The Bio Report

Developing an Alternative to Opioids for Post-Surgical Pain

The approach to post-surgical pain relief has relied on short-duration treatments and notably opioids. That’s led to the associated risks of dependence and abuse, prolonged hospitalizations, and slower recoveries. Allay Therapeutics is developing an alternative to opioids to treat post-surgical pain with an initial focus on knee replacement surgeries. Allay’s guitar pick-sized polymer is implanted during surgical procedures and it releases the analgesic bupivacaine as it dissolves over 30 days. We spoke to Adam Gridley, CEO of Allay Therapeutics, about post-surgical pain, the need for alternatives to opioids; and the company’s implanted, extended-release analgesic.

Leveraging the Power of Vocal Biomarkers

Physicians can learn a lot from talking to patients, and not just from the words they say, but from millions of data points from acoustic features of their speech, such as pitch, vocal cord vibration patterns, and micro-instabilities in the voice. Canary Speech has developed an AI-based diagnostic listening tool that can detect neurological and psychiatric conditions from physiological signals in the voice. We spoke to Kang Hsu, chief medical officer of Canary Speech, about how its diagnostic tool works, how it is embedded invisibly into clinical workflows, and how the company is driving physician adoption.

Determining the Cause and Severity of Sepsis with a Point-of-Care Test

Sepsis remains one of medicine’s most intractable and costly problems, arising when an infection triggers a runaway immune response that damages organs long after a pathogen is controlled. It accounts for an estimated $53 billion in Medicare spending alone, yet more than a hundred drug trials have failed to yield a single approved drug that directly treats the underlying immune dysfunction. Inflam­matix, which grew out of work at Stanford University, has developed a point-of-care blood test to determine whether an infection is bacterial or viral, as well as the severity of the patient’s immune response to optimize treatment. We spoke to Tim Sweeney, CEO of Inflammatix, about the company’s TriVerity test for sepsis, how it works, and how it is used in an ER setting to determine who needs antibiotics, ICU‑level care, or a broader diagnostic workup.​

Separating Signal from Noise in Regenerative Therapies

Rion is developing platelet-derived exosome therapeutics as off-the-shelf, room-temperature-stable alternatives to traditional cell therapies. The company’s lead program is advancing toward phase 3 trials in diabetic foot ulcers, and it is building a broader pipeline across musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, pulmonary, dermatologic, and women’s health indications. The company is built on stem cell research conducted at the Mayo Clinic that showed that regenerative benefits from treatments stemmed from exosome-mediated biological signaling that promoted healing rather than from transplanted stem cells themselves. We spoke to Atta Behfar, co-founder and CEO of RION, about how the company’s purified exosome products work, their potential as scalable, cost-effective regenerative therapies, and how they avoid the immune issues that have long hampered cell-based approaches.

Rewriting Drug Discovery with an AI-Multi-Omics Approach

The genomics revolution promised to unravel diseases and lead to treatments that addressed their root causes. In reality, says Mo Jain, your zip code remains a better predictor for how healthy you will be over the course of your life than your genetic code does. That’s because, except for monogenic diseases, etiology tends to be far more complex than the identification of a single gene. Sapient is using its AI-driven, multi-omics platform to advance the discovery and development of precision medicines. We spoke to Jain, chief scientific officer of Sapient, about how its technology bridges the gap from discovery to clinical development, accelerates drug development timelines, and expands opportunities to drug previously undruggable targets.

Overcoming Chemoresistance and Activating the Immune System in Difficult-to-Treat Cancers

The enzyme GSK3β, in healthy cells, is involved in glucose metabolism. In cancer cells, though, it serves as a master regulator of tumor growth, progression, and cell survival. While GSK3β has long been an attractive target in cancer therapy, it has been difficult to inhibit due to the poor pharmaceutical characteristics and adverse effects of therapeutic candidates. Actuate Therapeutics’ experimental therapy elraglusib has shown early promise. Results suggest it not only suppresses tumor growth but also activates the immune system to combat cancer. We spoke to Dan Schmitt, president and CEO of Actuate Therapeutics, about elraglusib’s potential to overcome chemoresistance, its recent clinical successes in metastatic pancreatic cancer, and the drug’s unique multimodal mechanism.

A Hub-and-Spoke Ophthalmology Company with an Eye for Innovation

Hub-and-spoke business models—the use of a central core of business functions with pipeline assets spun out into subsidiary companies—have gained traction for the benefits they can provide in terms of capital efficiency, diversification of risks, and improved access to capital. Eyexora is applying that business model to accelerate the development of therapies for ophthalmic indications. We spoke to Theresa Heah, CEO of Eyexora, about why the hub-and-spoke model is well-suited for the development of ophthalmic therapies, its initial assets in-licensed from the Singapore Eye Research Institute, and how it identifies early-stage candidates with high potential.

An AI Collaborative that Welcomes All into the Fold

OpenFold, an open-source, collaborative initiative founded in 2022 to address the challenges of protein structure prediction and design using artificial intelligence, emerged as a response to the restricted commercial access to DeepMind’s AlphaFold platform. Leveraging public datasets and using a pre-competitive consortium model, OpenFold seeks to democratize cutting-edge protein engineering tools for both industry and academia. We spoke to ​Brian Weitzner, director of computational and structural biology at Outpace Bio and co-founder of OpenFold, about the creation of the collaborative effort, how its open licensing model ensures broad accessibility, and how it stacks up against AlphaFold.