george-church-lab
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Marc Lajoie
Marc Lajoie is a protein designer turned biotech CEO. He co-founded Outpace Bio in 2021 in Seattle, where he is chief executive, building engineered cell therapies that aim to bring the kind of cures seen in blood cancers to the solid tumors that make up the vast majority of cancer cases. Trained in George Church's genome-engineering lab at Harvard and David Baker's Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, Lajoie helped pioneer the design of proteins with moving parts - molecules that compute, switch, and make decisions inside living cells. Outpace raised a $144M oversubscribed Series B in 2024 to push its AI-powered, protein-designed therapies toward the clinic.
Surge Biswas
Surge Biswas is the co-founder and CEO of Nabla Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that designs antibodies with AI. As a graduate student in George Church's Harvard lab he helped pioneer protein language modeling, a technique now central to machine-learning-guided protein design. At Nabla he built JAM, a generative system he calls 'molecular auto-complete' that designs therapeutic antibodies from a target sequence alone, including against notoriously undruggable membrane proteins like GPCRs. The company has raised roughly $37M and struck collaborations with Takeda, AstraZeneca, and Bristol Myers Squibb worth over a billion dollars in potential payments.