Alex Federation is the co-founder and CEO of Talus Bio, a Seattle biotech building drugs for transcription factors, the gene-control proteins long written off as 'undruggable.' A Harvard-trained chemical biologist who studied under Jay Bradner, he invented the MARMOT platform to measure and modulate the regulome inside living cells, pairing functional proteomics with AI models trained on tens of millions of compound-target interactions. He teamed with proteomics scientist Lindsay Pino in 2020, went through Y Combinator, and has raised roughly $24.7M to chase first-in-class medicines for targets like Brachyury, AR-V7, and STAT3.
ClearNote Health is a San Diego molecular diagnostics company building non-invasive, blood-based tests that detect high-mortality cancers early, when treatment works best. Spun out of Stephen Quake's Stanford lab in 2016 (originally as Bluestar Genomics), it pairs a proprietary 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) epigenomic platform with cell-free DNA analysis and machine learning. Its flagship Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test targets high-risk patients - including adults 50+ newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes - and the company is extending the approach to ovarian and multi-cancer detection.
Dave Mullarkey is the CEO of ClearNote Health, a San Diego company that reads the chemical edits on your DNA to catch deadly cancers before symptoms show. A life-sciences operator who has shepherded three diagnostics and sequencing companies through scale-ups and acquisitions - Ariosa to Roche, Omniome to PacBio - he now leads the team behind the Avantect epigenomic blood tests for pancreatic and multi-cancer detection.