Gabriel Tremblay

Most longevity companies reach for the obvious tools: edit a gene, dose a chemical, hack the wiring of a tired cell and hope it perks up. Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay's company does something stranger. HexemBio takes a patient's own blood stem cells out, drops them into a lab-built copy of the embryonic environment where blood first appears - a structure the company calls the Synthetic Human Yolk Sac - and then returns them by ordinary IV. The cells, the company says, come back acting young.

It is a deceptively literal idea. If you want a cell to remember how to be new, put it back in the place it was new. The foundational science was published in Nature in 2024 by a University of Pittsburgh team, and HexemBio turned it into a platform. Gabriel is the CEO and co-founder, the person whose job is to take a wildly ambitious laboratory result and march it past the FDA.

His three-line description of the whole thing is almost suspiciously calm: "We first mobilize those cells, we rejuvenate them outside of your body, and we slowly transplant them back." No genetic modification. No reprogramming cocktail. Just biology, played in reverse.

He grew up in Chicoutimi, a small city in northern Quebec. At seventeen he moved to Montreal - to become himself and to chase biotechnology, in that order. That instinct, leaving the small place for the big problem, became the through-line of a career that keeps choosing the harder version of every question.

The credentials stack up fast: a PhD from the University of British Columbia, a bachelor's and master's in science from the University of Quebec in Montreal, a postdoc in synthetic biology at UC Berkeley. For a stretch he ran technical affairs at AIChE, where he helped pull in more than $100 million in grants from the NSF, DOE, NIH and DOD and helped stand up new engineering communities around regenerative medicine and CRISPR. Useful training for a man who would later have to convince regulators and investors of the same impossible thing.

Then he did the thing scientists are not supposed to do. He left the bench for the cap table.

His first company was Orbillion Bio, a cultivated-meat startup he co-founded and helped run as CTO. It graduated from Y Combinator in the Winter 2021 batch and raised over $10 million. The problem there was scale: lab-grown beef tasted fine but cost a fortune. Gabriel's answer was to treat biology like an engineering spec, building an AI-driven algorithm that made low-cost cultivated wagyu commercially plausible.

His confidence from those days reads like a personal operating manual: "We just need smart people, money, and time, and this will be solved. I have no doubt about it." He has now applied the same sentence to two completely different industries - one growing meat from cells, one growing youth from them.

Ambition is cheap in biotech. Paperwork is not. In 2025 the FDA granted HexemBio Orphan Drug Designation; in January 2026 the company completed a Pre-IND meeting; in April 2026 it launched publicly and closed a $10.4 million seed round led by Draper Associates, with SOSV and Seraphim Space along for the ride. First-in-human trials are targeted for 2027. Along the way the work has been featured in the New York Times and on NASDAQ, and the company collected the Crimson Founders Most Innovative Tech Award at Investopia 2025 in Abu Dhabi - a long way from Chicoutimi.

He runs HexemBio with a deep bench: Mo Ebrahimkhani as CSO, Samira Kiani as CTO, Samet Yildirim - his old Orbillion co-founder - as CBO, and Joshua Hislop heading AI. The team, the company likes to note, carries something like ninety years of combined experience. Gabriel's role is the translator's: turn a Nature paper into a therapy, and a therapy into a company.