Mike Nohaile

A printer that builds immune systems

In a lab off Anthony Street in Berkeley, two laser beams cross inside a droplet of biological ink and, where they meet, tissue appears. Not a scaffold, not a render - a lymph node organoid, the little factory your body uses to school its antibodies. Mike Nohaile runs the company doing this. He is the chief executive of Prellis Biologics, and his pitch is disarmingly literal: if you want human antibodies, ask a human immune system. He just happens to grow that immune system in a dish.

The platform has a name, EXIS, short for Externalized Human Immune System. Donor immune cells go in. Lab-grown lymph nodes recapitulate the place where antibodies mature. Out the other side come candidates pulled from the full human repertoire, screened for immunogenicity, ranked, and handed to pharmaceutical partners. The clock on all of this reads three to four weeks. Conventional antibody discovery measures itself in seasons.

That is the headline Nohaile inherited and now sells. The stranger fact is who is doing the selling. This is a man who spent the prime of his career on the executive committee of one of the largest biotech companies on earth, and who walked away from the corner office to run a startup that prints organs with light.

The long way to a short timeline

Nohaile did not arrive in biotech through a garage. He arrived through a PhD in molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, then a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biology at MIT. The bench taught him the molecules. What came next taught him the money.

He started at McKinsey & Company as a partner in the New Jersey office, working the healthcare seam - diagnostics, devices, pharmaceuticals. From consulting he moved operational: Global Head of Molecular Diagnostics at Novartis in Switzerland, with stops running corporate and pharmaceutical strategy. Then Amgen, where he joined in December 2012 as a vice president of strategy and, by February 2017, had been promoted to Senior Vice President of Strategy, Commercialization & Innovation.

The Amgen title is a mouthful, but it mattered. He sat on the executive committee. He owned corporate strategy, the commercialization machine, portfolio management, and every drug program from late research through late lifecycle management. He also ran the company's data, digital health, and artificial intelligence efforts - which is worth remembering, because it is precisely the field he would later treat with a raised eyebrow.

The believer who became the skeptic

After Amgen came Generate Biomedicines, the Flagship Pioneering company building drugs with generative biology, where Nohaile served as Chief Scientific Officer. He went on Amgen's own podcast, "The Generative Biology Revolution," to talk through the protein structure prediction problem - the puzzle of reading a sequence and knowing the shape it folds into. He has lived at the AI-and-medicine frontier from the inside.

Which is what makes his current position interesting. Ask Nohaile about AI inventing drugs and he sharpens. On the TechSurge podcast he put the question plainly to the entire industry, and his answer was not a press release.

His argument is precise rather than dismissive. AI, he says, is brilliant at improving proteins that already exist - taking a reference molecule and optimizing it. What it has not yet done is conjure a genuinely novel therapeutic from nothing. The search space is the reason. Describing the universe of possible antibody sequences, he reached for the only scale large enough: more options than there are atoms in a trillion trillion galaxies. AlphaFold, the tool that rewired structural biology, he files under useful, not magic. "It is a piece of a solution."

So Prellis flips the script. The human immune system does the inventing first - generating antibodies the way evolution intended, inside lymph node tissue - and AI comes in afterward to optimize and rank. Discovery by biology, refinement by machine. For a company that could easily wrap itself in AI buzzwords, the order of operations is a quiet act of conviction.

Why bother

The motivation underneath all of it is unglamorous and human. Nohaile points out that modern medicine still misses badly on problems we consider solved - fewer than half of hypertension patients actually hit their treatment goals. The promise of faster, more precise antibody discovery is not a slide in a deck. It is the difference between a patient who gets a working medicine and one who waits.

When he joined in 2022, the company raised a $35 million Series C, co-led by Celesta Capital and Avidity Partners, with Khosla Ventures, SOSV, True Ventures, and Lucas Venture Group along for the round. Founder Melanie Matheu, who invented the two-photon holographic printing approach, moved to Chief Technology Officer and kept her board seat. The total raised crossed $64.5 million. Nohaile's job is to turn a remarkable piece of science into medicines that ship.

He is, in the end, a translator. Bench to boardroom, biology to balance sheet, hype to honest assessment. The career looks like a tour of pharma's command centers - McKinsey, Novartis, Amgen, Generate - and it landed him in a Berkeley lab betting that the smartest antibody designer in the room is still the human immune system. He just figured out how to print one.