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Jay Stamatis Traded the Mega-Deal Table for a Biotech With Two Shots on Goal
After more than eight years shaping AbbVie’s pipeline, the history major turned biotech dealmaker is now running MBrace Therapeutics - where the wager is on novel targets, disciplined development and knowing which risks are worth taking.
Ashley Zehnder
Ashley Zehnder is the co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio, a Berkeley biotech mining the genomes of hibernating ground squirrels, bears and 452 other mammal species for drugs that could treat humans. A boarded avian veterinarian with a Stanford PhD in cancer biology, she had her career epiphany while giving chemotherapy to a parrot, when a faculty member asked in disbelief, 'Birds... get cancer?' That question convinced her the wall between animal and human medicine was an illusion. Fauna Bio's Convergence AI platform turns the survival tricks of extreme mammals into therapeutic targets, work that has drawn partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and NASA-funded research into putting astronauts into a hibernation-like state.