Bicara Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing first-in-class biologics engineered to bring together the precision of targeted therapy and the power of tumor modulators. The company’s bifunctional antibodies are designed to deliver an immunomodulatory payload directly to the tumor microenvironment to ramp up immune cell activity, potentially offering long-lasting efficacy.
Sector: Life Sciences
TandemAI
TandemAI is an advanced technology company dedicated to reinventing drug discovery infrastructure. The company integrates proprietary AI-driven and physics-based high-performance computation with its efficient, large-scale in-house wet lab operations to deliver a turnkey drug discovery solution.
Curie.Bio
Curie.Bio is a founder-focused seed-stage venture firm combined with an industry-grade therapeutics accelerator focused on one thing: helping entrepreneurial founders launch viable therapeutics companies. Curie.Bio does this by giving founders access to a team of the world’s best drug hunters and drug makers, seed capital, and best-of-breed services—everything a founder needs to get from concept to a compelling quality dataset that enables an awesome Series A financing. In a nutshell, we want founders in control of their own company and focused on their area of expertise and creativity, while we help make the rest happen smoothly.
Enzene Biosciences Ltd.
Enzene is an innovation-driven biotech company a subsidiary of Alkem Laboratories Ltd. (one of the top five pharmaceutical companies in India*) located in Pune, India. Enzene’s focus lies in producing biosimilars, novel biologics, synthetic peptides and phytopharmaceuticals. Enzene also offers a range of biologics CDMO and CMO services with capabilities from clone development up to GMP manufacturing supported by bio-reactor capacities ranging from 20 litres to 2000 litres.
Shift Bioscience
Shift Bioscience (Shift) is a Cambridge, UK-based biotechnology company focused on safe cellular reprogramming for rejuvenation. The company leverages a proprietary cellular age clock and an active machine learning approach to discover novel factors for safer cellular rejuvenation without the use of pluripotency-inducing reprogramming genes. Shift aims to enable the development of reprogramming-based therapeutics to prevent and treat age-associated diseases.
John Shiver, PhD
Dr. John Shiver is a Special Advisor for F-Prime and is also Chief Strategy Officer at IGM ID a wholly owned subsidiary of IGM Biosciences. Established in 2021, IGM ID utilizes a proprietary IgM platform to treat and prevent infectious diseases. The potential utility of this platform for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases is supported by its recent application towards COVID-19 (Ku et al., Nature, published online 03 June 2021).
Prior to joining IGM ID, John was the SVP and Global Head of Vaccines R&D and a member of the Executive Leadership team for 8 years at Sanofi Pasteur, the largest company in the world devoted entirely to vaccines. He previously spent 22 years at Merck & CO where he held a series of senior leadership positions with his last position being VP and Head of Vaccines and Biologics Research. He was a member of Merck Vaccines Integrated Leadership Team and the Global Research Leadership Committee responsible for vaccine research, vaccine clinical assays and biomarkers, and biologics research, and siRNA technologies. Earlier in his career John spent five years at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
John is a recognized expert and industry leader in vaccine and pharmaceutical research and development. He has guided numerous scientific teams that created novel vaccine and monoclonal antibody candidates to prevent or treat more than 40 infectious and non-infectious diseases, including HIV, influenza, HPV, RSV, CMV, pneumococcus, cancer, and asthma. He has collaborated with other senior leaders to secure the licensure of 14 pharmaceutical products spanning both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, many of which were first- and/or best-in-class products addressing global infectious diseases. He also championed four acquisitions and three major collaborations to obtain new technologies or clinical candidates/products.
John is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the International Society of Vaccines (ISV) and a member of multiple advisory boards, including the Board of Directors for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Board of Directors for Icosavax, and previously, the Executive Board of the International Society for Vaccines. He has also served on journal editorial boards, including Nature Partner Journals Vaccines and the Journal of Virology. He is the author of more than 150 articles, including 19 in Science, Nature, Cell, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of 68 awarded patents. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania College of Medicine and has been recognized by the Financial Times.
John holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Mathematics from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.
Galatea Bio
Galatea Bio is a biotechnology company committed to driving groundbreaking discoveries in healthcare by pairing genetic diversity with cutting-edge data analytics. Our passion is fueled by a focus on populations historically underrepresented in genetics research. We achieve this by leveraging our world-class clinical network and biobank, cutting-edge algorithms, and innovative analyses to discover and validate new tests and treatments that will improve the lives of all.
Comanche Biopharma
Comanche Biopharma is a maternal and fetal medicine biopharmaceutical company working to lower the risks of pregnancy and premature births worldwide. We are currently developing the world’s first treatment for preeclampsia, which affects more than 10 million women every year.
Alternative Bio (ABio)
Alternative Bio’s mission is to translate the discovery of novel protein synthesis regulatory nodes into first-in-class precision medicines to treat the most challenging cancers. The company’s vision is to establish itself as a global pioneer in this new research space as it advances breakthrough therapies to benefit cancer patients worldwide.
Prime Medicine: Advancing a next-generation gene editing technology
Using “search and replace” to address the fundamental causes of genetic disease.
Developed in the lab of Dr. David Liu at the Broad Institute, Prime Medicine was founded to deliver the promise of gene editing to patients with genetic diseases. The ability to introduce nearly any desired edit to restore normal genetic function has long been viewed as the ‘holy grail’ in the gene editing space. While there are approaches to accomplish this with first generation CRISPR-based technologies – which are based on introducing double strand breaks into DNA – efficiencies have historically been low (these technologies are very well suited to introducing gene disruptions). Base editing was a significant step forward in gene editing, but the technology only allows for select base-to-base changes. Prime editing introduced, for the first time, the ability to efficiently introduce any base-to-base edit as well as to correct insertions and deletions, creating an opportunity to address more than 90 percent of known disease-causing genetic mutations.
First-generation CRISPR/Cas9 technologies can be likened to scissors, base editing to a pencil and eraser, and Prime Editing to a word processor, enabling search and replace genome editing and representing a significant improvement in precision and breadth of possibilities.
“F-Prime was with us from the beginning and shared our vision for the promise of Prime’s technology. Together we can deliver hope to patients and families suffering from incurable genetic diseases.”
Keith Gottesdiener, CEO
At F-Prime, we believe that Prime’s transformative technology is a major advancement towards their vision of creating a world where Prime Editing can potentially cure, halt and ultimately prevent genetic diseases.
It was an honor to support Prime through their Series A and Series B funding rounds alongside other leading healthcare investors. We share a common goal to improve the lives of patients with a wide range of genetic diseases.