palo-alto-biotech
(3)
Steven Everett
Steven Everett is a biotechnology executive and cancer scientist who founded MaveriX Oncology in Palo Alto, California, where he serves as President and CEO. With a background rooted in more than two decades of cancer research at the University of Oxford, University of Dundee and UCSF, he has built his career around a single idea: making cancer drugs that switch on only inside tumors. At MaveriX he is developing conditionally activated small-molecule therapeutics that exploit hydroxylase biology in the tumor immune microenvironment, aiming to hit cancer hard while sparing healthy tissue.
Weston Kightlinger
Weston Kightlinger is the CEO and co-founder of Ridge Bio (Ridge Biotechnologies), a Palo Alto biotech that left stealth in September 2025 with $25 million in seed funding to design precision enzymes and targeted therapeutics by pairing machine learning with massive cell-free laboratory datasets. A Northwestern-trained scientist with a background in cell-free protein synthesis and protein glycosylation, he turned a decade of bench work into a company whose advisory board reads like a who's-who of chemical biology, including Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi.
Koji Tanabe
Koji Tanabe is the founder and CEO of I Peace, Inc., a Palo Alto and Kyoto biotech building an automated platform to mass-manufacture clinical-grade induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). He earned his PhD in the Kyoto University lab of Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka and was a co-author of the landmark paper that first reported the creation of human iPS cells. After postdoctoral work at Stanford, he founded I Peace in 2015 with the goal of giving every person access to their own stem cells for therapy and longevity.