Jessicca Rege

For two decades, the standard tool for testing a cancer drug before it reaches a human has been a mouse. Small, cheap, and convenient. Also, frequently, wrong. Drugs that shrink tumors in mice routinely fail in people, and the gap between the two has cost the industry billions and patients their time. Jessicca Rege runs a company that thinks the answer has been on a farm the whole time.

Rege is the Chief Executive Officer of Sus Clinicals, an early-stage biotech whose flagship product is the Oncopig Cancer Model - an FDA-cleared platform that grows human-like tumors inside genetically engineered pigs. A pig's size, physiology, and metabolism sit far closer to a human's than a mouse's does. That is the bet. And Rege, a pharmaceutical scientist with a doctorate in pharmacogenomics, is the one selling it to pharma.

She started the job on August 1, 2024, picked by the board after what its executive chair Jeffrey Weedman called "an exhaustive search." The choice carried a certain symmetry. Rege had spent her career on the human side of the equation - designing trials, building clinical strategy, raising money, taking a company public. Now she would spend it trying to make the preclinical side honest enough that fewer of those human trials end in heartbreak.

Rege did not arrive at Sus Clinicals as a first-time operator. She arrived with a resume that reads like a tour of oncology's biggest names. Early clinical research roles at Hoffman-LaRoche and Bristol Myers Squibb. Global medical affairs leadership at Eisai. Clinical collaborations at Eli Lilly. Chief of staff for the cancer enterprise at Daiichi-Sankyo. Each stop added a different muscle: the science, the strategy, the politics of moving a molecule through a global organization.

Then she went smaller, and the stakes got personal. At OncXerna Therapeutics she served as global chief development officer, helping build the company's infrastructure from the studs and raising a $16 million Series A and an $80 million Series B. At Alkermes, which she joined in 2020 as VP and head of clinical development for oncology, she built the immuno-oncology development strategy and ran its global trials. That oncology effort spun out into Mural Oncology, where Rege became chief development officer and helped lead the company through its public offering - taking a science project and turning it into a publicly traded company.

Most executives would have planted a flag there. Rege traded it for a startup with eighteen people and a pig.

Before the boardrooms, there was a softball diamond. Rege earned her bachelor's in biology at Carson-Newman College, where she was both a competitive softball player and a scholar - the kind of person who could read a curveball and a chromosome. She went on to Virginia Commonwealth University for a master's in physiology, then a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences at the Medical College of Virginia, specializing in pharmacogenomics: the study of how a person's genes shape their response to a drug.

It is a fitting specialty for someone who would end up running a precision-medicine platform. Pharmacogenomics is the science of why one patient thrives on a drug and another does not. The Oncopig, with its CRISPR-edited, patient-tailored tumors, is that question asked at the scale of a whole animal.

Across interviews, one theme recurs in Rege's language with unusual consistency. Not the technology. Not the valuation. The patient. She talks about drug development the way someone talks about a promise they intend to keep.

When Rege sat down with the She Leads Biotech podcast in April 2025, she described herself with three words that rarely share a sentence: scientist, mom, startup leader. The conversation was about the unconventional path from big pharma to biotech - the move from a place with structure and budgets and a hundred colleagues to a place where the org chart fits on an index card and the science has to earn its keep every single day.

Her answer to how she navigates it is disarmingly low-tech. Authenticity and curiosity, she says, are her most powerful tools. Not a particular framework or a hard-charging operating playbook - the willingness to be herself and to keep asking questions. For a leader running a company whose entire premise is that the conventional model is incomplete, curiosity is not a personality quirk. It is the job description.