Emily Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Delineate, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building AI agents that read the scientific literature the way a pharmacologist does - pulling numbers out of buried plots and patents to speed up drug development. A University of Georgia biological engineer turned MIT PhD researcher, she worked on computational modeling at Pfizer and AstraZeneca before deciding the bottleneck wasn't the models but the months it took to feed them. Delineate, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, now works with top-10 pharma companies to turn months of systematic review into weeks.
Theravance Biopharma is a South San Francisco biopharmaceutical company built around a focused respiratory franchise. Its flagship product, YUPELRI (revefenacin), is the first and only once-daily nebulized long-acting muscarinic antagonist approved in the U.S. for COPD maintenance, commercialized with partner Viatris. Spun out of Innoviva in 2014 and trading on Nasdaq as TBPH, the company combines a profitable marketed product with high-value royalty assets - including a now-monetized stake in GSK's TRELEGY - and runs a lean, capital-disciplined model rather than chasing scale.
Verantos is a Menlo Park healthcare technology company that turns messy, fragmented patient records - including the clinical notes most platforms ignore - into research-grade real-world evidence (RWE) at scale. Using AI applied to the complete patient record and a rigorous focus on measured accuracy, completeness, and traceability, Verantos helps pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and health systems generate evidence that can hold up to FDA-grade scrutiny across every therapeutic area.
Bexorg is a New Haven techbio company that perfuses donated, postmortem human and pig brains with custom-made artificial blood to restore their molecular and metabolic activity, turning whole organs into living-tissue testbeds for drug discovery. Its BrainEx wet-lab platform and XO Digital AI engine generate petabyte-scale human brain datasets that let pharmaceutical partners test therapies in human-relevant tissue before costly clinical trials - a direct response to the roughly 95% failure rate of central-nervous-system drugs.
ConcertAI is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that combines real-world clinical, genomic, imaging, and claims data with applied AI to accelerate cancer research and clinical development. Through its CARA AI platform, large independent oncology data network, and Digital Trial Solutions, it helps biopharma companies, healthcare providers, and medical societies design smarter trials, match patients faster, and generate evidence on how treatments perform outside controlled studies.
Alvin Luk is a biotech executive, neuroscientist and entrepreneur with more than three decades in global drug development. He is President & Chief Medical Officer (Group) and U.S. CEO of HanchorBio, a clinical-stage immunology and immuno-oncology company building Fc-based designer biologics, and co-founder and CEO of CRISPR gene-editing company HuidaGene Therapeutics. Across his career he has contributed to roughly two dozen approved products and more than 250 global regulatory submissions, including LUXTURNA, the first FDA-approved gene therapy. A 2025 TIME100 Health honoree, he wants to turn HanchorBio into the 'Genentech of Asia.'
Nura Bio is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco developing brain-penetrant, small-molecule neuroprotective medicines. Its work centers on SARM1, an injury-activated NAD hydrolase that triggers axon degeneration, an early and common event across many neurological diseases. The lead candidate, NB-4746, is an oral, brain-penetrant SARM1 inhibitor that completed Phase 1 in healthy volunteers and shows protection in preclinical models of ALS, MS, traumatic brain injury and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. The company has raised more than $140 million in Series A financing led by The Column Group.
Sporos Bioventures is a Houston-based private biotechnology company that builds and operates a portfolio of oncology and immune-disease startups under one roof. Rather than launching companies one at a time, Sporos pools capital, drug-discovery infrastructure, and operational expertise across multiple programs - including Tvardi Therapeutics, Asylia Therapeutics, Nirogy Therapeutics, Stellanova Therapeutics, and its internal Sporos BioDiscovery group - to move targeted cancer therapies from idea to early clinical trials faster and with less duplicated risk.
Eric Bolesh is the Chief Executive Officer of Cutting Edge Information, a Research Triangle Park firm that has become the de facto industry standard for fair market value (FMV) data in life sciences. One of the company's first employees back in 2002, he spent two decades turning the murky question of what a cardiologist in Bulgaria or a pharmacist in the UK should be paid into a defensible, data-driven discipline. A Harvard graduate and frequent speaker at compliance conferences, he is widely regarded as a thought leader on healthcare-provider engagement and the economics of compliant compensation across more than 130 global markets.
Evan Sussman is the co-founder and CEO of Granata Bio, a Boston-based biopharma company expanding access to fertility care by in-licensing IVF medications proven abroad and bringing them through U.S. clinical development and commercialization. A former fertility business unit head at EMD Serono, he built Granata to be revenue-positive early through a fee-for-service model, then raised a $14M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), extended it, acquired ovarian-aging biotech Oviva Therapeutics, and struck a strategic investment and co-development deal with Gedeon Richter.
Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is the founding CEO and now Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a Cambridge-based company building generative and predictive AI on the world's largest multi-modal oncology dataset. He grew the company from a 2017 startup into a roughly $1.9 billion business with about 1,300 employees, acquiring TeraRecon's imaging technology and ASCO's CancerLinQ network along the way. A former Accenture managing director, Novartis research COO, and McKinsey partner, he co-authored the widely cited book Healthcare Disrupted and chairs the MassBio board.
