precision-medicine
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Venky Soundararajan and the Case of the Missing Medical Signal
A biological engineer trained to read proteins now builds machines that read the unruly archive of medicine. His wager is simple to state and difficult to execute: the next useful discovery may already be hiding in the record.
Jim Robinson and the Art of the Two-Signal Bet
A salesman's instinct for people brought Jim Robinson to the edge of cell therapy. At A2 Bio, his job is to turn a biological logic gate into an organization that can deliver on it.
Nikole Kimes Took the Scenic Route to the CEO’s Chair
She studied coral ecosystems, joined the Peace Corps and went looking for a science that could hold all her interests at once. Then a UCSF discovery turned a self-described meandering career into a lesson in how founders are really made: one unfamiliar job at a time.
Pek Lum Keeps Asking Biology Better Questions
Before AI became biotech's favorite phrase, Pek Lum was teaching computers to notice what biology hides in plain sight. At Auransa, that long apprenticeship has become a patient-first method for finding the signal inside human complexity.
Ilsong Lee’s Second Act Is Making Research Less Mechanical
After decades spent turning complex semiconductor systems into businesses, Cipherome’s CEO is applying the same operational instinct to the messier machinery of clinical and genomic data.
Giordano Bottà Left Oxford to Put a Number on the Invisible
A mosquito-genomics researcher spotted a stubborn gap between scientific discovery and useful software. He packed up in Oxford, returned to Rome, and began the long work of making inherited risk legible in the clinic.
Scott Marshall Is Making Clinical Trial Data Behave
The QuartzBio CEO built his career around an unglamorous but expensive problem: a clinical sample can travel farther than the data that explains it. His answer is a connected system designed to catch the gaps before researchers have to play another round of spreadsheet detective.
Bobby Reddy Bet a Decade on the Data Hospitals Were Missing
An all-access hospital badge helped an electrical engineer discover that his clever device was solving the wrong problem. What followed was a ten-year lesson in listening, clinical rigor and the unglamorous patience required to make AI useful.
Patrick Roberts Is Betting the Cell Cycle Has Another Door
After helping a small North Carolina biotech move a cell-cycle drug from discovery toward patients, Patrick Roberts reunited with longtime colleagues to pursue a harder target: CDK2. The wager behind Incyclix Bio is that precision, patience and the right biomarkers can reopen a route that resistant cancers have learned to use.
The Chemist Who Wants to Build a Kinder Cancer Drug
He spent 25 years learning how cancer drugs fail. Now he is running a company built on the idea that the next generation can be safer, steadier, and easier to live with.
Andreas Goutopoulos Raised $75.5M for a Company That Was, on Paper, Just Him
He led chemistry at a big pharma for a decade, then walked out to build a radiopharma startup with no executive team and a single conviction: make the molecules stick.
Diana Abdueva Is Teaching Blood to Keep Better Notes
The computational biologist behind Aqtual has spent two decades learning how to pull useful signals from noisy biology. Now she is building a company around a deceptively simple idea: the blood carries a running record of what the body is doing.
The Person Selling Certainty in a Business Built on Doubt
A marketing job at a company whose products live or die on trust, sold to buyers who read the footnotes. Here is what that work looks like from the inside.
Paul Billings
Paul Billings has spent four decades asking the same hard question from different seats: how do you turn genetic information into something useful without letting it become something dangerous?
Serge Messerlian
Serge Messerlian is the Chairman and CEO of Creyon Bio, a San Diego biotech using AI to design oligonucleotide medicines. A life-science operator with more than 25 years across oncology, hematology, immunology and rare disease, he has led Teon Therapeutics as CEO, run Janssen Oncology as President at Johnson & Johnson, and held senior roles at Actelion, Baxalta and Baxter International. He joined Creyon first as an investor and board member through DCVC Bio, then stepped in as Executive Chairman and Acting CEO in fall 2024 and took the full CEO title in April 2025 as the company prepares to enter the clinic in 2026.
