Not enough fluids? Drink more. Too much fluid – entirely different, far more complex problem. From the systemic swelling caused by congestive heart failure to the localized ascites caused by cancer, or NASH, Sequana Medical has developed novel approaches to drain the fluid away when diuretics are no longer effective. The results are greatly improved clinical outcomes and quality of life for patients, and significant cost savings. Ian Crosbie, CEO of Sequana Medical, Oxford graduate, and long-tim...

Turning a biological process on or off is like flipping a light switch. However, these approaches often come with serious side effects that can limit therapeutic utility. For this reason, treating certain types of CNS disorders like chronic pain, PTSD, and cognitive impairment requires a more nuanced modulatory approach to restore normal brain function. Listen in as Aptinyx’s newly minted president & CEO Andy Kidd, MD explains how the company is taking a novel approach to NMDA receptor modulatio...

Harpreet co-founded Immatics in 2000 to translate pioneering scientific discoveries in immunology into highly innovative immunotherapies to impact the lives of cancer patients.

Hear how Captor Therapeutics became a Swiss/Polish public biotech company run by a Scotsman –as told by 30-year healthcare industry veteran and Captor’s CEO, Dr. Tom Shepherd. That’s one great story – another is how Captor’s targeted protein degradation platform will stick it to the competition with their ligase library, and proprietary molecular glues and bifunctional degraders...

For the computer expert/CEO of Anima, Yochi Slonim, it’s all the same – lots of instructions and lots of code. It could be code for AI, it could be codons for the translation of proteins. With the elucidation of unique codon pairings by mRNA Lightning, Slonim can turn expression on or off, or up or down, depending on the therapeutic need, like say, in CNS disorders. Eli Lilly has taken notice. So has Takeda. You might want to give a listen…

Your GI team can’t help you if they can’t see what’s wrong. An endoscope might encounter clotted blood in the esophagus from chronic bleeds, or remaining stool in the colon after an insufficient prep. Either way, it would be nice to have a device that clears the way for precise imaging. The Pure-Vu® System, by Motus GI, offers both, and at a savings of time, and money. In this podcast, Tim Moran, CEO of Motus, tells us all about it.

Three facts: 1) World Diabetes Day is November 14th, which marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery and isolation of insulin. 2) There are an estimated 463 million diabetes patients worldwide – and that number is rapidly rising. 3) Access to care remains a major hurdle for diabetes patients, but today GBS is developing an affordable, smartphone-compatible, needle-free glucose monitor. Endocrinologist/ Interim CEO, Dr. Steven Boyages is here to tell you all about it.

He’s got patents, patience, and a plan – and a five-year runway to execute. Listen in as Dr. Amit Kumar, CEO of Anixa Biosciences, tells a tale of novel vaccines for breast, and ovarian cancer, and a new kind of CAR-T therapy – also for ovarian cancer – called a CER-T: a Chimeric Endocrine Receptor T cell. Is it worth your investment? Cleveland Clinic, Moffit Cancer Center, and investigators at NIH seem to think so…

From a doctorate at the SALK Institute overlooking La Jolla Cove, to an MBA from INSEAD, the world-leading business school located near Paris, NOXXON CEO Aram Mangasarian knows his way around different environments. Now he’s focused on tackling the tumor micro-environment (TME) and targeting the chemokines that drive tumor immunosuppression. Lead asset, NOX-A12, has generated exciting early results in some of the most challenging tumor types: pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma.

After spending the first half of her career developing medical devices for others, Kathy Lee-Sepsick, founder, and CEO of Femasys sets out to address the often-overlooked needs of a woman’s reproductive health – and she can’t be more passionate about the mission. Not only is Lee-Sepsick the company’s founder and CEO, but she’s also the inventor of Femasys’ two key reproductive health technologies: FemBloc, a permanent form of birth control that is much less invasive, and less expensive than the ...

From a famous pub in Oxford to a lab on California’s coast, Gritstone founder, and CEO Dr. Andrew Allen tells the story of how his dream, inspired by a legend in cancer immunotherapy, became the reality that is Gritstone bio, a company developing both off-the-shelf and personalized vaccines for cancer – and now COVID – with antigens discovered by their proprietary, machine learning platform, EDGE™.

Listen in while Vincerx CEO, Dr. Ahmed Hamdy shares his experience with life-changing events, a date with the cancer target CDK9, and the utterance of every investor’s favorite magic word: “Platform.”

