ucsf
(15)
Lina Yao
Lina Yao is a pharmaceutical scientist and the founder of Teon Therapeutics, a Redwood City, California biotech developing first-in-class, orally administered small-molecule cancer drugs that target G-protein coupled receptors to reverse tumor-driven immune suppression. A molecular pharmacologist by training with an MD and PhD and more than two decades in drug discovery, she built her career at CV Therapeutics and Gilead Sciences before launching Teon in 2018. She led the company through an oversubscribed $30 million Series A in 2021 and into the clinic with two novel programs: TT-702, an adenosine A2B receptor antagonist, and TT-816, a cannabinoid CB2 receptor antagonist being studied in combination with Merck's KEYTRUDA.
Therini Bio, Inc.
Therini Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurodegenerative and retinal diseases driven by vascular dysfunction. Founded in 2019 on the neurovascular research of Dr. Katerina Akassoglou at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes, the company's lead antibody THN391 selectively blocks fibrin's inflammatory epitope to halt chronic neuroinflammation without interfering with normal blood clotting. Backed by roughly $145M in total funding from investors including Eli Lilly, Sanofi Ventures, Merck's MRL Ventures and the Dementia Discovery Fund, Therini is advancing THN391 into Phase 1b trials for Alzheimer's disease and diabetic macular edema.
Voio
Voio is a Berkeley-based frontier AI lab building a unified reading platform for radiology. Spun out of UC Berkeley and UCSF, it develops the open-source Pillar family of models that interpret CT, MRI and X-ray scans across hundreds of conditions, aiming to help radiologists work faster without trading away accuracy. The company exited stealth in November 2025 with $8.6M in seed funding.
Adam Yala
Adam Yala is a UC Berkeley and UCSF assistant professor of Computational Precision Health turned founder, now CEO of Voio, a Berkeley AI startup building frontier radiology models. At MIT he created Mirai and Sybil, open-source AI tools that flag breast and lung cancer risk years early and are now studied at more than 90 hospitals across 30 countries. In late 2025 Voio emerged from stealth with $8.6M in seed funding and Pillar-0, billed as the most accurate open AI model for radiology, with a mission to make being a radiologist more empowering rather than to replace the profession.
Dedra Chamberlin
Dedra Chamberlin is the founder and CEO of Cirrus Identity, an Oakland-based cloud identity company that helps more than 200 universities run single sign-on and federated login without the friction. She arrived at identity management sideways - a UC Berkeley psychology major with master's degrees in city planning and Latin American studies who volunteered for a one-year networking internship and never left. After two decades inside UC Berkeley and UCSF IT, where she rose to Deputy Director of Identity and Access Management and chaired the University of California's system-wide identity strategy workgroup, she founded Cirrus in 2013 to build the education-specific identity tools she wished vendors had made. She is a board member of SimpleSAMLphp and a founder of IAM-HER, a community advancing women in the identity field.
Charvi Shetty
Charvi Shetty is the co-founder and CEO of Aluna, a San Francisco respiratory-health company that makes an FDA-cleared, pocket-sized spirometer paired with games and AI so patients can track lung function from home and send the data to their doctors. A UC Berkeley bioengineer with a UCSF master's in biomedical imaging, she left an algorithm-engineering job at Genentech to build the device, became the youngest recipient of an NSF SBIR grant, and is recognized as one of the youngest female CEOs to bring an FDA-cleared healthtech device to market. In 2023 Aluna raised a $15.3M Series B, bringing total funding to about $27M.
Jon Wang
Jon Wang is the co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, a San Francisco company building voice AI agents that answer the phone for doctors' offices. A Stanford bioinformatics graduate and Gates-Cambridge Scholar who walked away from UCSF medical school, Wang spent two years studying why patients wait on hold before launching Assort with Jeff Liu in 2023. The company has since handled more than 42 million patient interactions and raised $102 million, including a $76 million Series B led by Lightspeed in 2025.
Priyanka Agarwal
Priyanka Agarwal is a physician-turned-founder building HealthEx, an AI-powered patient consent and data-rights platform she started in 2022. A practicing UCSF telehealth physician with an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from Harvard Business School, she is rebuilding how patients grant, revoke, and direct access to their own medical records. HealthEx raised $14M led by General Catalyst, connected to national networks through TEFCA, and partnered with MD Anderson, Epic, CLEAR, and athenahealth to make patient-controlled data the default rather than the exception.
David Werdegar
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.
Kjeld Aamodt
Kjeld Aamodt is a UCSF-trained orthodontist who turned a faculty research interest into a transcontinental clear-aligner company. He founded Uniform Teeth in San Francisco in 2018, merged it with Barcelona-based Impress in 2022, and now serves as co-founder and CEO of Impress US while continuing to teach at UCSF.
Priscilla Chan
Priscilla Chan is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a pediatrician-turned-philanthropist directing one of the largest private bets on biomedical science. With husband Mark Zuckerberg she has pledged the bulk of their fortune to a mission to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century, increasingly through AI-powered biology and the Biohub network.
Josh Lehrer
Josh Lehrer is a physician-scientist and biotech executive serving as CEO of Marea Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company harnessing human genetics to develop first-in-class medicines for cardiometabolic diseases. A cardiologist by training with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and UCSF, Lehrer brings over two decades of drug development experience spanning Genentech, Global Blood Therapeutics (where he oversaw the FDA approval of Oxbryta for sickle cell disease), and Graphite Bio. At Marea, he has led the company from a Third Rock Ventures incubation to a $190 million-funded enterprise with two clinical-stage programs showing strong early efficacy data, including a 53% reduction in remnant cholesterol with MAR001 published in The Lancet.
Sophia Yen
Dr. Sophia Yen, MD, MPH is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pandia Health, the only women-founded, women-led, doctor-founded, physician-led birth control and menopause telemedicine and medication delivery service in the United States. A Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford Medical School with 20+ years in medicine, she brings MIT engineering instincts, UCSF medical training, and UC Berkeley public health expertise to the problem of making prescription contraceptives and hormonal care radically more accessible for women. She co-founded SheHeroes.org to inspire girls in STEM and has been a nationally recognized voice on reproductive rights, menstrual equity, and women's health innovation.
Vishwanath Lingappa
Vishwanath Lingappa is the CEO and CTO of Prosetta Biosciences, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company he founded in 2003 after 22 years as a faculty member at UCSF. An MD-PhD with a doctorate from The Rockefeller University under Nobel laureate Gunter Blobel, Lingappa developed a proprietary Cell-Free Protein Synthesis System (CFPSS) drug discovery platform that targets transient multi-protein complexes - a class of drug targets largely ignored by traditional pharma. His company is pursuing small-molecule therapeutics across neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's), oncology, and infectious diseases (COVID-19, HIV, influenza), and won an ARPA-H Dash competition for a pan-cancer drug candidate. With over 157 publications and 12,800+ citations, Lingappa bridges rigorous academia with commercial biotech ambition.
Bryan Faust
Bryan Faust, PhD is an Investment Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he backs seed and Series A companies at the intersection of biology and technology. A trained biophysicist with a PhD from UCSF, he published research in Nature, Science, and Cell before pivoting to venture—studying antibody-protein interactions, GPCR signaling, and COVID-19 nanobodies along the way. At a16z he has co-led investments in Stipple Bio, Tessera Labs, Gate Bioscience, and Formation Bio, and writes widely on AI in life sciences, biotech financing, and the coming era of programmable medicine. When he's not reading pitch decks, he's surfing, roasting coffee, or hunting down the perfect tacos al pastor.