Shidong Jia
Shidong Jia, MD, PhD, is the founder and global CEO of Predicine, a Silicon Valley precision-oncology company building multi-omic liquid biopsy tests that read cancer from blood and urine. Trained as a physician-scientist at Harbin Medical University, Peking Union Medical College, Dana-Farber and Harvard, he ran oncology biomarker strategy at Genentech before leaving to start Predicine in 2015. His pitch is simple: precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine, built 'From Pharma, For Pharma.'
Sofie Qiao
Sofie Qiao, Ph.D. is a chemist-turned-biotech-founder who has built a career at the intersection of hard science and dealmaking. Trained in organic chemistry at Harvard and MIT, she founded LEAD Therapeutics (acquired by BioMarin in 2010, source of the PARP inhibitor Talazoparib now sold by Pfizer), ran WuXi Ventures, and then founded and led Vivace Therapeutics from 2015 to 2026, raising more than $100 million to advance first-in-class small molecules targeting the Hippo/YAP-TEAD pathway in cancer. She now leads Virtuoso Therapeutics, another company she founded.
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.
Wei-Wu He
Wei-Wu He is a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and investor who serves as Executive Chairman and CEO of Human Longevity, Inc., the San Francisco Bay Area precision-health company that pairs whole-genome sequencing with advanced imaging and blood analytics to catch age-related disease early. Trained as a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine with an MBA from Wharton, he was among the first scientists at Human Genome Sciences before building OriGene Technologies into a major research-tools business. Over three decades he has founded or funded dozens of biotech companies through his venture fund Emerging Technology Partners, and he now channels that experience into the science of extending healthy human lifespan.
Bryan Stuart
Bryan Stuart is the Chief Executive Officer and a director of Atavistik Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company building precision allosteric small molecule therapeutics on its Atavistik Metabolite-Protein Screening (AMPS) platform. He joined in July 2023 after more than two decades leading biopharma companies, including roles as CEO of Fulcrum Therapeutics, Yarra Therapeutics, and Kastle Therapeutics. Under his leadership Atavistik has raised a $120 million Series B in December 2025, later extended to $160 million, to advance its lead programs for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia and myeloproliferative neoplasms toward the clinic.
Cheng Zhang
Cheng Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Character Biosciences, a precision-medicine biotech that flips traditional drug discovery on its head by starting with patients instead of targets. Trained in mathematics and philosophy at Duke and shaped by years at UBS, Oliver Wyman, and Pfizer, Zhang built Character around a proprietary database of thousands of patients with age-related macular degeneration, combining genomics, longitudinal clinical data, retinal imaging, and machine learning to reclassify common diseases of aging into genetic subtypes. In 2025 the company raised an oversubscribed $93 million Series B to move its lead eye-disease candidates into the clinic.
Daehwan Kim
Daehwan Kim is a computational biologist and software engineer whose genome-alignment tools - TopHat, HISAT and HISAT2 - are cited more than 78,000 times and are used by researchers worldwide to read DNA and RNA data. A former Michael L. Rosenberg Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he co-founded Omphalos Lifesciences, where he invented L++, a high-level programming language meant to describe living systems the way C++ describes machines. His goal is a fully programmable, simulatable virtual cell.
Elliott Green
Elliott Green is the co-founder and CEO of Dandelion Health, a New York-based real-world data and clinical AI platform building multimodal, longitudinal datasets from a consortium of non-academic health systems. A former founding member of Oscar Health with a finance background, Green launched Dandelion in 2020 to give life science companies and AI developers unbiased, clinical-grade data - including the images, waveforms, and notes that make up most of medicine but are rarely used. The company closed a $14M Series A in 2026 and has launched a free AI validation service and a GLP-1 data library aimed at bringing precision medicine to cardiometabolic disease.