Angion Biomedica Corp. Podcast Episode

Dr. Marshall Fordyce, CEO of Vera Therapeutics still treats patients – it is a calling he will always hear. It took him to the bedside at HIV clinics in the East to leadership roles in developing life-saving drugs at Gilead in the West. Entrepreneurship flowed from experience, and Vera Therapeutics came to be. Focused on nephrotic autoimmune disease, hear how Fordyce brought his heart and mind to this urgent unmet need.

Christopher Giordano, MS, explains how an American English major studying at Oxford University lucked into marrying a Welsh girl he convinced to move to North Carolina’s Research Triangle – a hotbed of literary studies. From that beginning – somehow – Giordano got a "real job" in drug development, rising through the ranks to become president of a business unit in healthcare giant, IQVIA, and eventually, CEO of Tenax. He tells me the Tenax name comes from the word "tenacity". Of this, I have no d...

You can fight fire with fire – it’s a thing. The problem is having anything left to salvage after the fire is out, and thus the conundrum of IL-2: the cytokine’s ability to supercharge T cells against cancer has been known for years, but the problem has always been its profound toxicity. Fahar Merchant, CEO of Medicenna explains how directed evolution has allowed him to turn the agent of wildfires into a tool for a controlled therapeutic burn.

The field of cancer immunotherapy exploded in 2011 with the FDA approval of an utterly novel, so-called “checkpoint” drug, the anti-CTLA-4 agent, Yervoy. The fires of that first-in-class success ignited a drug development rocket – the approval of the checkpoint-targeting drugs Keytruda and Opdivo occurred shortly thereafter. But then came a lot of dark, cold space. Until now. Frederic Triebel, the founder of Immutep, explains how his discovery – the checkpoint molecule called LAG-3 – is finally ...

The field of cancer immunotherapy exploded in 2011 with the FDA approval of an utterly novel, so-called "checkpoint" drug, the anti-CTLA-4 agent, Yervoy. The fires of that first-in-class success ignited a drug development rocket – the approval of the checkpoint-targeting drugs Keytruda and Opdivo occurred shortly thereafter. But then came a lot of dark, cold space. Until now. Frederic Triebel, the founder of Immutep, explains how his discovery – the checkpoint molecule called LAG-3 – is finally ...

To the oncologist, human physiology is a riot of redundancies, and treating cancer is a game of whack-a-mole – target one mechanism, another pops up. Anat Cohen-Dayag, scientist and CEO of Compugen has known this for years. However, to bring her expertise into the clinical realm, she needed to transform her company from a service provider of computational target discovery, into a savvy team of scientists/clinicians poised to enter the blockbuster field of cancer immunotherapy checkpoints.

GeNeuro's CEO, Jesus Martin-Garcia, a consummate technology entrepreneur, tells his business journey from the birth of telecoms, to the advent of online grocery shopping, to his support and exploration of the final frontier in healthcare - biotechnology. GeNeuro is using human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) to treat autoimmune diseases, including MS, ALS, and the lasting neurological symptoms of COVID-19.

Can T cells be leveraged as a cancer therapeutic? Check. How about natural killer (NK) cells? Check. Now meet invariant natural killer (iNKT) cells – a potentially game-changing tool to reprogram the innate and adaptive immune system to recognize and attack tumors. In this episode of the Benchtop Bios Podcast, leading life science entrepreneur and former Executive Director at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dr. Ian Walters – now CEO of Portage Biotech – highlights the role iNKT cells play in activating th...

There are no approved treatments to treat dry macular degeneration – a disease of the eye that can lead to eventual blindness. The standard of care for these patients consists of functional/behavioral training to acclimate the patient to their progressive, incurable vision loss. Lloyd Diamond, CEO of Pixium Vision, is convinced that much more can be done. Thus, the advent of Prima: Pixium’s bionic eye.

From a training at the bedside to a benchtop at the NIH, to the realities of life on the Dark Side, Arcellex CMO, Dr. Chris Heery speaks of his passion of all things immunologic, and in particular, the Arcellx platform that can target, activate, and control a CAR-T cell with their proprietary SparX plug. He also recalls the time he had to face a room full of angry biotech investors (N=50 or more): a textbook example of grace under fire.

Dr. Jennifer Bath, an expert in antibody discovery, as well as translational work in infectious disease, explains why leaving a tenured professorship was a price worth paying to become the CEO of ImmunoPrecise Antibodies (IPA). Under her leadership, and with B Cell Select, a proprietary discovery platform at her command, IPA is developing a therapeutic antibody cocktail called, Polytope, that has the potential to not only treat current strains of Covid-19, but also emerging variants. She also an...