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Zlatko Jončev
Zlatko Jončev is the co-founder and CEO of b-12 (b12 Labs), a Y Combinator S25 startup building AI agents that plan and run chemical synthesis for pharma and biotech. A former national chemistry olympiad champion turned organic chemist, he earned a PhD in Basel, trained as a medicinal chemist at Roche, and did his postdoc in EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence, where he met co-founder Andres Bran. b-12 aims to shrink early-stage drug discovery from years to months by making molecules that are otherwise hard to make.
Girisha Fernando
Girisha Fernando is the CEO and co-founder of Lyfegen, a Basel- and Boston-based healthtech company building software that helps payers, hospitals, pharma companies and medical device makers manage value-based drug pricing, access and rebate agreements. After nearly a decade at Roche in market access, pricing and IT, he left in 2018 to build technology that ties the price of medicine to how well it actually works for patients. He splits his time between Switzerland and New York as Lyfegen pushes into the US market.
Dave Mullarkey
Dave Mullarkey is the CEO of ClearNote Health, a San Diego company that reads the chemical edits on your DNA to catch deadly cancers before symptoms show. A life-sciences operator who has shepherded three diagnostics and sequencing companies through scale-ups and acquisitions - Ariosa to Roche, Omniome to PacBio - he now leads the team behind the Avantect epigenomic blood tests for pancreatic and multi-cancer detection.
Mohan Purushothaman
Mohan Purushothaman is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Progentec Diagnostics, an Oklahoma City company building blood tests and digital tools that aim to predict autoimmune disease flares before they happen. He came to diagnostics by an unusual route: a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. focused on pharmaceutical pricing, a Harvard research fellowship, five years inside Roche, and a pricing-software practice he built and sold to Alliance Life Sciences. In 2014 he turned that commercial instinct toward lupus, partnering with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and in 2020 raised a $5M Series A led by Plains Venture Partners to bring the aiSLE DX flare-prediction platform and the LupusCorner patient community to market.
Shashi Shankar
Shashi Shankar is the co-founder and CEO of Novellia, a New York-based, AI-enabled health data platform that turns patients' scattered medical records into clean, longitudinal stories that biopharma companies can actually use. After nearly a decade at Genentech and Roche, he started Novellia in response to his grandfather's death from cancer, when his family found there was no single place to see the man's complete medical history. The company raised an $18M Series A led by Spark Capital and Shankar was named to Worth Magazine's 2025 AI & Health Access Pioneer list.
Scott Clarke
Scott Clarke is the CEO of CatalYm GmbH, a Munich-based biotech company developing visugromab, a monoclonal antibody targeting GDF-15 to reverse cancer immunotherapy resistance. With over 20 years in biopharmaceuticals - spanning Roche's global oncology partnering, BioMarin, Tizona Therapeutics, and Ambagon Therapeutics - Clarke joined CatalYm in January 2025 to lead the company's $319M-funded push through Phase 2b clinical trials, building on visugromab's striking Phase 1/2a results published in Nature showing durable responses lasting 28-32+ months in multiple solid tumor types.