san-diego-biotech
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Adam Kinsey Built His Career in the Space Between the Lab and the Ledger
The Ventrix co-founder trained as an engineer, learned the grammar of patents and then spent more than a decade turning an academic biomaterial into a company built for the long haul.
Pilgrim Jackson Is Teaching Cancer Drugs to Find Their People
After 13 years inside Celgene, the biochemist left to chase a stubborn question: what if a drug fails because its trial never found the patients whose proteins say yes?
Ahmet Tutuncu Has Spent 30 Years Fixing the Last Inch of Medicine
A physician-scientist turned three-time respiratory founder, Ahmet Tutuncu keeps returning to an unfashionable question: what good is a sophisticated drug if its delivery device gets in the way?
Eiry Roberts Built the Bridge From Lab Bench to Boardroom
Across 26 years at Lilly and seven as Neurocrine's chief medical officer, Eiry Roberts learned that drug development is less a straight line than a chain of judgment calls. Her next chapter puts that operating memory to work in the boardroom.
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.
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.
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.
Alexander Casdin
Alexander Casdin is the Chief Executive Officer of Epirium Bio, a San Diego biotechnology company developing small-molecule therapies to improve muscle function. A healthcare executive and institutional investor with more than 25 years in the industry, he stepped up from CFO and COO to CEO on January 1, 2025, the same month Epirium's lead drug MF-300 - a first-in-class oral 15-PGDH inhibitor for sarcopenia - cleared the FDA to begin human trials. Before Epirium he founded and ran Reneo Capital Management, was CFO of Sophiris Bio, and ran VP of Finance at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, and he sits on the board of Erasca as audit committee chair.
Andy Kidd
Andy Kidd is the chief executive officer of Tentarix Biotherapeutics, a San Diego company building conditionally active multispecific biologics for oncology and autoimmune disease through its Tentacles platform. A physician turned operator, he carries an unusual pairing of credentials - an M.D. from Oxford and a CFA - and spent over two decades crossing from the consulting room into the boardroom, from Boston Consulting Group to Baxter International to the helm of Nasdaq-listed Aptinyx, which he took public. He stepped into the Tentarix CEO seat in April 2024 to scale a science-heavy startup backed by partnerships with Gilead and AbbVie.
Christopher Reyes
Christopher Reyes is a biophysicist turned serial biotech entrepreneur and the CEO, co-founder, and director of Bloom Science, a San Diego company developing living medicines that harness the gut-brain axis. Bloom's lead program, BL-001, is a first-in-class oral live biotherapeutic designed to replicate the anti-seizure effects of the ketogenic diet, built on technology licensed from UCLA. With a PhD in biophysics from UCSF and a track record that includes a fast-acquired cancer startup, Reyes is betting that genetically optimized gut bacteria can treat pharmacoresistant neurological diseases.
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.
Jean Cui
J. Jean Cui is a medicinal chemist who has invented three FDA-approved cancer medicines and now runs the biotech she founded to do it again. As scientific founder, President and CEO of BlossomHill Therapeutics in San Diego, she designs small molecules built to outmaneuver the resistance mutations that defeat earlier drugs. Her crizotinib, lorlatinib and repotrectinib all began as chemistry problems she solved at the molecular level. In 2024 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Her track record includes co-founding Turning Point Therapeutics, which Bristol Myers Squibb bought for $4.1 billion.
Jeffrey Stafford
Jeffrey Stafford is the CEO and co-founder of 858 Therapeutics, a San Diego clinical-stage biotech developing small-molecule cancer drugs against novel targets in DNA-damage repair, innate immunity and RNA epigenetics. A chemist by training, he has spent three decades turning molecules into medicines: his discovery teams contributed to three FDA-approved drugs, and he previously led Jecure Therapeutics (acquired by Genentech in 2018) and co-founded Quanticel Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Celgene in 2015). 858's lead asset, the PARG inhibitor ETX-19477, won FDA Fast Track status and posted a 57% response rate in BRCA-mutated ovarian cancer at ASCO 2026.
