How does a biotech startup manage to forge $125 million in partnerships with AbbVie and Eli Lilly in just under two years post-inception? Our next guest, Peter Anastasiou, CEO of Capsida Biotherapeutics since 2022, attributes much of the company's rise to addressing unmet patient needs. First invented by Viviana Gradinaru, director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the Chen Institute for Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, Capsida’s next-generation gene therapy platform engineers the capsids in adeno-associated viruses, or AAVs. The company ..read more

What do Magic Johnson, the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and a molecule have in common? They each played an unexpected role in changing the course of our next guest, Stanley Lewis, CEO and founder of San Diego-based A28 Therapeutics, on his path toward finding a novel treatment for cancer and advocating for patient diversity in clinical trials. On this episode of LifeLines, Stanley speaks about his journey from academia to blazing his own trail in biotech and founding his own company. As a physician, Stanley specialized in treating HIV patients and helped lead the development of ..read more

Decades ago, the terms “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” were associated with rogue robots and nefarious computers in sci-fi books and movies. Today, these technologies are a part of our everyday lives and as innocuous as predictive text appearing in a messaging app, a robot on wheels delivering food to your table at a restaurant, or a student using Chat GPT for writing prompts. But what applications does AI, big data, and machine learning have in life science?   On this week’s episode of LifeLines, our final episode of Season 1, we chat with Peyton Greenside, Ph.D., c ..read more

Mention Orange County to the average person and images of Disneyland, Laguna Beach and high-end shopping malls may come to mind. Life science industry insiders know that beyond the county’s famous landmarks is a nascent biotechnology hub—more than 63,000 people there were employed by the sector last year, and the number of startups establishing roots in Orange County is growing. In 2020, biotech startups gained a new place to set up shop when University Lab Partners, the first wet lab incubator for biotech and medtech companies in the region, opened near the University of California, Irvine ca ..read more

The San Francisco Bay Area is known as the “birthplace of biotech” and a center of the tech world, but did you know the local biomedical industry—companies developing new drugs and foods, medical devices and equipment, digital healthcare, and more—number in the thousands in the region? And that where a life science company first sets up shop in the Bay Area can indicate where it may move to in the future?  Gregory Theyel, Ph.D., a biomedical engineer and professor at California State University East Bay, discovered this ten years ago when he first sought out startups to help through the n ..read more

Karius’ story is all about equipping doctors with the right information, for the right patient, at the right time. For most immunocompromised patients, it’s a matter (quite literally) of life or death.  When Alec Ford’s daughter was just a toddler, she suffered with asthma and caught a viral infection that led to secondary bacterial infections and was hospitalized multiple times. Alec says he watched doctors try to help his daughter, but the tools they had to figure out exactly how to provide the best anti-infective care for her were all a failure. “They couldn't find the cause, they'd ge ..read more

Kit Pogliano says her colleagues from graduate school would have voted her the least likely person from class to go into university administration, let alone become a dean of an entire school. But after building a 20-year career as a professor, researcher, and leader at University of California, San Diego, she became the first female Dean of the School of Biological Sciences—which U.S. News & World Report ranks as No. 7 in the world for its biology and biochemistry programs—in 2018.  Kit’s research focuses on how bacteria cells are organized, grow, and interact with antibiotics and wa ..read more

Women make up half of the globe’s population, but the dollars devoted to finding treatments for women’s unique health issues—beyond conditions such as breast cancer—are significantly underfunded. Only 1 percent of research dollars are invested in women's health concerns, and women's health represents only 2 percent of the development pipeline of preclinical products for non-cancer related conditions, according to a 2022 McKinsey & Company report. Sabrina Martucci Johnson, president and CEO of Daré Bioscience, says this is not congruent, at all, with the need and demand for such products an ..read more