Eureka Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in Emeryville, California, developing next-generation T-cell therapies for cancer, with a focus on hard-to-treat solid tumors. Founded in 2006 by Dr. Cheng Liu, the company pairs its E-ALPHA phage-display antibody engine with its ARTEMIS T-cell receptor platform - an alternative to conventional CAR-T designed to keep engineered T cells potent inside immunosuppressive tumors while sharply reducing the inflammatory cytokine release linked to CAR-T toxicity. Its lead program, ECT204, targets GPC3-positive advanced liver cancer and has received FDA RMAT designation.
Auransa is a clinical-stage, AI-native biopharmaceutical company in Palo Alto, California, that uses a proprietary machine-learning platform - the SMarTR Engine - to mine large, heterogeneous human disease datasets and discover novel cancer therapies without starting from a predefined drug target. Founded in 2014 by Pek Lum and Viwat Visuthikraisee, the company pairs each predicted compound with the patient subtypes most likely to respond, aiming to improve the odds of clinical success. Its lead program, AU-409, an RNA transcription modulator for advanced liver cancer, is in Phase 1 trials, with additional programs including heart-safe chemotherapy.
Niranjan Sardesai is the founder, president and CEO of Geneos Therapeutics, a Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania biotech building personalized DNA-based cancer vaccines that are custom-designed to each patient's own tumor mutations. A Caltech-trained chemist with a Wharton MBA, he spent years as COO helping build Inovio Pharmaceuticals into a Phase III immunotherapy company before spinning out Geneos in 2016. Under his leadership Geneos published a landmark Nature Medicine paper in 2024 showing its neoantigen vaccine drove complete responses in advanced liver cancer, with some patients reaching multi-year, recurrence-free survival.
Autem Therapeutics is a Hanover, New Hampshire bioelectric oncology company developing AutEMsys, a non-invasive, non-toxic device that delivers personalized, low-level, amplitude-modulated electromagnetic frequencies to patients with solid tumors. Founded by medical oncologist Frederico Costa and led by CEO Michael Choukas, the company targets hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) and other hard-to-treat cancers, aiming to make effective cancer care portable, affordable, and accessible worldwide. Its lead program has earned FDA Breakthrough Device designation for advanced HCC.
Michael Choukas is the co-founder and CEO of Autem Therapeutics, a Hanover, New Hampshire biotech building AutEMsys, a bioelectric platform that delivers personalized, amplitude-modulated electromagnetic frequencies to treat solid tumor cancers. A Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate, he spent two decades running clinical-development, real-world-data, and oncology-analytics businesses at firms like ConcertAI, Vector Oncology, United BioSource, SCIREX and Bain & Company, work he credits with more than $2.5 billion in market value creation. He raised a $10 million Series A-1 in 2022 and is steering Autem toward FDA-cleared trials in liver cancer and glioblastoma.
Geneos Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotherapeutics company in Plymouth Meeting / Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, building DNA-based personalized immunotherapies for cancer. Its proprietary GT-EPIC platform reads a patient's own tumor mutations and manufactures a custom DNA plasmid vaccine encoding up to 40 of that patient's unique neoantigens, delivered intradermally with an IL-12 cytokine adjuvant and electroporation. In 2024 the company published Phase 1/2 GT-30 data in Nature Medicine showing its vaccine plus pembrolizumab generated new neoantigen-specific T cells and clinical responses in advanced liver cancer - billed as the first definitive demonstration of a personalized cancer vaccine boosting response to anti-PD-1 therapy.
Cheng Liu is the founder, President, and CEO of Eureka Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Emeryville, California. A molecular cell biologist trained at UC Berkeley and Peking University, Liu invented a novel class of TCR mimic antibodies that allow engineered T cells to recognize intracellular tumor antigens - a major challenge in treating solid tumors. Since founding Eureka in 2006 after a decade at Chiron/Novartis, he has built a pipeline of ARTEMIS T-cell therapies targeting liver cancer, multiple myeloma, and neuroblastoma, with the company's ECT204 program earning FDA RMAT Designation in January 2026 - one of the highest-priority designations the FDA gives to regenerative medicine therapies. Eureka has raised over $168 million in total funding and holds more than 500 patents worldwide.