Andrew Reaume is the co-founder, President and CEO of Melior Discovery, an Exton, Pennsylvania preclinical contract research organization built around theraTRACE, a multiplexed in vivo phenotypic screening platform that runs a single drug candidate through a battery of animal disease models at once to uncover unexpected therapeutic uses. A geneticist by training with a Wharton MBA, he conceived the idea at Pfizer, left in 2005 to build it, and has since raised over $15 million in capital, closed more than $40 million in partnering deals, and pushed a repurposed compound, MLR-1023, into Phase 2 diabetes trials.
Eesha Sharma is the founder and CEO of Lamar Health, a Y Combinator-backed (W21) startup that uses AI to automate the mountain of paperwork standing between patients and high-cost specialty drugs. A genetics PhD from the University of Toronto and former Stanford postdoc, she traded antisense-oligonucleotide research for the unglamorous fight against prior-authorization bureaucracy after watching a family member endure years of misdiagnosis. Lamar Health now serves specialty pharmacies, infusion clinics and hospitals, automating prior auths, document review and EHR connectivity for medications that average roughly $70,000 a year per patient.