south-san-francisco
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Brian Slingerland's Long Game Started With a Craigslist Ad
A finance graduate answered a housing problem with a classified ad and found a scientist instead. Two decades later, Brian Slingerland is still building companies where business discipline meets difficult biology.
Aetna Trombley Chose the Long Route to a New Kind of Biotech
She spent nine years helping build NGM, then left for science compelling enough to begin again. At Lycia Therapeutics, Aetna Trombley has made patience, partnerships and protein clearance into an operating strategy.
Scott Greenberg
Scott Greenberg is the Chief Business Officer of Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco building small-molecule drugs to stop nerves from dying. He joined in February 2025 to steer business development and corporate strategy as the company pushes its lead SARM1 inhibitor, NB-4746, into the clinic. He arrives with more than two decades crossing the line between finance and biology - a Goldman Sachs banking start, more than a decade at Celgene, an operations leadership role at Roivant Sciences, and a stint as Chief Operating Officer at Aro Biotherapeutics. He studied both Finance and the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania before an MBA at Harvard.
Andrei Georgescu
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.
David Earp
David J. Earp is the President and CEO of Circle Pharma, a South San Francisco clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building orally available macrocycle drugs aimed at cancer targets long deemed undruggable. A biochemist turned patent lawyer turned chief executive, Earp holds a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge and a JD from Lewis & Clark, and has led Circle since 2013, steering it through a $90M Series D, a $607M collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, and the first human dosing of its lead cyclin A/B inhibitor CID-078.
Gajus Worthington
Gajus Worthington is a life sciences entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor who turned an idea for circuits that move fluid instead of electrons into Fluidigm, a microfluidics company he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO through its IPO and years as a public company. Today he is Chairman and CEO of Superfluid Dx, a South San Francisco company building a blood test that reads cell-free messenger RNA from the brain to diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier and more precisely. Between those chapters he served as COO of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, co-founded Kaizen Therapeutics and the ML/AI healthcare company StatOS, and became a Managing Partner at WRQ Sciences.
Ken Drazan
Ken Drazan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio), a South San Francisco clinical-stage company building computationally designed, programmable T-cell therapies to attack solid tumors. A board-certified liver transplant surgeon turned operator and investor, he previously was President and Chief Business Officer of GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), founded the robotic surgery company Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), and co-founded the private equity firm Bertram Capital. At ArsenalBio he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and forged collaborations with Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech, betting that gene-edited 'integrated circuit' T cells - and an AI foundation model of the T cell - can turn cell therapy into something curative for cancers that have resisted it.
Shilpa Sambashivan
Shilpa Sambashivan is the CEO and a co-founder of Nura Bio, a South San Francisco biotech building brain-penetrant small molecules that aim to stop nerves from dying. A protein biochemist by training, she helped spin the company out of academic labs in 2018, built its R&D engine as Chief Scientific Officer, and was elevated to CEO in September 2024 alongside a $68M Series A extension that pushed total funding past $140M. Her lead drug, NB-4746, blocks the SARM1 enzyme that triggers axon self-destruction.
Fabian Gerlinghaus
Fabian Gerlinghaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares, a South San Francisco biotech company building the world's first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. An aerospace engineer turned life-science entrepreneur, he co-founded Cellares in 2019 after spotting a critical gap: FDA-approved CAR-T therapies were sitting ready while patients died on waitlists because manufacturing couldn't scale. His Cell Shuttle platform — a fully automated, factory-in-a-box system processing 16 patient batches simultaneously — has attracted $630M in funding, a $380M partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, and FDA's Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. TIME magazine named it one of 2025's most important inventions.
Paul Gatti
Paul Gatti is co-founder and CEO of CompareNetworks, a South San Francisco-based B2B media and technology company he built from a postdoc's side project into a 12-brand portfolio serving 8 million science and engineering professionals. Trained as a microbiologist at Tulane and UCSF, Gatti pivoted from the bench to the boardroom around 2000, assembling a media empire that connects buyers and sellers across life sciences, pharma, engineering, and industrial sectors. Under his leadership, CompareNetworks has grown via strategic acquisitions — GlobalSpec in 2020, Gulf Energy Information in 2025 — backed by Main Street Capital since 2019.
