Tara Nickerson, PhD, is President, CEO and Director of Therini Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurological and retinal diseases. A biopharma executive with more than 20 years of experience, she was a founding-team member and Chief Business Officer at both Maze Therapeutics and Prothena Corporation before taking the top job at Therini in 2024. She combines a research background from McGill University with an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School and a long track record of company-building, financing and dealmaking in the life sciences.
Spear Bio is a Woburn, Massachusetts biotechnology company commercializing SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction), an ultra-sensitive, wash-free immunoassay platform licensed from Harvard's Wyss Institute. SPEAR measures protein biomarkers at attomolar levels from sub-microliter samples using a two-factor authentication mechanism and standard qPCR instruments, delivering more than a 5-log improvement over conventional ELISA. The company sells assay kits - initially for neurodegeneration biomarkers such as pTau217, pTau231, GFAP and neurofilament light - to academic, pharmaceutical and clinical researchers.