Nucleate Podcast

In this episode of the Nucleate Podcast, Dr. Jo Viney, co-founder, president, and CEO of Seismic Therapeutic, shares her trajectory from academic immunology training in London to major biotech companies and startup leadership. She discusses how early clinical lab exposure to autoimmune patients sparked her passion for translational science and highlights why the Boston ecosystem is an ideal place to launch biotech startups due to its unparalleled funding, incubator space, and collaborative peer networks. She also reflects on the lessons learned from co-funding Pandion Therapeutics—including how following surprising data led to a major asset acquisition by Merck—and describes the bittersweet feeling of handing off a company she helped build. The conversation then explores Seismic Therapeutic's approach to tackling autoimmune diseases by integrating machine learning into protein drug discovery. Jo details how combining structural biology, machine learning, protein engineering, and immunology allows Seismic to accelerate drug design cycles, optimize enzyme therapeutics, and tackle complex agonist and cell-selective antibody design. She emphasizes that machine learning serves as a powerful tool guided by human hypothesis-driven research rather than a standalone cure-all. Jo closes with practical advice for emerging scientific founders, encouraging them to seek out diverse viewpoints, pressure-test their ideas with critics, and keep patient impact as their true North Star. Here's a segment breakdown with timestamps: 00:27 – Academic beginnings to Startups 02:05 – International experience shaping perspective 03:03 – Location and choosing Boston 03:53 – Influences, mentors, & successful mentorship 04:54 – Biotech CEO Sisterhood 05:08 – Leading other scientists now 05:78 – Larger pharma versus the smaller biotechs 07:28 – Co-founder at Pandion, drug development, & inspiration to start the company 08:62 – Acquisition of company: success and navigation 10:12 – Initial Conversations 10:86 – Emotionally Tied Science & Company 11:28 – Seismic Therapeutic focus on autoimmune disease 12:73 – Structural biology & prediction technologies emerging 12:58 – Data & Technology 15:47 – Experiences with AI 15:77 – AI drug discovery engines 16:04 – Founding a company out of a venture creation firm 17:11 – The Founding Process 17:88 – Fundraising conversations with investors for an academic labs 18:43 – When to move on from an idea or keep investing 19:24 – Biggest mistakes from lab to startup 19:52 – Rapid Fire Questions

In this episode of the Nucleate Podcast, Joe Betts-LaCroix, co-founder of Retro Biosciences, traces his path from Silicon Valley hardware startups to longevity biotech, explaining that a liquidity event from his first company prompted him to reflect on the limited real-world impact of most tech products compared to medicine, which almost always meaningfully helps people. He describes Retro's approach to navigating biotech regulation through a "daughter test" – asking whether a given regulatory requirement is one he'd genuinely want applied if it were his own family member's treatment on the line. He then explains why the company has set an ambitious but achievable mission of extending healthy human lifespan by 10 years, framing it as a "right-sized" goal for a venture-backed startup. The conversation then dives into Retro's science and pipeline, including a notable collaboration with one of their major investors, OpenAI, to retrain a large language model on amino acid sequences, which unexpectedly produced improved Yamanaka factors used in cellular reprogramming — work now feeding into Retro's FDA filings. Joe discusses the company's twin strategies of replacing aged cells entirely versus partially reprogramming cells in place to rejuvenate them without erasing cell identity, and explains why their lead Alzheimer's program targets intracellular autophagy dysfunction rather than the more traditional extracellular amyloid-beta approach, despite the field's history of failed drugs. He closes with reflections on the broader longevity industry — expressing sympathy for experimentation but skepticism toward supplement vendors who oversell single mechanisms as cure-alls.

She started out as a small-town GP in South Africa with zero idea a "biotech industry" even existed. Three decades later, Deborah Dunsire had led the launch of Gleevec — the first targeted cancer therapy ever approved — steered Millennium Pharmaceuticals through an $8.8 billion acquisition, and run two more companies through drug failures, board showdowns, and billion-dollar bets. In this episode, she takes us inside the moments that don't make the press release: a phase one cancer patient still alive today, decades after a drug nobody thought would work; a multiple myeloma patient who happened to be trial patient #007 and was actually named James Bond; and the $60,000 milk-budget cut that nearly tanked employee morale company-wide. Dunsire doesn't sugarcoat the hard parts either. She walks us through the gut-punch of watching a phase 3 trial fail just weeks after taking the CEO job at Lundbeck, the sleepless nights of shutting down a company at Forum Therapeutics, and a boardroom fight over share classes that got her booed by public shareholders. Through it all, one thread holds: her conviction that treating people with dignity — during layoffs, acquisitions, culture clashes across continents — isn't just the right thing to do, it's the thing that actually builds winning companies. This is a masterclass in building biotech companies from someone who's done it inside Novartis, Millennium, Takeda, Forum, and Lundbeck — with the scars, the wins, and the hard lessons to prove it.

In this episode of the podcast we are joined by Dr. Phillip Sharp, Nobel Prize Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT, who shares his story behind the groundbreaking discovery of RNA splicing. He explains how the work ethic and problem solving instinctions he built early on eventually led him to Caltech, and then MIT, where his 1977 discovery changed how we understand gene expression. Sharp discusses his journey from science into biotech entrepreneurship, co-founding both Biogen and Alnylam, and delves into his role as a pioneer of the industry. This episode offers a firsthand account of biotech’s earliest days, along with advice for founders on risk, communication strategies, and what it takes to build a successful company. Book mentioned: The Double Helix by James D. Watson

This episode of the Nucleate Podcast features host Sam Kessler in conversation with Nolan Townsend, CEO of Lexeo Therapeutics, a New York-based clinical-stage biotech developing gene therapies for genetically driven cardiovascular disease. Nolan traces his path from healthcare investment banking at Lehman Brothers into more than a decade at Pfizer, where international P&L roles in Korea, Ukraine, and Western Europe sharpened his ability to navigate ambiguity and different healthcare systems, and where leading Pfizer's rare disease unit gave him a front-row seat as tafamidis, a treatment for a once-obscure cardiac amyloidosis, grew into one of the company's largest products. That experience drove his decision to found Lexeo in January 2020, just months before COVID hit, betting that cardiovascular disease would follow oncology's path toward genetically defined subtypes treatable with precision therapies delivered via AAV-vector gene therapy. The conversation then breaks down Lexeo's pipeline and the mechanics of building a biotech company. Nolan describes lead programs in Friedreich's ataxia-associated cardiomyopathy and arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, explains why the company narrowed its focus away from a CNS/Alzheimer's program despite promising APOE-gene-therapy science, and offers candid advice on fundraising in a cooled IPO market, including the importance of de-risking a story, avoiding pure me-too positioning, and recruiting strong advisors to unlock larger tranche financings. He closes with reflections on mentors like Ron Crystal and Steve Altschuler, Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation theory as a guiding framework, and lastly takes on the most underrated CEO skill (managing unpredictability) and what he'd do outside biotech (play tennis).