Shennon Biotechnologies is a San Francisco biotech turning immune-cell target discovery from a months-long slog into a same-day job. Its proprietary TCELERATOR platform fuses ultra-high-throughput microfluidics with AI to functionally profile millions of single immune cells in hours, pinpointing the rare T and B cells that recognize cancer antigens. Founded in 2021 by physicist-turned-founder Li Sun, the company is building a pipeline of validated targets for solid tumors and autoimmune disease, backed by a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
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.
Li Sun is the founder and CEO of Shennon Biotechnologies, a San Francisco single-cell immunotherapy company that profiles millions of immune cells in hours to pinpoint the rare T cells and antibody targets that fight cancer. A physicist by training (PhD from Harvard's Weitz lab, M.Eng from MIT), she spent five years as a deep-tech venture investor at Bessemer and Foundation Capital before building the platform herself. Shennon emerged from stealth in March 2023 with a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
Michael Shih is the Chief Executive Officer of NeoPhore Ltd, a London-based small molecule neoantigen immuno-oncology company developing first-in-class drugs that target the DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway to make cancers more visible to the immune system. An attorney by training with degrees in biology, he spent nearly two decades structuring biotech deals before sitting in the chief executive's chair, with senior business development and corporate development roles at Kite Pharma, Biogen, Sanofi, Epizyme, Forest Laboratories, Kastle Therapeutics and Eisai. He took the helm at NeoPhore in December 2024, right after the company closed an oversubscribed Series B round backed by Bristol Myers Squibb.
NeoPhore is a UK small-molecule immuno-oncology company developing first-in-class inhibitors of the DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway. By temporarily switching off MMR, its drugs are designed to make tumours generate fresh neoantigens, become visible to the immune system, and respond to checkpoint immunotherapy - extending the benefit of drugs like Keytruda to patients whose cancers are otherwise immune-cold. A 2017 spin-out of Cambridge's PhoreMost, NeoPhore has raised roughly $47M and counts Bristol Myers Squibb and Memorial Sloan Kettering among its backers and collaborators.
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.
BlueSphere Bio is a Pittsburgh-based clinical-stage biotechnology company developing personalized T-cell receptor (TCR) therapies for cancer. Spun out of the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Enterprises in 2017, the company's proprietary TCXpress platform rapidly discovers and screens natural T-cell receptors that can target cancer antigens hidden inside cells - a reach beyond what conventional CAR-T therapies achieve. Its lead programs target high-risk hematologic malignancies such as relapsed/refractory acute myeloid leukemia.
Brendan Bulik-Sullivan is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures) backing biotech and therapeutics companies from the San Francisco office. He arrived at venture capital by a back door familiar to almost no one: a Ph.D. in statistical genetics, an authorship on the LD Score Regression method that reshaped how human geneticists read GWAS data, and a stint designing the deep-learning neoantigen models at Gritstone Oncology. He now sits on the boards of Comanche Biopharma, Santa Ana Bio, Ventus Therapeutics, and Areteia Therapeutics.