Author: Madeleine Hartmann

When Stephanie Culler co-founded Persephone Biosciences in 2017, she had a vision of decoding the microbiome to harness its potential for diagnostics, therapeutics, and preventative care. The vision is simple, but the execution is far more complicated. The microbiome is highly individual and constantly changing, shaped by diet, environment, disease, and a multitude of other factors. Making sense of that complexity and turning it into reliable, scalable therapies requires advanced tools in biology, data science, and manufacturing. This approach has the potential to change how we approach human health, leveraging the microbiome as a core component of precision medicine. That…

Michelle Longmire isn’t interested in incremental change, she’s aiming instead to cure all disease within two decades. A rather ambitious mission, but her decentralized clinical trial platform might be just what the medical research field needs to speed up the timeline on cure development. Dr. Longmire is a trained physician, tech founder, and the CEO of Medable, and she is betting that the future of medical research lies not only in the discovery of new therapies, but in radically accelerating the path to get them to patients. Clinical trial research is historically cumbersome and inefficient, but she believes that’s just…

Medicine is being increasingly driven by data. Advances in genomic sequencing, wearable devices for data collection, biomarker discoveries, and machine learning are enabling care teams to personalize treatment not just by disease type, but also by individual patient. This move from population-based medicine to personalized care is significantly improving cancer treatment. Traditionally, chemotherapy takes somewhat of a broad approach, but precision medicine provides a more nuanced and strategic treatment plan. Instead of attacking all rapidly dividing cells, today’s most promising therapies intercept the genetic mutations, regulatory pathways, and cellular dependencies that drive tumor growth in specific patient subtypes. Companies like…

Facing a critical rise in gram-negative bacterial resistance, the health community confronts a formidable challenge, as these infections now rank as the third leading cause of death in the US, claiming around 48,000 lives annually due to antimicrobial resistance. Melinta Therapeutics, a pioneer in advanced antibiotic treatments, targets these resistant infections, focusing on those present in hospital settings. Most recently, Melinta worked alongside Cidara Therapeutics to garner FDA approval in 2023 for REZZAYO™ in the US. REZZAYO™ is breakthrough treatment for refractory and complicated urinary tract infections. UTIs in immunocompromised patients, males, pregnant patients, and those associated with sepsis, fever,…

Biotech Metropolitan Women 2023 Year in Review: New York Edition Applied Therapeutics Received Orphan Medical Designation Shoshana Shendelman has led Applied Therapeutics as CEO since its inception in 2016 and has been gathering significant momentum in 2023. Her company prioritizes developing drugs for diseases thatdo not currently have accessible or successful treatment options. This past year, Applied Therapeutics received the orphan medical product designation for one of their medications, called Govorestat, which is in development. Orphan Medical products receive monetary and regulatory government assistance to incentivize developing drugs for rare diseases since the return on investment would be much lower…

Nabiha Saklayen, CEO of Cellino, was born in Saudi Arabia and raised partially in Germany and Sri Lanka. From a young age, she was encouraged and inspired by her mother, the first female in her family to attend university. Nabiha took a special interest in the cosmos and astrophysics because she loves a challenge, and found those subjects to be more difficult than chemistry and biology. In Nabiha’s senior year, she received a full scholarship to Emory University, to major in Physics and minor in Mathematics. A turning point in Nabiha’s academic career was when she lost her grandmother to…

Treating cancer is complicated, lengthy, costly, and often significantly impacts the patient’s quality of life. What if there was a way to test drugs on a patient’s cancerous cells without administering the drug to the patient? Enter, Carcinotech. Carcinotech offers 3D printing of tumors made of the patient’s own cells. Having a 3D-printed tumor to test drugs on, perform targeted cell mutations, or irradiate means that the patient is not at risk of adverse reactions to these therapies. With this technology, patients’ oncologists are able to test what works effectively on their cells. But how does this work? First, patients…

Jurata Thin Film began as an idea to develop a novel way to deliver Ebola vaccines to low-income countries without the specialized storage capabilities needed for a live vaccine. MSI-TX thin film, Jurata’s flagship technology, was created by Maria Croyle, RPh, PhD, at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin. The film can uniquely stabilize live material three-dimensionally for up to three years without vials, temperature control, or large shipments. Sheila Ann Mikhail, owner of the gene therapy company AskBio, took an interest in Croyle’s technology and founded Jurata Thin Film in 2019, with Croyle as…