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The Biotech Venture Capital Podcast
Nimbus Therapeutics is in the business of building structures. Molecular yes, but corporate too — they’re unique and fit-for-purpose. CEO Don Nicholson explains it all: the partnerships, the code names, the high energy water, the bowling, the rapping. And how, at any given time, fully half of Amazon’s cloud computing power may be in use to create your next medicine.
Eric Schadt may enjoy the simple things in life — high velocity, a good polo shirt — but he is the first to admit that life is not simple. Living things are such complex systems, in fact, that our best chance to promote wellness is to understand them as vast information networks.
To do so, Eric is unleashing maximum scale and bringing the firepower of math to bear. He endeavors to monitor and modify humans-slash-networks, both as CEO of the new genomics startup Sema4, and as Dean for Precision Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai.
This episode was recorded in front of a live audience, on location – outdoors no less – at the Foundation2017 conference. Make of it what you will: as soon as Eric discussed god, the birds start chirping.
Alix Lacoste crossed the ocean from France in search of new challenges, made her way to California, ran out of money and took up filmmaking in community college. Insert the windy road that led to Neurobiology degrees from Berkeley and Harvard.
Today she is a subject matter expert at IBM’s internal venture: Watson. You may remember IBM Watson from such disruptions as winning Jeopardy against humans in 2011. Now it is disrupting Drug Discovery as part of its effort in (human) health.
Alix discusses some examples of how it’s tackling that challenge, including partnering with pharma companies and institutes to find unique disease genes. You might say there’s a new paradigm in genetics: Watson and Click.
Strong patent protection has always been a cornerstone of the biotech industry — and table stakes in a VC deal. But inter partes review has significantly changed the game in the last 5 years.
Enter Scott Kamholz. Scott is once, twice, three times a doctor: Medicinae, Philosophiae, and Juris.
He went from partner at a law firm, to patent judge, became a foremost expert in inter partes review, and then back to private practice at Covington & Burling with 250 IPR cases under his belt.
Whether you’re a baby biotech with a patent license as your only asset or large pharma with marketed products to worry about, he is a good person to know.
Scott is a great legal mind, but he cannot give a straight answer to a yes or no question.
If you work in biotech, or venture capital, if you pay taxes, or take medicine… you really ought to know the name Joe Allen. He worked tirelessly behind the scenes in Washington to get the Bayh-Dole Act passed into law. Sponsored by Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole, and passed at the last possible opportunity in a lame duck session of Congress in 1980, it is the legislation that realigned the incentives of the patent system to enable small biotech companies and their investors to flourish. And Joe’s been implementing, overseeing, protecting, sharing, and blogging about it ever since.
Deborah Dunsire was a general practitioner in South Africa when a motorcycle drove her into industry. And that side trip, ultimately routing her to Boston, is still going on. She built the North American Oncology unit at Novartis, launched Gleevec, ran Millennium after the millennium, realized the value in Velcade, took a foray into Forum, and recently announced her latest role, President and CEO of XTuit Pharmaceuticals.
Art Pappas had an extensive, international career in the pharma industry before going on to form his eponymous VC firm in the 90s. Pappas Ventures has been partnering with pharma ever since: licensing assets from them, selling portfolio companies to them, syndicating with them, and managing venture funds for them. But perhaps most notable is the list of pharma and strategic limited partners they brought together to invest in their newest fund — Pappas V — it’s a record, even for them.
If the mantra in real estate is location location location, for venture capital it might just be timing timing timing. Stacey Seltzer made the move from big pharma into venture capital during a financial crisis and has gone on to build a wildly diverse portfolio of healthcare companies at Aisling Capital. She takes us on a tour of some of the highlights, and reveals what venture capitalists do for fun.
Marc was a podcaster before it was cool. That is, 2006. While producing over 100 hours of interviews on his show “Futures in Biotech” he confirmed his own future was in biotech, starting one and then another. Bypassing his jazz guitar talents and multiple black belts, he launched Aeromics out of Yale to develop the world’s 1st clinical candidate targeting a water channel for the treatment of brain swelling in stroke. And then there’s Dodo Omnidata, Inc. which is developing a read/write hard drive that stores data in DNA.
If Biotech Showcase is the farm team for JPM, then Sara Demy is the coach. She literally got high fives as her new conference burst onto the scene, bust out of its first two locations, and now boasts 400 presenting companies and 1,000 investors. And there are new offspring offerings in the Demy-Colton family as well…
Amanda is a wife. A mother. A blogger. A Christian.
A charming, beautiful, bubbly, young woman who lives life to the fullest.
But Amanda is dying, with a secret she doesn’t want anyone to know.
She starts a blog detailing her cancer journey, and becomes an inspiration, touching and
captivating her local community as well as followers all over the world.
Until one day investigative producer Nancy gets an anonymous tip telling her to look at Amanda’s
blog, setting Nancy on an unimaginable road to uncover Amanda’s secret.
Award winning journalist Charlie Webster explores this unbelievable and bizarre, but
all-too-real tale, of a woman from San Jose, California whose secret ripped a family apart and
left a community in shock.
Scamanda is the true story of a woman whose own words held the key to her secret.
New episodes every Monday.
Follow Scamanda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Amanda’s blog posts are read by actor Kendall Horn.
