Monthly Vibe Bio Newsletter - January 2024 🎆
Every Cure for Every Community - New Year, New Decisions
Welcome to ’s Monthly Newsletter! Stay up-to-date with our latest company updates and insights into the ever-evolving biotech funding landscape.
Happy New Year to our wonderful Substack community! Whether you’re a new subscriber or long-time reader, we appreciate your attention. We hope you enjoy our curated industry headlines and special guest interviews on VibeCast.
There is no doubt that 2024 will be a significant year for biotech financing decision makers. The year has already kicked off with a wave of anticipation, setting the stage for unprecedented industry growth and innovative opportunities.
Artificial intelligence is experiencing a remarkable resurgence, solidifying its pivotal role in modern society with enhanced accessibility and affordability. Cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) are redefining our comprehension in areas such as healthcare delivery and drug development. These advanced models are instrumental in pinpointing optimal targets, elucidating clinical pathways, and pioneering new frontiers in drug discovery.
If you are an active drug developer or biotech investor and interested in learning how to optimize your decision-making, let us embark on this journey together. Vibe Bio is navigating the evolving landscape of biotech innovation and data analytics to help unlock the potential that awaits in 2024 and beyond.
Please enjoy our first newsletter of the year and let us know what you think in the comments below. Thank you for your subscription to the Vibe Bio newsletter.
Industry Updates and Resources 👀
BD Tech Talks: Compress the prompts, reduce the costs of AI - critical for efficient use of LLMs in all industries especially life sciences and biotech
BioPharmaDive: Biotech M&A picked up in 2023 - search through the M&A database of deals starting from 2018
Boston Business Journal: Top 8 VC raises reached $2B in 2023; largest rounds included ElevateBio ($401M), Orbital Tx ($270M), Nimbus Tx ($210M), and Upstream Bio ($200m)
Boston Globe: Alexandria life sciences real estate developer sells property at discount in Boston
CNBC: BMS announces acquisition of RayzeBio for $4.1B bolstering it’s radiotherapy program
CNBC: AI can’t analyze an SEC filing… yet…
Endpoint News: VC firm Pivotal closes $389M therapeutics fund
Fierce Biotech: Otsuka Pharma paying $65M for exclusive European licensing rights to Ionis Pharma’s late-phase prophylactic treatment for hereditary angioedema, a life-threatening rare genetic disease
Fierce Biotech: Half of biotechs rely on Big Pharma for funding - is anyone surprised?
Fierce Biotech: Biotech potentially hit rock bottom in 2023, it’s lowest level in 4 years - VC outlook looking positive for 2024
Fierce Biotech: Alphabet’s Isomorphic AI biotech, Isomorphic snags billion dollar deals with Lilly and Novartis to discover novel small molecules.
Forbes: Biotech startup investment in 2023 dropped to ~840 deals ($24B) from 2021’s ~1500 deals ($60B)
Fortune: Even VCs are going to be disrupted by AI
MassBio: 2023 MA BioPharma Funding and Pipeline Report
Nature Biotechnology Editorial: Tear up the traditional biotech playbook
Pharma Exec: 2024 to bring an end volatile biotech index, large pharma equipped with $1.4T to fund deals!
PitchBook: 28% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking in 2023, including Boston-based OpenView
PWC: Healthy activity levels expected in 2024 - biotech IPO window will ‘gradually reopen’
Stat News: CRISPR medicine is expected to be a major treatment in 2024, after the gene-editing technology’s first ever approval in 2023
Technology Review: AI and large-scale datasets will unlock new biology learning via spatial omics
Wall Street Journal: The worst is likely over for the biotech sector
Wall Street Journal: Biotech rallying towards the end of 2023 but can you pick the winners?
Learn about Vibe’s AI-guided Insights and Analytics
🔬 Assess the likelihood of your drug candidate succeeding in clinical trials, based on its preclinical data and competitive landscape
📈 Make informed decisions about your drug pipeline
🧫 Elevate your drug asset’s scientific present value
🧪 De-risks potential risks early in the development process
VibeCast Updates 🎙️
On VibeCast, our Industry Engagement Manager and show host Ray Dogum, interviews Vibe Bio community experts who come from diverse backgrounds and career paths. However, one commonality that all VibeCast guests have is a passion to improve society by encouraging research and educating others by sharing their own experiences.
Collectively we have the skills. We have the technology. We have the passion. We now need the community catalyst to bring it all together. That’s Vibe.
In addition to our YouTube channel, you can listen to episodes on:
Google Podcasts (shutting down April 2024)
We are always looking for interesting and knowledgeable people to interview on our show. If you know of a community member who would be a great guest, please let us know. You can suggest a guest by sending us an email, leaving a Substack comment below, or reaching out via social media.
