Beyond Biotech

→ WHAT IT COVERS Olivia Ryu, Senior Director at Curia, explains how corticosteroid and hormonal therapy APIs — molecules in use for over 70 years — still require highly specialized manufacturing, dedicated segregated facilities, and end-to-end CDMO partnerships to meet growing global demand across aging populations and emerging markets. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Facility Segregation:** Steroid and hormone APIs require physically dedicated, segregated manufacturing plants — not just procedural...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Joachim Eeckhout, cofounder of Labiotech and now co-owner of Knowbio, traces the platform's evolution from a free French-language student blog in 2012 to Europe's leading independent biotech media outlet, covering fundraising, acquisition by Impart in 2021, and the current AI-driven shift in science media. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Media accessibility as a founding strategy:** Labiotech launched in 2012 specifically to solve two concrete problems: biotech media remained in expensive...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ochre Bio CEO Quinn Wills and Lexogen CEO Stefan Baj examine why drug discovery fails due to non-human biology models, how they built one of the world's largest human liver functional genomics datasets, and how purpose-designed RNA sequencing data enables AI-driven target discovery for liver disease affecting 1.5 million deaths annually. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Human data gap in liver disease:** Only 40,000 liver transplants are performed globally each year against 1.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Dominic Clark, VP of Technical Operations at IntegraCell (Cryoport Systems), explains why cell therapy programs default to fresh leukapheresis workflows, how late-stage cryopreservation adoption creates costly regulatory and operational problems, and how IntegraCell's automated closed process standardizes starting material handling from early development through global commercialization. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Fresh vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ryan Cavewood, CEO of Labthread, draws on a decade running Oxgene (acquired by Wuxi Advanced Therapies in 2021) to explain how fragmented lab tools—scattered across Excel, email, and paper notebooks—erode reproducibility, destroy institutional knowledge, and consume scientist time that should go toward research. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Knowledge retention cost:** When a scientist leaves after two to three years, all their work risks becoming inaccessible if stored in personal folder...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Stanford bioengineering professor Stanley Qi, founder of EpicBio, explains how the company's GEMS platform uses a miniaturized Cas protein — one-third the size of Cas9 — to perform reversible epigenetic editing without cutting DNA, with lead program EPI-321 targeting FSHD muscular dystrophy in an upcoming Phase 1 trial. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Mutation-agnostic targeting:** Epigenetic editing can treat diseases with hundreds of distinct mutations in a single gene — like cystic...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Patrick Andre, CSO of Diagonal Therapeutics, explains how the company's clustering antibody platform targets the root cause of hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Lead program DIAG-723 holds FDA and EMA orphan drug designation and is entering clinical trials mid-2026, backed by a $125M Series B.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Thierry Logel, managing partner of Karma Partners and chairman of Argo Bio, explains how the €50M European venture builder model addresses the structural gap between world-class academic biomedical research and commercial biotech company creation, having already spun out eight companies with three closing seed rounds totaling over €43M.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Parashar Dhapola, CEO of NIGEN Analytics, explains how multi-agent AI systems address the core bottleneck in single-cell omics: cell type annotation. He covers where AI genuinely delivers in biopharma, why cherry-picking poses greater risk than hallucination, and how CytType compresses weeks of iterative analysis into minutes. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Single-cell analytics pipeline structure:** Divide single-cell workflows into three distinct phases — primary (raw sequencing to...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Magdalena Tyrpien, CEO and cofounder of Nionyx Bio, discusses the company's AAV-based gene therapy platform targeting rare kidney diseases, days after winning the BIO-Europe Spring 2026 Startup Spotlight in Lisbon. The six-month-old startup has raised $4M seed funding and targets an IND filing within 18 months. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Human-first capsid development:** Rather than developing AAV capsids in mouse models and hoping results translate, Nionyx Bio develops and validates...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Dr Rosanne Dunn, CSO and cofounder of HaemaLogiX, details the company's precision immunotherapy pipeline targeting kappa and lambda myeloma antigens (KMA and LMA) in multiple myeloma and amyloidosis, covering Phase 2b trial plans, CAR-T development at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and a planned 2026 IPO. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Target Specificity Advantage:** KMA and LMA appear exclusively on malignant plasma cells, not healthy ones, meaning capamab treatment avoids depleting...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Koenraad Wiedhaup, co-founder and CEO of Leyden Labs, and CSO Clarissa Kosch explain how their intranasal antibody spray delivers broad-spectrum protection against influenza and coronaviruses directly at the nasal entry point, addressing critical gaps left by traditional vaccines, backed by newly published preclinical data and €50 million in European funding.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Field Fisher partner Janita Good outlines how biotech companies can structure themselves from inception to maximize partnering and licensing outcomes with large pharma, covering corporate architecture, equity documentation, commercialization planning, and current market conditions heading into 2024's gradual sector recovery. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Hub-and-spoke corporate structure:** Set up a holding company (HoldCo) with separate subsidiary SPVs for each asset — one for the...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sean Mac, CEO of Kynova Therapeutics, outlines the company's GPCR-based drug discovery platform, its lead anti-CCR8 antibody DT-7012 in Phase 1, a $32M Series B raise, and the strategic rebrand from Domain Therapeutics as the company targets immuno-oncology and inflammation. → KEY INSIGHTS - **CCR8 Treg depletion mechanism:** DT-7012 targets CCR8 to deplete T regulatory cells from the tumor microenvironment, restoring immune competitiveness against tumors.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sergei Jakimov, founding partner of Longevicy VC, argues that health misinformation on social media constitutes a public health crisis, driven by bounded rationality and credibility gaps. He outlines how scientific institutions can reclaim audience trust by adopting the same accessible communication formats used by wellness influencers.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Professor Matthew Wood of Oxford's Harrington Rare Disease Centre outlines how antisense oligonucleotides, gene editing, and AI tools can be developed as scalable platforms to accelerate therapies for the estimated 500 million rare disease patients worldwide, with a target of delivering treatments within 100 days of genetic diagnosis.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Avital Sharir, cofounder and CSO of Prophet, an Israeli AI drug discovery startup launched in late 2024 from ION Labs, explains how Prophet maps proteins and small molecules into a shared mathematical space to screen billions of molecules at scale, targeting previously undruggable proteins without requiring solved 3D structures. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Shared Interaction Space Architecture:** Prophet converts drug discovery into a search problem by embedding proteins and small...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Thomas Hopkins, VP and Head of Explore R&D at Eli Lilly, explains how the program works as a full-stack R&D partner for early-stage biotechs. Since launching in mid-2022, Explore R&D has signed over 100 collaborations with roughly 70 companies across 10 countries, scaling from under 10 to nearly 50 deals annually. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Early engagement window:** Explore R&D accepts biotech partners at any stage, from pre-incorporation spin-outs to post-IPO companies with 100-plus...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Claire Waring, founder and CEO of Cumulus Oncology, explains how her platform-agnostic, virtual biotech model builds a risk-adjusted oncology pipeline across three preclinical assets — GPR68, a PARG inhibitor, and a GTPase program — targeting candidate nomination in 2026 and first clinical trials in 2027. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Platform-agnostic portfolio building:** Rather than committing to one platform technology or modality, Cumulus takes option agreements on assets across...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Tim Opler, Stifel managing director with 150+ deals totaling over $100 billion, outlines five trends reshaping biopharma over the next decade: M&A acceleration driven by patent cliffs, expanding mass-market drug opportunities, China's emergence as an innovation force, AI transforming medical diagnosis, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs including cell therapy cures.