Jennifer Bergheiser is the Chief Business Officer of eGenesis, the Cambridge biotech turning gene-edited pig organs into a real answer to the transplant waitlist. She runs corporate strategy and all portfolio and commercial development, drawing on more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and consulting. Her resume runs from screening deals at Domain Associates to steering the blockbuster autoimmune drug Stelara at Centocor/Johnson & Johnson. At eGenesis she helps commercialize one of medicine's boldest bets: organs grown in pigs, edited dozens of times over, transplanted into living humans.
Mirador Therapeutics is a San Diego precision-medicine company building first- and best-in-class therapies for immune-mediated inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Its Mirador360 engine fuses human genetics, multi-modal patient data, AI and advanced analytics to find novel targets, design combination therapies and identify the patients most likely to respond. Founded in 2024 by the former Prometheus Biosciences leadership team, Mirador launched with more than $400 million and has since raised over $650 million total.
Peter DiLaura is the CEO and Board Director of Helicore Biopharma, a San Mateo biotech building long-acting antibody-peptide conjugates that go after obesity by neutralizing the GIP hormone in the bloodstream rather than blocking its receptor. With nearly three decades of company-building behind him - CEO roles at Initial Therapeutics and Second Genome, business and strategy chief at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, and time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Third Rock Ventures - he is the operator brought in to turn a $65M Series A and a clinic-ready antibody into medicines that aim for quarterly dosing and better-quality weight loss.
Shashi Shankar is the co-founder and CEO of Novellia, a New York-based, AI-enabled health data platform that turns patients' scattered medical records into clean, longitudinal stories that biopharma companies can actually use. After nearly a decade at Genentech and Roche, he started Novellia in response to his grandfather's death from cancer, when his family found there was no single place to see the man's complete medical history. The company raised an $18M Series A led by Spark Capital and Shankar was named to Worth Magazine's 2025 AI & Health Access Pioneer list.
Stephen Rubino is the CEO of Sporos Bioventures, a Houston-based biotech that runs cancer drug development as a portfolio rather than a single bet. A Cornell-trained virologist with a Baruch MBA, he spent three decades in business development and commercial roles at Schering-Plough, Novartis, Celyad Oncology and Fortress Biotech before taking the helm at Sporos in 2022, where the lead program is SPR1, a next-generation TEAD inhibitor aimed at hard-to-drug cancers.
Tom Smart is a biotech executive with a 25-year run of taking cancer companies from the lab bench to Wall Street and back again. He currently leads Actym Therapeutics, a cancer-immunotherapy company building bacteria-delivered gene therapies, after a career that ran through AnaptysBio, XOMA, Cell Genesys and Genetics Institute. He helped shepherd the PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor that became GSK's Jemperli, founded and sold an antifungal company, and is named in industry records as a CEO and board member at oncolytic-virus company Seneca Therapeutics. His specialty is the unglamorous middle: financings, partnerships, IPOs and acquisitions that decide whether a promising molecule ever reaches a patient.
Ganesh Kaundinya is President and CEO of GlycoEra, a Swiss-US biotech building extracellular protein degraders to treat autoimmune disease. An MIT-trained chemical engineer, he co-founded Momenta Pharmaceuticals and helped grow it from a sugar-sequencing concept into a public company with FDA-approved products, later acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $6.5 billion. At GlycoEra he raised an oversubscribed $130 million Series B in 2025 to push a precision IgG4 degrader toward the clinic.
Kim Jaffe, PhD, is Chief Business Officer at BlueSphere Bio, a Pittsburgh-based clinical-stage biotech building personalized T-cell receptor therapies for cancer using its TCXpress discovery platform. A bench scientist turned dealmaker, she trained in cell and molecular biology at Northwestern and Princeton, ran cell-line development and R&D at clinical-stage oncology companies, and now leads strategy, partnerships, and business development as the company pushes TCR T-cell candidates toward high-risk leukemias.
Mohit Rawat is the Boston-based CEO of Myricx Bio, a UK-US biotech building a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate platform based on NMT inhibition to treat cancer. He arrived in September 2025 fresh off Fusion Pharmaceuticals' $2.4 billion sale to AstraZeneca, where he was President and Chief Business Officer. With a Harvard MBA, an MIT chemical engineering master's, and stints at Novartis, AbbVie and McKinsey, he is steering Myricx toward its first human clinical trials in 2026.
Benchling is a cloud platform built for biotech R&D - a single, biology-first system of record where scientists design experiments, track samples, manage molecular data, and collaborate. Founded in 2012 out of MIT, it has grown into the operating system for modern life science, used by hundreds of thousands of scientists at companies ranging from startups to the largest biopharma firms, and is now embedding AI agents and predictive models directly into the lab workflow.
