preclinical-research
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Reza Rezaei Built a Career at the Handoff Between Science and Sales
A veterinarian and animal scientist learned to translate laboratory detail into commercial trust. After a decade climbing Cyagen's ranks, Reza Rezaei now leads the company from the junction of research, customers and scale.
Apeximmune Therapeutics
Apeximmune Therapeutics is a South San Francisco / Burlingame-area biotechnology company developing next-generation antibody therapeutics that harness the immune system to treat cancer and autoimmune disease. Using a proprietary target-discovery platform built on bioinformatic analysis of thousands of tumor RNA-seq transcriptomes, the company has identified more than 30 novel immune targets. Its lead program, AI-306, is a first-in-class antagonist antibody against the novel immune checkpoint AIM-103, and its MEBA platform builds bispecific antibodies that engage macrophages to kill tumor cells. The company closed a $21.3 million Series A in 2025 led by PharmaEssentia.
Cyagen Biosciences
Cyagen Biosciences is a life-sciences contract research organization that builds custom genetically engineered rodent models - knockout, knockin, conditional, and humanized mice and rats - for academic labs and drug developers. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with major operations in China, Japan, and Europe, Cyagen has grown into one of the world's largest suppliers of custom mouse and rat models, complemented by stem-cell products and a fast-growing gene-delivery arm, VectorBuilder, that designs and manufactures viral vectors from research through clinical CDMO work.
Drug Hunter
Drug Hunter is a Boston-based knowledge platform for the scientists who turn molecules into medicines. Founded in 2018 by former Genentech chemist Dennis X. Hu, it distills scientific literature, patents, and early disclosures into searchable, expert-curated insights - molecule search, patent search, courses, flash talks, and a mobile app. More than 200 R&D organizations, including Eli Lilly, Biogen, Merck KGaA, Isomorphic Labs, and the NIH, rely on it. In September 2025 the company raised a seed round led by Teamworthy Ventures.
Andrew Reaume
Andrew Reaume is the co-founder, President and CEO of Melior Discovery, an Exton, Pennsylvania preclinical contract research organization built around theraTRACE, a multiplexed in vivo phenotypic screening platform that runs a single drug candidate through a battery of animal disease models at once to uncover unexpected therapeutic uses. A geneticist by training with a Wharton MBA, he conceived the idea at Pfizer, left in 2005 to build it, and has since raised over $15 million in capital, closed more than $40 million in partnering deals, and pushed a repurposed compound, MLR-1023, into Phase 2 diabetes trials.
HistoWiz
HistoWiz is a New York-based histopathology company that turns tissue specimens into publication-quality digital slides in as little as three days. By pairing an automated, robot-driven lab with PathologyMap, a cloud platform hosting one of the world's largest preclinical pathology databases, it gives academic and biotech researchers fast, standardized histology plus AI analysis and access to board-certified pathologists - work that traditionally took weeks of slow, manual lab effort.
Multispan, Inc.
Multispan, Inc. is a Hayward, California biotech that builds the cell lines and assays drug hunters use to interrogate G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the largest druggable target family in the human genome. Founded in 2004 by Helena Mancebo, the company has assembled one of the industry's largest libraries of clonally derived, GPCR-expressing stable cell lines - 600+ lines and 2,000+ ready-to-use reagents - and pairs them with custom assay development, compound profiling, antibody work, and CRISPR cell engineering. Its MULTISCREEN platform and proprietary HEx high-expression cell technology let pharmaceutical and academic teams screen, profile, and validate candidate drugs against receptors that are notoriously hard to express and measure.
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.