The Long Run with Luke Timmerman

→ WHAT IT COVERS Becky Pferdehirt, CEO of Radial at the Astera Institute, explains how a $500M philanthropic commitment aims to fix structural failures across academia, industry, and venture capital by building open-source data infrastructure, rethinking publication incentives, and creating the data conditions necessary for AI to advance biological understanding.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jeremy Levin, founder of Ovid Therapeutics and past BIO chairman, outlines why U.S. biotech faces a structural crisis of public distrust—tracing the decline from Martin Shkreli's 2015 price gouging through COVID vaccine backlash—and presents 10 concrete commitments companies can adopt to rebuild credibility and secure the industry's strategic future.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Richard Pops, 35-year CEO of Alkermes, discusses the company's late-stage development of elixirexant, an orexin-2 receptor agonist targeting narcolepsy type 1, with potential expansion into ADHD, MS fatigue, and Parkinson's. He also addresses mid-sized biopharma policy threats, including IRA pricing reforms, most-favored-nation pricing, and the rising competitive pressure from China.

→ WHAT IT COVERS University of Illinois chemistry professor Martin Burke explains how his block chemistry platform—using iterative carbon-carbon bond formation to synthesize small molecules modularly—enables full automation and AI integration. His startup Excelsior Sciences raised $95M to compress drug discovery cycle times from months to weeks, while his academic lab pursues antifungal and iron-transport therapeutics now in Phase 2 trials.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Abbas Kazimi, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics, describes how a 70-person team with no labs used computational chemistry to discover zazositinib, a TYK2 inhibitor sold to Takeda for $4B upfront in 2022. He outlines the capital-efficient hub-and-spoke LLC model, target selection discipline, and culture that enabled two blockbuster exits across 17 years.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Envita, describes how he built a Boulder-based natural product drug discovery company from $55,000 in personal savings to a $1 billion valuation with $517 million raised, three candidates in clinical trials, and a platform that produces development candidates 4x faster than industry average with an 11x higher success rate.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Otello Stampacchia, founder of Omega Funds, outlines the structural and financial barriers holding back European biotech, where companies receive only 7% of global venture capital versus 63% for the US, and describes the European Life Sciences Coalition's advocacy strategy to mobilize capital, harmonize public markets, and accelerate clinical trial frameworks across the continent. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Capital allocation gap:** European pension funds invest approximately 0.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ken Song, CEO of Candid Therapeutics, explains how bispecific T-cell engaging antibodies could deliver CAR-T-like immune resets for autoimmune diseases at scale. The San Diego startup raised $370M, licensed two clinical-stage assets from China, and has now treated over 60 autoimmune patients across 10 disease indications in under 18 months.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Stanford immunologist and physician-scientist Ansu Satpathy discusses how single-cell genomics and multi-omic tools are reshaping cancer immunotherapy and autoimmune drug discovery. He covers his path from Midwest public schools through MD-PhD training to founding Cartography Biosciences, Santa Ana Bio, and Immuni, while arguing US academic innovation still outpaces Chinese biotech pipelines in breakthrough potential.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ron Renaud, CEO of Kailera Therapeutics, explains how his company is building a GLP-1 obesity drug portfolio around licensed assets from China's Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals. With $1 billion raised and Phase 3 trials underway, Kailera's lead injectable candidate targets patients with BMI above 35, aiming for best-in-class weight loss by 2029.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Kate Haviland, former CEO of Blueprint Medicines, traces the company's evolution from a precision oncology startup to a precision immunology leader, culminating in Sanofi's $9.1 billion acquisition in 2025. The episode covers how Blueprint pivoted from rare cancers to systemic mastocytosis, achieving 75-80% response rates and building a commercially durable franchise.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Emily Conley, CEO of Renaissance Bio, explains how the company is developing oral small molecule correctors and potentiators to treat autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), a genetic condition affecting 300,000 patients in the US and Europe, by targeting the polycystin protein complex using a framework borrowed from cystic fibrosis drug development.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Neil Kumar, founder and CEO of BridgeBio Pharma, details how he built a rare disease drug company using a hub-and-spoke portfolio model starting in 2015 with $7M. The company now has one blockbuster drug generating $108M in a single quarter, with two additional programs showing strong phase three clinical results. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Hub-and-Spoke Portfolio Design:** BridgeBio structures each drug program as a separate subsidiary with its own focused disease team, while...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Marc Tessier-Lavigne, CEO of Xaira Therapeutics, outlines how the South San Francisco startup deploys AI across all three stages of drug discovery — target identification, molecular design, and patient matching — backed by $1 billion in committed capital and Nobel laureate David Baker's protein design technology, with the goal of halving drug development timelines from 13 to 6.5 years.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Art Krieg, founder of Zola Therapeutics and pioneer of CpG DNA immunotherapy, explains how his new oligonucleotide drug candidate simultaneously activates TLR7, TLR8, and TLR9 receptors to mimic a retroviral infection signal, potentially converting immune-suppressive tumor environments into active cancer-killing responses across multiple solid tumor types.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Eric Fischer, structural biologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, explains how targeted protein degraders and molecular glues work as a new drug class, tracing the field from thalidomide's rediscovered mechanism through the 2014 breakthrough papers, the $80M Deerfield-Dana-Farber Center for Protein Degradation, and spinout companies including Neomorph now partnered with Novartis, Biogen, and AbbVie.

→ WHAT IT COVERS CAR T cell pioneer Bruce Levine from University of Pennsylvania and Irish country musician Mags McCarthy describe their collaboration creating "Ring That Bell," a country song about cancer immunotherapy. Their partnership began in November 2021 after a family member's blood cancer diagnosis prompted McCarthy to cold-email Levine, who happened to be in Galway, Ireland that same day.