Biotech builders and professors on picking the right problem
BIOS talks with professors from MIT and Harvard, the CEO of Seagen, the founder of Exact Sciences and the editor-in-chief of the Science journals. The talk stays technical, from lymph node biology to FDA device review, and it keeps coming back to how a researcher picks the one problem worth years of effort.
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BIOS is the podcast of the BIOS community, a network of early-stage healthcare and life-science founders and investors anchored by Alix Ventures, a venture fund based in San Francisco. Each episode here opens by stating that affiliation. Some guests are professors, others run companies, and one runs a family of journals. MIT professors Dane Wittrup and Darrell Irvine, Harvard's Vijay Kuchroo, Seagen CEO David Epstein, Exact Sciences founder Stan Lapidus and Science journals editor-in-chief Holden Thorp all appear in the episodes collected here. The questions are layered and informed, sometimes running several clauses before they land, and the interviewers are willing to admit where their own knowledge runs out. Answers get technical fast. Irvine explains how lymph nodes are affected by disease such as chronic HIV infection or cancer, and why the answer depends on the case. Lapidus tells the story of a slide-preparation method for cervical samples. It won on better sampling and easier-to-read slides, and it went through an FDA device division that kept moving the goalposts before approval came in 1996. Epstein, talking after the Pfizer deal was announced, rejects the idea that he was brought in just to sell the company. He says he was asked to build a world-leading oncology company, and then Pfizer came knocking. Thorp's episode leaves the bench entirely. He separates the research side of a journal, which publishes findings in technical language, from the news side, which writes about those findings and about the culture of science more accessibly. It is probably the easiest way in for anyone less at home with immunology. Beneath the science runs a steady interest in how careers get built. Wittrup describes taking five years before deciding he really should pick one problem, which is how he came to focus on cancer, and he is asked whether his startup success has fed back into his academic work. Kuchroo remembers doing his PhD when ELISA and immunohistochemistry were the only tools available, and he boils his advice down to choosing the right question. The tone throughout is warm. Guests are welcomed with obvious enthusiasm and sent off with thanks and an invitation to come back. Small personal moments get room as well: Thorp mentions that he still plays bass guitar and upright bass in pit orchestras for college and community-theater musicals, and Irvine is congratulated on his induction into the National Academy of Medicine. Guests often thank more than one interviewer, and one episode adds a guest host. In at least one conversation the pace shifts midway for a 'halftime' round of rapid-fire questions. What a listener gets is scientists and executives explaining in their own words how they chose problems, built companies, and dealt with regulators and editors.
Made for: Suits a listener who follows biotech and health startups and wants technical detail from researchers and executives, along with their own accounts of how they chose problems and built companies.
What sets it apart: It comes from an early-stage life-science investing community and puts MIT and Harvard professors alongside company builders and a journal editor. It keeps pressing on how problems get chosen, how regulators behave, and how people move between academia and industry.
BIOS Podcast brings together cutting-edge insights from Life Science industry leaders at the forefront of innovation. Join us in hearing from Founders, Investors, Professors, & Pharma operating at the intersection of Technology & Biology. By Alix Ventures: Driving Patient Impact - Supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to drive radical advances in human health. Learn more @ BIOS.community / Alix.vc __________________________________ Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community,…
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at how protein engineering turns useful tools into focused problems worth solving.
Protein engineering comes through as a practical discipline here: a way to choose useful problems, test ideas with synthetic tools, and shape ambitious science into focused work.
A clear look at the gap between scientific authority and public reach.
Holden Thorpe, Editor-in-Chief at Science Journals, uses the conversation to map the space between scientific authority and public understanding.
A focused look at how tumor-draining lymph nodes could shape cancer immunotherapy design.
BIOS keeps its attention on a precise question in cancer therapy: where immune treatments need to act, not just what they are designed to do. Daryl Irvin frames tumor-draining lymph nodes as part of the therapeutic landscape alongside the tumor itself, then walks through how…
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BIOS episode 63 pairs Dane Wittrup, a MIT Koch Institute professor, with Jake Beecraft, CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a Boston mRNA company that says it is working beyond vaccines into oncology and cell therapy.
["Holden Thorpe, editor-in-chief of Science journals, says the biggest misconception is that Science has broad public reach, even though he cites about 4 million unique website visitors a month versus Joe Rogan's 100 million listeners.", "He traces a career from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and a theater childhood to chemistry work at Caltech and Yale, then faculty and administration roles at UNC, Washington University in St.
["BIOS Podcast episode 61 opens with Chris welcoming Daryl Irvin, who was inducted into the National Academy of Medicine that Monday, and Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics.", "Daryl says he moved from polymeric biomaterials at MIT to a Stanford postdoc with Mark Davis and then back to MIT, where his lab has spent 20 years on HIV vaccines and cancer immunotherapy.", "He keeps returning to the rule that immune therapy works only when it delivers the right cue to the right immune cell at the right time and place, which is why his lab works on nanoparticles, lymph nodes, and intratumoral delivery.", "Jake describes Strand Therapeutics' cell-type-specific mRNA and long-expressing RNA work, while both speakers focus on CAR T in solid tumors, toxicity, and manufacturing."]
BIOS episode 60 follows Stan Lapidus from electrical engineering and ITRAN to ThinPrep and Exact Sciences, with Chas and Drew Yashar steering the interview at Alix Ventures.
BIOS by Alix Ventures features David Epstein, CEO of Cgen, discussing how a fifth-grade New Jersey Star-Ledger article on interferon led him from Rutgers College of Pharmacy to Novartis and Flagship Pioneering.
David Weitz, a Harvard professor and Wyss Institute core faculty member, explains how microfluidics uses tiny fluid volumes to improve single-cell sequencing, diagnostics, and drug discovery.
BIOS interviews Vijay Kuchroo, a Harvard Medical School professor, about self-tolerance, T-cell differentiation, and translating immunology into therapies.
Harvey Lodish, an MIT professor and founding member of the Whitehead Institute, traces his work from red-cell potassium transport in 1958 to biotech companies including Genzyme and Carmine Therapeutics.
David R.
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Frank Nestle, Sanofi’s Global Head of Research and CSO, describes an AI research factory intended to improve a drug-development process that can take 10 to 13 years and cost more than $2 billion.
Jeff Bluestone traces four decades of work on immune tolerance, from the National Cancer Institute and University of Chicago to UCSF and Sonoma Biotherapeutics.
BIOS interviews UC Berkeley professor Jay Keasling about engineering microbes to produce medicines, fuels, and specialty chemicals.
Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford professor and 2022 Nobel laureate, traces bio-orthogonal chemistry from her work on glycans to methods for observing cell-surface sugars without destroying living cells.
Joel Dudley, partner at Innovation Endeavors and former chief scientific officer at Tempus, argues that precision medicine will replace broad disease labels with increasingly molecular subtypes.
A podcast interviewing leaders in life science startups, focusing on technology and biology innovation.
An interview with MIT professor Ron Weiss and Strand Therapeutics CEO Jake Becraft about synthetic biology and mRNA therapeutics.
A podcast featuring interviews with leaders in life sciences, discussing innovation at the intersection of technology and biology.
An interview with Arvind Gupta about his transition to Mayfield and his philosophy of using biology as a technology to address planetary and human health.