neoantigen
(4)
Niranjan Sardesai
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
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
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.
Brendan Bulik-Sullivan
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.