therapeutic-proteins
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Cyrus Sold Protein Software to 120 Drugmakers. Then It Put Its Own Molecules on the Line.
The Seattle spinout made Rosetta easier for pharma scientists, learned from more than 30 partnered discovery programs, and then made a riskier bet: building its own autoimmune drugs. Its story is a useful lesson in when software should become a laboratory - and when that strategy can still fail.
Be Biopharma
Be Biopharma (Be Bio) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company pioneering a new class of therapies called Engineered B Cell Medicines (BCMs). By precisely gene-editing a patient's own B cells - nature's protein factories that can secrete high volumes of protein for decades - Be Bio aims to deliver durable, potentially re-dosable treatments for hemophilia, rare genetic diseases, and other serious conditions. Founded in 2020 out of Seattle Children's Research Institute and Longwood Fund, the company has raised roughly $356 million and, as of early 2025, advanced to a multi-program clinical-stage company led by CEO Joanne Smith-Farrell, Ph.D.
Joanne Smith-Farrell
Joanne Smith-Farrell is the President and CEO of Be Biopharma, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building a new class of medicines from engineered B cells - the body's own protein factories. A physicist by training who moved into drug development, she has spent more than 25 years leading teams tackling cancer and rare diseases, most notably building bluebird bio's 400-person oncology cell therapy business behind the CAR-T therapy Abecma. Since taking the helm at Be Bio in early 2021, she has steered the company through more than $350 million in funding as it works to turn B cells into durable, in vivo sources of therapeutic proteins.
Tero-Pekka Alastalo
Tero-Pekka Alastalo is a Finnish-born physician-scientist turned serial entrepreneur who trained as a pediatric cardiologist, completed his postdoctoral work at Stanford University School of Medicine, and has spent the last 15 years building life science companies in Silicon Valley. He co-founded Blueprint Genetics in 2012 - a clinical genetic testing company later acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2020 - before launching Avenue Biosciences in 2023, a transatlantic AI-powered protein engineering company that uses signal peptide libraries and machine learning to unlock the secretory pathway and dramatically boost therapeutic protein yields. Based in Menlo Park, California, Alastalo is turning a fundamental cellular mechanism overlooked by the industry into a platform that could accelerate every class of next-generation biologic.