Check out the latest episodes, 40-43 below
Uncovering Protein Dysregulation in Neurodegenerative Disease w/ Travis Stiles | VibeCast Episode 40
For more than a decade, Dr. Travis Stiles has studied the mechanisms underlying regenerative failure in the CNS. His work led to the discovery that the LRP1 receptor was a novel therapeutic target for neuronal regeneration after CNS damage or disease. To best translate his work into viable therapies, Dr. Stiles co-founded Novoron Bioscience early in 2014. Novoron's work developing drugs against LRP1 has opened the door to the discovery of an entirely new class of drugs capable of targeting LRP1 and other members of the low-density lipoprotein receptor family, which play critical roles in multiple diseases, but have been long considered untargetable by conventional means. Dr. Stiles holds a PhD in Biomedical Science from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). His outstanding contributions have earned him recognition as a top innovator by esteemed groups such as J&J and Biocom, along with over $3 million in federal grants. Additionally, Dr. Stiles has actively served on multiple scientific review boards for the National Institute of Health and recently completed a four-year Federal Advisory Committee appointment to the Scientific Merit Review Board subcommittee for Regenerative Medicine in the Department of Veterans Affairs.
AI for RNA Biomarker Discovery and Drug Development with Rafael Rosengarten | VibeCast Episode 41
Rafael Rosengarten, PhD leads Genialis’ effort to realize the promise of precision medicine, and to build a company that puts people first as a guiding principle. Prior to Genialis, he spent nearly 20 years in biomedical research, publishing on the evolution of innate immune systems, bioengineering of microbes, and genetics of development. Rafael co-invented the j5 DNA assembly design automation software for high-throughput molecular design and analyses (since commercialized by TeselaGen). Rafael earned his doctorate at Yale University, and conducted his postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Baylor College of Medicine. In his free time, Rafael enjoys beaches and mountains, coffee and kettlebells, and exploring the world with his wife and two children.
The Biotech Connectors Advancing Epigenetics with Bryan Vought & John McShane | VibeCast Episode 42
John McShane has worked the last 12 years in biotech commercialization and business development focusing on epigenetic and next generation sequencing. He holds a Masters in Biotech Management from the Katz School of Science and Health at Yeshiva University and a Bachelors Degree in Molecular Biology from Lehigh University. He is currently the director of business development at Biomodal, a precision multiomics company backed by google ventures. John is a co-founder and steering committee member of the Boston Epigenetics Society. The Boston Epigenetic Society has been founded to: - Promote epigenetics and epitranscriptomics research - Foster connections between academics and industry epigenetics scientists - Help promote new methods - Create a support system for experimental epigenetics research
Bryan Vought: I completed my PhD in biophysics at Syracuse University. I came to Boston in 2000 to do my post-doc research at Harvard Medical School. From there I was hired as a protein biochemist/biophysicist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals to focus on membrane proteins. I started focusing mostly on their neuroscience programs. At the time, they were prioritizing phenotypic screens with a focus on human disease cell models. I turned my attention to stem cells and using IPSCs to create disease models. I helped to build out their stem cell facilities here in Boston. I left there in 2017 to start an in vitro disease modeling team at Alkermes in Waltham. While there, I built out a functional genomics team and we focused on characterizing epigenetic drug targets. A couple of years ago I became the director of in vitro biology at Ring Therapeutics where we use human primary and IPSC cell models to better understand how anellovirus can be harnessed to provide genetic therapy to patients. While I was at Alkermes, I met John McShane. We were both passionate about epigenetics. The pandemic was keeping people apart, and we thought about how we might bring people together to talk about and promote epigenetics. We talked through different ideas about how we might do that. From that, the Boston Epigenetics Society was born. We would host webinars and bring together people while promoting epigenetics.
Democratizing Cancer Screening through Tears with Omid Moghadam | VibeCast Episode 43
Omid Moghadam is the founder and CEO of Namida Lab. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, venture investor, and educator. He specializes in launching new ventures with social impact in health and technology. Moghadam has inventions in medical imaging, cryptography, microprocessor design, medical devices, diagnostics, digital photography, data science, and communications. He is currently the Chairman of RAPID Dosimetry, a precision medicine company he also co-founded and a board member of The Diary Corporation. He is the past founder or co-founder of nine companies in Healthcare IT, genomics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, and has held executive positions at Intel, Eastman Kodak, and CTG-AMS Corporations. He formerly served on the advisory boards of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Children's Hospital Boston, and California Healthcare Foundation, and has held academic positions at Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Lally School of Business as well as an EIR position at UCLA. Mr. Moghadam’s past approaches to innovation have been highlighted in two books: Grabbing Lightning, and The Innovators Prescription. Omid loves art, history, languages, and travel. Most Sundays he can be found sweating over FT’s Polymath crossword puzzle.
Community Feedback
We encourage you to explore our Discord server and learn more about our mission to accelerate the development of new treatments and cures through inflection point financing. You can also follow us on social media to stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates from our community.
Tell us what else you’d like to see in future editions of the newsletter. We’d love to hear from you!
Sincerely,
The Vibe Bio Community Team
#EveryCureforEveryCommunity