Sean McCarthy
Sean McCarthy is the chairman, president and CEO of CytomX Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharma in South San Francisco building 'Probody' conditionally activated antibodies that switch on inside the tumor and stay quiet everywhere else. An Oxford-trained cancer biologist turned operator, he has run CytomX since 2011, taking it from a venture-backed startup to a Nasdaq-listed company with partnerships across Bristol Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Amgen, Astellas, Moderna and Regeneron.
Alex Batyrev
Alex Batyrev is the President and CEO of AB Soft, a roughly 150-person software services firm headquartered in Odesa, Ukraine, with an operating presence in South San Francisco. For more than a decade his Odesa engineers have been a long-running build crew behind RingCentral's cloud communications stack. A mathematician by training, Batyrev has spent his career stitching American product ambitions to Ukrainian engineering bench depth.
Andrew Quong
Andrew Quong is President and CEO of InterVenn Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based precision diagnostics company unlocking the human glycoproteome through AI-powered platforms. With a PhD in Physics and over 30 years spanning national laboratories, academia, and biotech, Quong bridges the physical and computational sciences with clinical medicine. He led InterVenn's development of GlycoKnow Ovarian, a non-invasive blood-based liquid biopsy test for distinguishing ovarian cancer from benign masses, and has steered the company through key commercialization milestones including a $201M Series C raise in 2021.
Eric Green
Eric Green is the Founder and CEO of Trace Neuroscience, a South San Francisco biotech company racing to develop the first effective ASO therapy for ALS. A Harvard-and-Stanford-trained physician-scientist with a background in cardiology, Green co-founded iLab Solutions (acquired by Agilent), Respira Design (Stanford $50K Challenge winner), and Maze Therapeutics before launching Trace with a $101 million Series A in November 2024. Trace's lead program targets UNC13A - a protein lost in ALS patients - using an antisense oligonucleotide designed to restore healthy nerve-muscle communication. With clinical trials targeting early 2026, Green is betting human genetics can do for ALS what it did for heart failure.
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.
Sofia Touami
Sofia Touami, Ph.D., is the Chief Business Officer of Lycia Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotech pioneering lysosomal targeting chimeras (LYTACs) - a platform invented by Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi to degrade disease-causing extracellular proteins. A trained organic chemist who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford and did postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute, Touami has built a career as one of biotech's sharpest dealmakers, having orchestrated major transactions including Frontier Medicines' landmark global collaboration with AbbVie before joining Lycia in July 2023. She helped close Lycia's oversubscribed $106.6 million Series C in May 2024, positioning the company to bring its LYTAC-based autoimmune therapies into clinical trials.
Diana Peng Bockus
Diana Peng Bockus is the Chief Executive Officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals, a South San Francisco biotech developing first-in-class medicines for liver disease, oncology, and ophthalmology. Appointed CEO in April 2025, she joined the company in 2020 to lead business development and restructured a pivotal Merck partnership that freed NGM to build a wholly owned pipeline. A Stanford and Wharton graduate with roots in management consulting at Bain & Company, she now steers a privately held biotech backed by $515M in total funding, focused on rare diseases like primary sclerosing cholangitis and hyperemesis gravidarum.
Tassos Gianakakos
Tassos Gianakakos is a Greek-American biotech entrepreneur and the co-founder, CEO, and Chair of Kardigan, a cardiovascular drug discovery company he built from the ashes of MyoKardia — the precision-medicine heart company he led to a $13.1 billion acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb in 2020. At Kardigan, he is applying the same playbook: marrying real-world clinical data, AI tools, and deep cardiovascular biology to deliver personalized medicines for heart disease — a field he believes is where oncology was 20 years ago. With $554 million raised and three late-stage clinical programs underway, Gianakakos is on a mission to make cardiovascular disease preventable and curable.
Kevin Parker
Kevin Parker, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based oncology company using single-cell genomics and AI to map the tumor antigen landscape and build precision immunotherapies. A Harvard and Stanford alumnus who founded the company straight out of his PhD, Parker has raised $124M in total funding, struck a landmark collaboration with Gilead Sciences, received FDA IND approval for his lead drug CBI-1214, and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 colorectal cancer trial in early 2026 - all before most scientists finish a second postdoc.