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Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Maneesh Jain
Maneesh Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a South San Francisco-based biotech company pioneering RNA-based blood tests to predict pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and preterm birth months before symptoms occur. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in life sciences and more than $1.5B in combined exits across five prior startups - including Ion Torrent (acquired by Life Technologies) and Cirina (acquired by GRAIL) - Jain trained at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and holds a BS from Caltech and a Master's in Applied Physics from Stanford. Mirvie has raised over $90 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, GV, General Catalyst, and the Gates Foundation, and received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its preeclampsia risk test in 2022.