Newsletter March 2022

As an optimist I am not interested in safe, incremental projects. I am interested in challenging, high-risk, high-impact research. The perseverance of Dr. Katalin Karikó's breakthrough work on mRNA vaccines is an inspiration.

I have been passionate about stem cell research since my first project on human embryonic stem cell lines in medical school. As the lead scientist of the "Thymus Engineering and 22q11DS" project at Stanford from 2017 to 2021, I become fascinated by the thymus, the primary immune organ for T cell development. Regenerating thymic epithelial cells from iPSCs provides a tool for manufacturing naïve T cell in vitro and holds tremendously potential to revolutionize T cell immunotherapies. Prior to Stanford, I was a senior scientist in the iPSC technology group at iPierian Inc, a pioneering iPSC startup, acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb.

I recently left Stanford and started Rattan Life Science with a goal of focusing on this high-risk project. Looking forward to continuing the work I started in academia in a fast-paced startup environment, expanding into commercial applications and therapies.

I am very excited to be at MBC BioLabs and meet the great community!

Maddalena Adorno, PhD and Benedetta di Robilant, PhD are the founders of Dorian Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company developing a new class of therapeutics, called senoblockers, for age-related disease.

Maddalena and Benedetta met at the Stanford School of Medicine, and after working together for few years and identifying important pathway crucial for counteracting the aging process, they decided to bring what they learned from the bench to the clinic. Often a lot of efforts are devoted in Academia to the discovery of new paradigms, but less frequently these are advanced to preclinical and clinical studies. In their case, they didn't want this to be their story, and they are firmly committed to bring the senoblocker technology to patients.

Their idea found the enthusiasm and support of several investors and incubators, including Y Combinator and StartX, and they launched Dorian in 2018. Among their investors, several incredible women are helping them in their path: Laura Deming (Longevity Fund), Celestine Schnugg (Boom Capital) and Yodfat Harel Buchris (Blumberg Capital).

Their journey in the Life Science ecosystem has been one of hard work, fast learning and quick adaptation, but they are surrounded by a supportive, stimulating and enthusiastic community and team and they are determined to keep growing and evolving.

International Women's Day is a global holiday celebrated annually on March 8 to commemorate the cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements of women. It is also a focal point in the women's rights movement, bringing attention to issues such as gender equality, reproductive rights, and violence and abuse against women.

MBC BioLabs will be hosting a celebration of Women's History Month

A webinar featuring the PerkinElmer Labchip GXII touch high throughput capillary electrophoresis system.

The LabChip® GXII Touch™ protein and nucleic acid characterization system provides the complete solution for reproducible quantitation, molecular weight sizing and percent purity analysis of protein and nucleic acid samples. Leveraging microfluidic electrophoretic separation technology, the LabChip® GXII Touch™ system enables rapid characterization with minimal sample preparation setup and sample input volume.

Siolta Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel microbiome-based targeted therapeutics, today announced that it was awarded an Advanced Technology Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grant will provide funding for the continued development and optimization of manufacturing approaches for live biotherapeutic products containing strictly anaerobic, non-spore forming bacteria as active pharmaceutical ingredients. The focus of the proposal is to enhance the potency, stability, and rapid molecular analysis of drug substances containing live anaerobic bacteria.

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company's June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

Alessa Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage drug development company developing an innovative and proprietary localized drug delivery technology to treat prostate disease, announced the enrollment of the first two men with prostate cancer in the company's Biolen+RT clinical study.

Biolen+RT (NCT 04943536) is a Phase 1 clinical study conducted in collaboration with the Radiation Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The study will evaluate the feasibility of replacing systemic androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) with targeted local delivery of an anti-androgen agent in patients in whom ADT plus radiation therapy is indicated for the treatment of localized prostate cancer. The Biolen+RT feasibility study will enroll up to 20 subjects at NCI in Bethesda, Maryland.