Tony Kulesa is a Co-founder @ Petri, an accelerator in Boston that backs companies developing new biotech applications and technologies in healthcare, food, industrial chemicals, and new materials. Co-founded and funded by Pillar, a venture firm co-founded by the CEOs of Cytyc, Ginkgo Bioworks, Iora Health, and 22 Boston companies, Petri draws on the resources of one of the strongest biotech ecosystems in the world to support founders from around the globe. Dr. Kulesa is an inventor and community builder. Previously, he was the founding Director of the MIT BioMakerspace, a community biology laboratory and incubator space, and an Instructor at the MIT Department of Biological Engineering. He holds a PhD from MIT, where his inventions of new platforms for drug discovery and microbial therapeutics were highlighted in Science Editor’s Choice and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. While at MIT, he co-founded and directed 3 courses on biotech and entrepreneurship, including BiomedStartup, a course that coaches 10+ teams per year on research commercialization projects. He was a member of the founding officer team at MIT Biotech Group, and an ambassador for Breakout Labs, venture philanthropy from the Thiel Foundation to support companies bringing radical scientific discoveries out of the lab and into the market.

Topics:

The value of accelerators within the life sciences

Venture creation and innovation within biotech and pharma

Entering the life sciences industry from academia and other industries

The intersection of technology & biology: Silicon meets Boston & the profile of new funds straddling both philosophies 

Types of risk within life sciences ventures: technical, biological, market

Impact of Covid-19 on the life sciences industry, both technological and financial

Investing and building in the life sciences revolution

Thank you for listening!

BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.

Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)