single-cell-sequencing
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Gordian Biotechnology
Gordian Biotechnology is a South San Francisco in vivo drug discovery company building a high-throughput screening platform that tests hundreds of gene therapies simultaneously inside animals that naturally develop age-related diseases. By pairing 'patient avatar' models with single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning (a stack the company calls Mosaic Screening + Pythia), Gordian aims to predict human clinical outcomes earlier and cure complex diseases of aging.
Adam Freund
Adam Freund is the founder and CEO of Arda Therapeutics, a San Carlos biotech built on a simple, contrarian bet: many chronic diseases are caused by specific cells gone wrong, so the cure is to find and delete those cells while leaving healthy tissue intact. A molecular biologist with a Berkeley PhD and a Stanford postdoc, he spent seven years at Google-backed Calico Life Sciences, where he helped grow the company from roughly 15 to 200-plus people and started its most advanced anti-aging therapeutic program. In late 2021 he left to start Arda as a solo founder with a deck and a thesis, and by October 2024 had raised a $43M Series A led by a16z Bio + Health. His tools are single-cell sequencing to map disease cell-by-cell and antibodies to do the deleting.
Arda Therapeutics
Arda Therapeutics is a San Carlos, California biotech building precision biologics that eliminate the specific cells driving chronic disease rather than tinkering with the proteins those cells produce. Using a single-cell data discovery engine, Arda maps disease-specific cell states, pinpoints their surface markers, and designs targeted therapies that deplete only the harmful cells while sparing healthy tissue. Founded in 2021 by former Calico scientist Adam Freund, the company is applying lessons from oncology to fibrosis, autoimmune, and metabolic disease, backed by a $43M Series A led by a16z Bio + Health.
Francisco Leport
Francisco Leport is the co-founder and CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, a South San Francisco-based company pioneering high-throughput in vivo drug discovery for age-related diseases. Trained as a physicist at Stanford, Leport pivoted from particle physics and energy tech into biotech, driven by a lifelong fascination with longevity sparked by his mother's fruit fly research. Gordian's signature 'mosaic screening' platform uses gene therapy vectors and single-cell RNA sequencing to test hundreds of therapies simultaneously in single animal models, with an AI system called Pythia scoring results against human disease signatures - achieving 80% accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes. The company raised a $60M Series A in April 2024, backed by Founders Fund, Gigafund, and The Longevity Fund, and in early 2026 announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to accelerate obesity drug discovery.