11
Jul
2022
Restoring Eyesight in the Developing World: Dr. Sanduk Ruit on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Dr. Sanduk Ruit. He is an ophthalmologist and the founder and executive director of the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology. The institute is in Kathmandu, Nepal. Dr. Ruit has restored the eyesight of more than 130,000 people in Asia and Africa. He’s the pioneer of a small-incision form of cataract surgery. Not only was... Read More
22
Jun
2022
Bringing Precision Medicine to Neuro: Ivana Magovcevic-Liebisch on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Ivana Magovcevic-Liebisch She is the CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Vigil Neuroscience. The story starts with Amgen. The big biotech made a strategic decision to get out of neuroscience in 2019. That meant a couple of drug programs targeting TREM2 came up for sale. One is a monoclonal antibody, and the other is a... Read More
7
Jun
2022
Rethinking Biotech Manufacturing: Rahul Singhvi on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Rahul Singhvi. Rahul is the co-founder and CEO of Resilience. The company made a splash in the fall of 2020, when it debuted with an $800 million Series A financing. Bob Nelsen of ARCH Venture Partners led the deal. The company has now raised a couple more rounds that add up to more... Read More
23
May
2022
Building a New Type of Drug Discovery Engine: Chris Gibson on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Chris Gibson. Chris the co-founder and CEO of Salt Lake City-based Recursion. The company was founded in 2013 when Chris was working in the lab of Dean Li at the University of Utah. The idea at Recursion is to do what it calls “industrialized drug discovery.” It combines some of the common tools... Read More
9
May
2022
Fighting Cancer With Food and Drugs: Lew Cantley and Sid Mukherjee on The Long Run
Today’s guests on The Long Run are Lewis Cantley and Siddhartha Mukherjee. They are co-founders of San Francisco-based Faeth Therapeutics. Cantley, who recently moved to Dana Farber Cancer Institute, is a scientist well-known for his work on cancer metabolism. He discovered the PI3kinase pathway that’s an important regulator of normal cell growth, proliferation, metabolism – and which can become activated... Read More
14
Mar
2022
Structural Biology-Driven Drug Discovery: Ray Stevens on The Long Run
Today’s guest on the Long Run is Ray Stevens. Ray is the CEO of ShouTi. It’s a company that uses advanced structural biology technologies like cryo-EM images, and computational techniques, to discover small molecule drugs. The idea is to come up with orally available medicines that can build off the biological insights gained from protein or peptide drugs, but replace... Read More
28
Feb
2022
Making Clinical Trials More Diverse: Michele Andrasik on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Michele Andrasik. I’m excited to have Michele on the show to talk about an undercovered aspect of the scientific enterprise. Michele is the director of social and behavioral science and community engagement for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, and COVID-19 Prevention Network. She’s based in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center,... Read More
14
Feb
2022
Rethinking the Cell Therapy Business: Derrell Porter of Cellevolve on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Derrell Porter. Derrell is the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Cellevolve. This is a different kind of biotech startup. Most startups are all about the R&D. Traditionally, many haven’t built up commercial capabilities in the early days for one big reason — they don’t have anything to sell. They have tended to... Read More
1
Feb
2022
Targeting Integrins With Small Molecules: Praveen Tipirneni on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Praveen Tipirneni. Praveen is the CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Morphic Therapeutic. Morphic Therapeutic is developing oral small molecule drugs aimed at integrin targets. There’s some fascinating biology and computational technology underpinning this work, which I discussed a couple years ago on The Long Run with Morphic scientific founder Tim Springer. Just to review... Read More
11
Jan
2022
Antibody Engineering & Company Building: Bassil Dahiyat on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Bassil Dahiyat. Bassil is the CEO of Monrovia, Calif.-based Xencor. He’s been on a true Long Run. Bassil co-founded Xencor in 1997 after getting his PhD in chemistry at Caltech. He’s been through a lot of ups and downs in the biotech markets, and taken the company through a couple big strategic shifts.... Read More
