peptide-therapeutics
(5)
Albert Luderer
He spent thirty years turning lab science into products doctors actually use. Now he is betting that a synthetic peptide can beat the antibody at its own game.
Tina Boville
Tina Boville is the co-founder and CEO of Aralez Bio, a Berkeley-based biotechnology company using directed evolution to make noncanonical amino acids - the building blocks behind a growing share of modern medicines. A biochemist trained at the University of Colorado and Caltech, where she worked in Nobel laureate Frances Arnold's lab, Boville turned an engineered enzyme platform into a company that can produce over 100 amino acids in single-step reactions, cutting manufacturing waste by up to 99%. She has been named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, is an Activate Fellow, and in 2024 raised a $12 million Series A to scale production to tons per year.
Ajay Kshatriya
Ajay Kshatriya is the CEO and co-founder of Aizen Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech that spun out of Caltech to build 'Mirror Peptides' - drugs made entirely of D-amino acids, the mirror image of the proteins nature uses. The company launched from stealth in November 2024 with $13M and a generative-AI platform called DaX. Before Aizen, Ajay founded and ran Biota, an environmental genomics company acquired by Novozymes in 2021 after creating roughly $400M in economic value and saving 1.2 billion gallons of water for industrial clients. A UC Berkeley and Stanford-trained chemical engineer who began his career at Genentech and learned company-building as a seed investor at XSeed Capital, he now also invests in Caltech science startups as a partner at Wilson Hill Ventures.
Mathai Mammen
Mathai Mammen is the Chairman, CEO and President of Parabilis Medicines (formerly FogPharma), a Cambridge biotech going after cancer targets long written off as undruggable. A trained physician-chemist who co-founded Theravance out of grad school and later ran R&D at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, he has had a hand in the discovery or development of roughly 19 approved medicines. At Parabilis he is betting on Helicon peptides - engineered molecules that slip inside cells to hit protein-protein interfaces small molecules and antibodies cannot reach.
Dinesh V. Patel
Dinesh V. Patel, Ph.D. is the President and CEO of Protagonist Therapeutics (NASDAQ: PTGX), a Newark, California-based biopharmaceutical company he has led since December 2008. With over 38 years spanning medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, venture capital co-founding, and three CEO stints, Patel has guided Protagonist from a peptide-platform startup to a company with its first FDA-approved drug - ICOTYDE (icotrokinra), approved March 2026 as the world's first targeted oral peptide for moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, partnered with Johnson & Johnson.