cell-engineering
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Armon Sharei
Armon Sharei is the founder and CEO of Portal Biotechnologies, a cell-engineering platform company in Watertown, Massachusetts that builds devices to push genetic and molecular cargo into living cells without killing them. He earned a chemical engineering PhD at MIT, where he invented the membrane-squeezing CellSqueeze technique, then founded SQZ Biotechnologies, raised more than $300M, struck a billion-dollar Roche partnership, and took the company public on the NYSE in 2020 before being ousted and watching it liquidate in 2024. After a sabbatical spent drawing comics about immune cells, he returned with Portal, choosing this time to sell tools rather than develop drugs, and has built a network of 100+ customers including most of the top 10 global pharma companies plus an $8M DARPA contract.
Helena Mancebo
Helena Mancebo is the founder and CEO of Multispan, Inc., a Hayward, California biotech she has run for more than 20 years. She built a company around G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) - still among the most prolific class of drug targets - and grew it into a maker of the industry's largest collection of highly characterized human GPCR cell lines and 1,600-plus assay tools. A Yale-trained immunologist and geneticist, she pairs hard cell biology with a service obsession: next-day assay turnaround, native receptor pharmacology, and a culture built on empathy, integrity, and productivity. In 2023 Multispan's cell engineering and assay services were folded into Avantor's catalog; in 2025 she partnered with AI-automation firm Synfini to push GPCR drug discovery forward.
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh is the CEO and Co-Founder of Stämm, a San Francisco-based biotech company reinventing biomanufacturing through miniaturized 3D-printed microfluidic bioreactors. A native of Argentina with a background in agricultural engineering and bioprocesses from the University of Buenos Aires, Yuyo co-founded Stämm in 2016 alongside his cousin Federico D'Alvia Vegh after spotting a fundamental gap between biology's potential and the outdated tools available to harness it. Stämm's platform - desktop-sized, modular, and scalable - is designed to make the production of biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies accessible and repeatable at any scale. The company has raised over $17 million including a Series A led by Varana Capital with participation from Draper Associates and SOSV's IndieBio, and has attracted former Merck KGaA CEO Stefan Oschmann to its board. Yuyo was selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2023.