20
Dec
2021
Physician-Scientist-Biotech VC: Vineeta Agarwala on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Vineeta Agarwala. Vineeta is a general partner with Andreesen Horowitz’s bio fund. Vineeta has spent a lot of time on the front lines of an explosion in biological data, and efforts to analyze it to develop better therapeutics, diagnostics and digital health applications. Before coming to A16Z, she worked at GV and Flatiron... Read More
6
Dec
2021
Targeted Small Molecule Protein Degraders: Nello Mainolfi on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Nello Mainolfi. Nello is the president and CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Kymera Therapeutics. Kymera is working on targeted protein degraders. These are orally available small molecule compounds. Many in biopharma are excited about them because they have a clever design that allows them to go after targets that have previously been out of... Read More
1
Dec
2021
T Cell Therapies for Autoimmunity: Jeff Bluestone on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Jeff Bluestone. Jeff is the president and CEO of South San Francisco-based Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Jeff has a long, distinguished history as an immunology researcher at the University of Chicago and UCSF. He learned over the years how to enlarge his impact by coordinating groups of scientists as an administrator at the Immune Tolerance... Read More
22
Nov
2021
Reviving Targeted Radiopharmaceuticals for Cancer: Ken Song on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Ken Song. Ken is the CEO of San Diego-based RayzeBio. At RayzeBio, Ken discovered new opportunity in an area cancer R&D that had been long ago abandoned. It’s about creating targeted cancer therapies loaded with radioactive isotopes to give them extra tumor-killing punch. These aren’t the same thing as antibody-drug conjugates, in which... Read More
8
Nov
2021
A Remarkable Life in Science: David Baltimore on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is David Baltimore. David is one of the most accomplished biomedical scientists – and scientific citizens — of the past 50 years. He recently won Lasker~Koshland Award for Special Achievement. The award was granted “for the breadth and beauty of his discoveries in virology, immunology, and cancer; for his academic leadership; for his mentorship... Read More
26
Oct
2021
Young Biotech Entrepreneurs Finding Community: Tony Kulesa on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Tony Kulesa. Tony is the co-founder of Boston-based Petri. It’s a seed and pre-seed investor in biotech startups. But that doesn’t quite fully describe it. It’s also a community for young founders trying to figure out how to get new enterprises off the ground, and connected with a network of seasoned entrepreneurs who... Read More
12
Oct
2021
Reimagining DNA Sequencing With Long Reads: Christian Henry on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Christian Henry. Christian is the CEO of Menlo Park, Calif.-based PacBio. It makes DNA sequencing instruments that are used by scientists around the world. The company has long toiled in the shadow of the market leader – some would say monopolist in DNA Sequencing – Illumina. PacBio was way overhyped in its early... Read More
27
Sep
2021
Sequencing Genomes of Indigenous Populations: Keolu Fox on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Keolu Fox. Keolu is an assistant professor at UCSD with a fascinating mix of interests. He’s a Native Hawaiian, and got his PhD in genome sciences from the University of Washington. He’s now taking that mix of life experience and scientific training, and putting it to work on projects that sequence the DNA... Read More
12
Sep
2021
Turning Around COVID Diagnostics. Mara Aspinall on The Long Run
Today’s guest on The Long Run is Mara Aspinall. Mara is a veteran diagnostics executive, investor, and educator. She’s a venture investor with Bluestone Venture Partners, the CEO of Health Catalysts (a consulting firm), and the co-founder and professor of the practice of biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University. It’s the only program of its kind in the country, designed... Read More
7
Sep
2021
Base Editing for Therapeutics: John Evans on The Long Run
John Evans is today’s guest on The Long Run. John is the CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Beam Therapeutics. The company was founded a little over three years ago to develop several types of DNA base editing developed in David Liu’s lab at Harvard University, along with an RNA base editor platform developed by Feng Zhang, at the Broad Institute of... Read More