Iker Huerga
Iker Huerga is the CEO of Pathos AI, a New York- and Chicago-based biotech building what it calls the first true AI-enabled drug development platform for oncology. A data scientist by training with more than two decades at the intersection of machine learning and cancer research, he previously served as Chief Data Scientist for Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca and as an EVP at Tempus Labs, and founded three oncology companies with two successful exits. He took the helm at Pathos in May 2025, days before the company closed a $365 million Series D that valued it at roughly $1.6 billion, with a stated mission to get the right therapies to the right patients, sooner.
Jack Hoppin
Jack Hoppin is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Ratio Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotech developing targeted radiopharmaceuticals for cancer. A mathematician by training with a PhD in applied mathematics, he previously co-founded the molecular imaging company Invicro and led Konica Minolta Precision Medicine. At Ratio he pairs with scientific co-founder John Babich to build fit-for-purpose radioligand therapies on the company's Trillium pharmacokinetic-modulation and Macropa chelation platforms, backed by investors including Bristol Myers Squibb and a partnership with Novartis.
Robert Chu
Robert Chu is the co-founder and CEO of Embleema, a New York-based clinical research platform that collects and generates regulatory-grade evidence to accelerate precision medicine. He founded the company in 2017 after nearly three decades in enterprise technology and life sciences data, including roles as Senior Vice President of Global Technology Solutions at IQVIA (formerly QuintilesIMS), where he ran a 1,400-person, $800M SaaS business, and prior leadership positions at IMS Health in France, China, and Asia Pacific, following 15+ years at IBM. Trained as an engineer at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, he now works at the intersection of patient consent, blockchain, and clinical data collection, with Embleema partnering with pharma sponsors and the FDA on real-world evidence workflows.
Todd Bazemore
Todd Bazemore is the President and CEO of AIRNA, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech developing RNA-editing medicines that rewrite disease-causing genetic variants without permanently altering DNA. Appointed in June 2026, he arrived as the company's lead program, AIR-001 for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, moved into the clinic on the back of an oversubscribed $155 million Series B. A University of Massachusetts Lowell graduate with more than 30 years in rare-disease drug development, he previously ran Kala Bio, led U.S. operations at Santhera, and was chief commercial officer at Dyax during its $6.5 billion acquisition by Shire.
Allison Luo
Allison Luo, MD is the Chief Medical Officer of Mirador Therapeutics, a San Diego precision-medicine company that launched in 2024 with more than $400 million to attack immuno-fibrotic diseases using its Mirador360 development engine. A physician scientist with more than two decades in clinical development, she was CMO of Prometheus Biosciences before Merck bought it for $10.8 billion, and has since reassembled with that team to build Mirador. She sits on the board of Triveni Bio and has held medical-leadership roles across Ventyx, Biora, Iveric Bio and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Briggs Morrison
Briggs Morrison is a medical oncologist turned biopharma leader who runs Crossbow Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building TCR-mimetic antibody drugs that aim T-cells at cancer targets once thought unreachable. Before Crossbow he ran late-stage R&D at the scale of an industry giant, serving as Chief Medical Officer and EVP of Global Medicines Development at AstraZeneca, and holding senior development roles at Pfizer and Merck across three decades. His fingerprints are on blockbuster cancer medicines including TAGRISSO and LYNPARZA. Today he splits his identity between operator and investor: CEO of Crossbow, Entrepreneur Partner at MPM BioImpact, and a fixture on biotech boards including chair of Arvinas.
Eirini Schlosser
Eirini Schlosser is the founder and CEO of Dyania Health, a clinical research AI company building Synapsis AI, a natural language understanding platform that reads unstructured electronic medical records to pre-screen patients for clinical trials and automate chart abstraction. The only non-physician in a family of doctors, she spent childhood summers digitizing her father's patient records, then worked on more than $60 billion of deals at Morgan Stanley before leaving finance to build technology. She founded the NLP startup Chuz, then launched Dyania Health in 2019, raising $17.55M and earning a spot on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders 500.