The Bio Report

Though the search for eternal youth has long been the fodder for myths and legends, science has been pushing us closer toward extending healthy years of life and has set some people off on efforts to defy death altogether. Peter Ward, in his new book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, explores a subculture of immortality seekers who have turned to cryonics, as well as efforts to merge man with technology as a way to escape death. The growing understanding of the biology of aging and advances in regenerative medicine, though, are creating the potential to alter notions of human lifespans. We spoke to Ward about his book, distinguishing science fact from science fiction, and the growing understanding of the biology of aging that offers the potential for extending healthy years of life.

About 15 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano took at look at how small entrepreneurial biotechs fared against large and mature pharmaceutical companies and found the two sectors were about the same when it came to R&D productivity. Now, a new book From Breakthrough to Blockbuster: The Business of Biotechnology finds that the biotechnology industry is far more effective at bringing innovative therapies to market than Big Pharma and offers a prescription for large drug companies to decentralize decision-making to improve their ability to innovate. We spoke to venture investor and former biotech executive Don Drakeman, co-author of the book, about its findings, how decentralized decision-making can produce greater innovation, and lessons from COVID-19.

Poseida Therapeutics is leveraging its set of platform technologies to develop a range of next-generation cell and gene therapies. By using these technologies, alone or in combination, the company said it’s able to overcome limitations of the current generation of cell and gene therapies. The company’s most advanced candidates in its pipeline include a set of allogenic CAR T therapies. We spoke to Mark Gergen, CEO of Poseida, about the company’s efforts to develop off-the-shelf CAR T therapies, its platform technologies, and why it believes its CAR T cells will provide advantages over competitors’ therapies.

Though structure-based drug discovery has been long been used, technologic advances have given this approach greater power. ShouTi believes its next-generation, computational, structure-based drug discovery platform will allow it to develop small molecule drugs that are superior in safety and efficacy to biologic and peptide therapies its seeking to replace. We spoke to Raymond Stevens, CEO of ShouTi, about the company’s structure-based drug discovery platform, how it works, and why he believes it will be able to produce small molecule drugs that will be superior to biologics.

Virus-like drug conjugates, or VDCs, are a new class of cancer therapies Aura Biosciences is developing to target a broad range of solid tumors. These therapies have a dual mechanism of action. They deliver a toxic payload to cancer cells, but also activate a secondary immune mediated response to kill cancer cells. We spoke to Elisabet de los Pinos, CEO of Aura Biosciences, about the company’s VDCs, how they work, and its pipeline in development.

While the emergence of CAR-T therapies have been promising, these autologous cellular therapies are costly to produce since they require taking T cells from a patient being treated, altering them, and then infusing them back into the patient. Cellectis is among a growing list of companies pursuing off-the-shelf CAR-T therapies. The company’s U-CARTs, or universal chimeric antigen receptor T cells, are allogenic products that can be standardized and carry both time and cost advantages. We spoke to André Choulika, CEO of Cellectis, about the company’s off-the-shelf CAR-T therapies, the platform technology behind them, and its programs in development.

Though it’s been nearly 20 years since the Human Genome Project provided a blueprint for human biology, it still left much work to be done to understand health and disease at a molecular level. The Sweden-based Human Protein Atlas, which is seeking to map human proteins in cells, tissues, and organs, recently published significant updates to the open-access resource. We spoke to Mathias Uhlén, director of the Human Protein Atlas, about how the atlas is changing the diagnosis and treatment of disease, what’s known about the human proteome to date, and how this understanding will be essential to brining about an era of precision medicine.

In 2020, CSL Behring entered into a global license and commercialization agreement with UniQure for the company’s experimental hemophilia B gene therapy. The expected, one-and-done treatment carries the potential to free people with the genetic bleeding disease from reliance on regular infusions of clotting factor IX for which they are deficient. We spoke to Steve Pascoe, senior vice president and head of therapeutic areas and development strategy for R&D at CSL about hemophilia B, how the gene therapy fits into CSL’s broader therapeutic offerings, and the encouraging results from the recent pivotal study.

The promise of data-driven medicine is that it can accelerate the diagnosis of disease, provide patients with the most effective treatments for their particular conditions, and improve drug development. Sophia Genetics is drawing on extensive information from its global, data-sharing network to make data-driven medicine a reality. We spoke to Emily Paul, product director of platform for Sophia Genetics, about Sophia’s vision for data-driven medicine, the challenges of managing vast amounts of data and turning it into actionable information, and how its changing patient care today.

The growing convergence of information technology and biotechnology are creating a compelling new group of companies that live in both these worlds at once. Lux Capital, which has long invested in both sectors, has a growing portfolio of these emerging TechBio companies. We spoke to Adam Goulburn, partner at Lux Capital, about his investment process, how he tempers the promise of technology with management realities and market timelines, and the changing landscape for venture investing.