Pacira BioSciences (Nasdaq: PCRX) is a U.S. biopharmaceutical company built around a single, stubborn idea: surgery and chronic pain should not require a bottle of opioids. Its flagship product, EXPAREL, a long-acting local anesthetic built on the proprietary DepoFoam multivesicular-liposome delivery platform, anchors a portfolio that also includes the ZILRETTA knee-osteoarthritis injection and the iovera handheld cryoanalgesia device. With roughly 790 employees and about $726 million in 2025 revenue, Pacira is pushing beyond established analgesics into gene therapy (PCRX-201) under a '5x30' growth strategy aimed at reinventing how the world treats pain.
Roam Robotics builds lightweight, air-powered wearable exoskeletons that augment human strength, endurance and mobility. Founded by Ekso Bionics veteran Dr. Tim Swift, the San Francisco company replaced the heavy metal of traditional exoskeletons with plastic, fabric and pneumatic actuators - making robotic assistance cheap and light enough to wear all day. Its products span consumer skiing (Elevate), medical knee osteoarthritis relief (Ascend), and military performance (Forge), with clinical data showing 46% average knee-pain reduction and up to 2x strength and endurance gains.
Frank D. Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Pacira BioSciences, a specialty pharmaceutical company pioneering non-opioid pain management solutions. A 30-year industry veteran who immigrated to the United States from South Korea, Lee built his career across Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, and a 13-year tenure at Genentech where he oversaw $11 billion in global product sales. Before joining Pacira in January 2024, he led Forma Therapeutics through a transformative journey from drug-discovery startup to clinical-stage biotech, culminating in a $1.1 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2022. At Pacira, Lee is executing the '5x30' strategy - five bold objectives to transform the company into an innovative biopharma powerhouse by 2030, including advancing the PCRX-201 gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis, which has already earned FDA Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation.
Francisco Leport is the co-founder and CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, a South San Francisco-based company pioneering high-throughput in vivo drug discovery for age-related diseases. Trained as a physicist at Stanford, Leport pivoted from particle physics and energy tech into biotech, driven by a lifelong fascination with longevity sparked by his mother's fruit fly research. Gordian's signature 'mosaic screening' platform uses gene therapy vectors and single-cell RNA sequencing to test hundreds of therapies simultaneously in single animal models, with an AI system called Pythia scoring results against human disease signatures - achieving 80% accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes. The company raised a $60M Series A in April 2024, backed by Founders Fund, Gigafund, and The Longevity Fund, and in early 2026 announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to accelerate obesity drug discovery.