new-york-biotech
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Jose Galarza Built a Vaccine Company Around a Perfect Fake
For more than two decades, the Argentine-trained virologist has run TechnoVax on one durable idea: build convincing copies of viruses, leave out the genetic machinery, and make the platform do more than one job.
Dimi Kellari
Dimi Kellari is the co-founder and CEO of Neion Bio, a New York biotech using genetically engineered chicken eggs as biological factories to produce complex biologics like monoclonal antibodies at a fraction of the usual cost. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer who previously built autonomous-vehicle infrastructure at Cavnue and worked at Alphabet's X moonshot factory and McKinsey, Kellari co-founded Neion in 2024 with biologist Dr. Sam Levin around a single question: why, in 2024, are we still making our most important medicines in hamster cells? In June 2026 the company closed an oversubscribed $23 million Series A led by Caffeinated Capital.
Laura Katz
Laura Katz is the founder and CEO of Helaina, a New York biotech company that uses precision fermentation to produce human-identical bioactive proteins. Its first product, effera, is the world's first commercially available human lactoferrin made through yeast fermentation. A food scientist by training and once NYU's youngest adjunct professor in Food Science, Katz started the company in 2019 from her Lower East Side kitchen after hearing a podcast about the black market for breast milk. She has raised more than $80 million to move Helaina from research into a commercial ingredient business.
Server Ertem
Server Ertem is the founder and CEO of Sanavia Oncology, a New York biotech developing antibody drug conjugates, T-cell engagers, and CAR-T therapies aimed at the roughly 80% of cancer patients whose tumors escape today's treatments. He built the company after a PhD in cancer cell biology at Weill Cornell, a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and a Runway Startup Postdoc fellowship at Cornell Tech - stitching high-throughput cell biology, super-resolution microscopy, and machine learning into a platform designed to find cancer-specific epitopes on validated targets with atomic-level precision.
Linh Hoang
Linh Hoang, MD, PhD, is the Chief Executive Officer of HistoWiz, the New York based digital pathology company building PathologyMap, a platform that automates histology and connects researchers to top pathologists on demand. A physician-scientist turned operator, he trained at the University of Pennsylvania, cut his teeth at Boston Consulting Group, and ran businesses at Thermo Fisher and PerkinElmer before leading two diagnostics companies as CEO, Boston Microfluidics and its successor Weavr Health, ahead of joining HistoWiz in October 2022.
Damaris Skouras
Damaris Skouras is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Olatec Therapeutics, a New York clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company built around dapansutrile, an oral, specific NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitor she has pushed from the lab bench into Phase 2 trials spanning gout, melanoma, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. She started in finance as a Wall Street biotech banker in 1982, founded her own investment advisory firm in 1985, and eventually crossed the table to run the kind of company she used to finance. With a Stanford degree, a Harvard MBA, and the immunologist who discovered interleukin-1 as her co-founder, she has raised over $100 million to bet that a single inflammatory switch can be turned off across a range of diseases.
Huafeng Xu
Huafeng Xu is the founder and CEO of Fathom Therapeutics (formerly AtomMap), a New York drug-design company that simulates protein motion at atomic resolution to design small molecules that work inside living cells. A computational chemist with 25+ years and 10,000+ citations, Xu spent 12 years at D. E. Shaw Research building the free-energy and molecular-dynamics methods now standard across pharma, then served as CTO of Silicon Therapeutics and Roivant Discovery before launching his own company. In April 2026 Fathom closed an oversubscribed $47M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures to scale its Microcosmos engine.
Michael Foley
Michael Foley is a medicinal chemist turned serial biotech founder who is now CEO and co-founder of Excelsior Sciences, a New York company building 'chemistry that machines can do.' His proprietary 'smart blocc' building blocks let robots and AI run iterative carbon-carbon bond formation in a closed loop, aiming to collapse the wall between drug discovery and manufacturing. Foley has founded multiple biotechs, ran the Broad Institute's Chemical Biology Platform, and was founding CEO of the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute. Excelsior launched with $95 million in 2025.