Defeated Germs — And May Still Lose The War Against Infectious Disease talks about what he learned in the writing of So Very Small, how cultural and political forces shape scientific progress, and what it means for drug developers, public health officials, and patients everywhere.

80. 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.