Hawthorne Health is a clinical trials company that decentralizes research by sending GCP-trained medical professionals - called Hawthorne Heroes - directly into patients' homes, pharmacies, and community settings. Founded in 2015 by former Edwards Lifesciences executive Jodi Akin, the company operates the largest mobile nurse network in clinical research, covering 50+ states and territories, with access to over 1,000 community-based locations. Their technology platform and distributed workforce model have completed 76+ trials with a 99% visit completion rate while achieving patient diversity metrics 3-10x above industry standards.
Abhishek Jha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, a San Francisco-based AI company making biomedical data AI-ready for drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D. A trained physical chemist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work at MIT, he spent years at Agios Pharmaceuticals contributing to four FDA-approved first-in-class therapies before co-founding Elucidata in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has raised over $22.7M in funding, grown to 170 employees, and achieved $22.2M ARR, while evolving from a data-curation platform into an AI company solving out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in biomedical research - work that earned Elucidata recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024.
Josh Rose is the CEO of Hawthorne Health, Inc. (formerly Hawthorne Effect), a Walnut Creek-based company building the largest community-based clinical trial site network in the U.S. A clinical research industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, Rose previously led decentralized clinical trial strategy at IQVIA and CVS Health before taking the helm at Hawthorne Health in early 2024. Under his leadership, Hawthorne has expanded to 75+ community locations, partnered with 40+ pharma sponsors, and pioneered a model that embeds certified clinical research staff inside independent pharmacies and patients' homes - bringing trials to communities that traditional research networks have long bypassed.
John Balen is a General Partner at Canaan Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, where he has been investing since 1995. With a background in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cornell University, he brings both operational and financial depth to early-stage investing across consumer internet, fintech, enterprise software, medtech, and digital health. His portfolio includes companies that have gone public (Cardlytics, Commerce One, eStamp) and been acquired by major players including Akamai, Dell, Expedia, and Oracle. He resides in Hillsborough, California, and is an active Cornell trustee and mentor.
Julie Grant is a General Partner at Canaan, a $5B technology and healthcare venture capital firm, where she leads biopharma investments and company formation on the West Coast. She co-founded and served as founding CEO of Day One Biopharmaceuticals, a purpose-built pediatric oncology company that grew to a $1.5B+ valuation and was later acquired by Servier. A Yale-educated molecular biophysicist who went on to Stanford MBA and Cambridge MPhil, Grant brings rare operational depth to venture - having sat in the CEO chair before returning to investing. In 2023, President Biden appointed her to the National Cancer Advisory Board. She is the fourth woman to become a General Partner at Canaan.
Stuart Peterson is the Founder and Managing General Partner of ARTIS Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he launched in 2001 that coined and trademarked the term 'TechBio.' A 2017 Forbes Midas List honoree, Peterson led early-stage investments in YouTube (acquired by Google) and StemCentrx (acquired by AbbVie for $10.2 billion - the largest-ever venture-backed life sciences acquisition), and has since focused ARTIS at the convergence of computer science and life science, closing a $200 million TechBio II Fund in December 2023 to back next-generation health and medicine companies deploying AI, machine learning, and deep learning to transform human health.
Arthur T. Sands, M.D., Ph.D., is the President and CEO of Nurix Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering targeted protein degradation medicines. A co-founder of Lexicon Pharmaceuticals in 1995, he spent 19 years transforming that company from a research startup into a drug-development enterprise generating over $450 million in revenue. At Nurix, he leads efforts to deploy a proprietary DEL-AI platform - combining DNA-encoded libraries with machine learning - to discover and develop small-molecule degraders and degrader-antibody conjugates for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The company's lead asset, bexobrutideg (a BTK degrader), entered pivotal Phase 2 development in 2025 with an 83% objective response rate in relapsed CLL patients.
Frank D. Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Pacira BioSciences, a specialty pharmaceutical company pioneering non-opioid pain management solutions. A 30-year industry veteran who immigrated to the United States from South Korea, Lee built his career across Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, and a 13-year tenure at Genentech where he oversaw $11 billion in global product sales. Before joining Pacira in January 2024, he led Forma Therapeutics through a transformative journey from drug-discovery startup to clinical-stage biotech, culminating in a $1.1 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2022. At Pacira, Lee is executing the '5x30' strategy - five bold objectives to transform the company into an innovative biopharma powerhouse by 2030, including advancing the PCRX-201 gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis, which has already earned FDA Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation.
John Vitalie is the CEO of Aktana, a San Francisco-based AI platform company that helps global life sciences organizations optimize commercial engagement with healthcare providers. A three-time software CEO with leadership stints at Salesforce, Oracle, and Siebel Systems, Vitalie brings a decade of pioneering AI in life sciences to a company building what it calls a Contextual Intelligence Engine - blending AI, human insight, and omnichannel orchestration to make every pharma sales interaction more timely and personalized. Recognized as one of the Top 25 Biotech CEOs of 2022 by the Healthcare Technology Report, he champions a philosophy that AI should augment human judgment, not replace it.