Markus Renschler
Markus Renschler is a medical oncologist turned biotech operator who runs Light Horse Therapeutics, a San Diego small-molecule drug discovery company that launched in January 2025 with a $62 million Series A and a Novartis deal worth up to $1 billion. He spent 25 years moving cancer drugs from the lab bench to the pharmacy counter, helped register blockbuster therapies in breast, lung and pancreatic cancer at Celgene and Pharmion, and previously took Cyteir Therapeutics from a discovery-stage startup to a publicly traded company. He trained at Princeton and Stanford and once built patient-specific lymphoma vaccines in Ron Levy's lab.
Paul Sargeant
Paul Sargeant is the President and CEO of Circular Genomics, a San Diego biotech building blood tests around circular RNA - the loop-shaped, unusually stable molecules most of the field once ignored. A Cambridge-trained physiologist with 25 years across Fortune 100 firms and venture-backed startups in the US, Europe and Asia, he took the helm in 2023, shepherded the launch of the MindLight test predicting which depression patients will respond to SSRIs, moved headquarters into Lilly Gateway Labs, and closed a $15M Series A in December 2025 to push the same platform toward early Alzheimer's detection.
Phil Chamberlain
Phil Chamberlain is the co-founder, president and CEO of Neomorph, a San Diego biotech building molecular glue degraders to drug proteins long written off as untouchable. An Oxford-trained structural biologist, he spent a decade at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb decoding how thalidomide works at the atomic level, then turned that science into a company that has signed partnerships with AbbVie, Biogen and Novo Nordisk worth billions and pushed its lead degrader into the clinic.
Steve Worland
Steve Worland, Ph.D., is the CEO of Numerion Labs, the AI-native drug discovery company that grew out of Atomwise. A medicinal-chemistry lifer with three decades behind him, his bench work fed the discovery of Paxlovid and Inlyta, and his operating record runs from Agouron through a Roche acquisition to a SPAC. Now he is betting that deep-learning surrogates plus GPU enumeration can search billions of molecules in seconds.
Swamy Vijayan
Swamy Vijayan is the CEO and cofounder of Zafrens, a San Diego biotech reinventing drug discovery by shrinking a 96-well plate down to 200,000 microwells that image and sequence single cells at once. A physicist by training who admits he was driven less by a love of biology than by dissatisfaction with theoretical physics, he is a serial founder whose previous company Omniome sold to Pacific Biosciences for up to $800 million. His stated goal is not a quick exit but a foundation for smart people to do important things for the next 100 years.
Vik Vaz
Vik Vaz is a physician-turned-executive who became CEO and President of San Diego multi-omics biotech Pleno Inc. in December 2024, arriving the same day the company closed a $25M Series B. Trained as a surgeon and interventional oncologist, he later ran strategy and companion diagnostics at Illumina and was a partner at both McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. At Pleno he is commercializing the RAPTOR platform, which uses proprietary Hypercoding technology to detect DNA, RNA and protein targets in a single sample at high speed and low cost.
Will Stratton
Will Stratton is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Strategy and Planning at Autobahn Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech building brain-targeting small molecules for neuropsychiatric and neuroimmunologic disorders. A Yale chemist turned Wharton-trained dealmaker, he helped steer the company's oversubscribed $100 million Series C in 2024 and runs the corporate strategy behind a pipeline led by ABX-002, a thyroid hormone receptor beta agonist for depression.
Jung Choi
Jung Choi is the President and CEO of Alterome Therapeutics, a clinical-stage precision oncology company pioneering mutation-specific cancer drugs. With over 20 years in biopharmaceutical leadership - spanning Gilead Sciences, InterMune, Chimerix, and Global Blood Therapeutics where he led a $5.4B Pfizer acquisition - Choi brought deal-making, strategy, and operational depth to Alterome when he was appointed CEO in April 2025. Under his leadership, Alterome has advanced two first-in-class inhibitors into Phase 1/1b trials targeting KRAS and AKT1 E17K oncogenic drivers, backed by $231M in total funding including a $132M Series B.