Lab to Startup

Russ Salakhutdinov, PhD., is the UPMC professor in the Machine Learning Department, in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the CSO at Sooth Labs,; President Elect ICML Board; Ex-VP of Research at Meta; Director of AI Research at Apple,

Russ Salakhutdinov's students at Carnegie Mellon University are building the forefront of AI and Robotics. Zhilin Yang founded Moonshot AI; Jimmy Ba co-founded xAI; Devendra Chaplot is at Thinking Machines and Mistral; Nitish Srivastava co-founded Vayu Robotics and Perceptual Machines. His alumni populate Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, X AI, Meta's Superintelligence Lab, and the list goes on. His students wrote the Dropout paper and the Adam optimizer papers, which trained every major model in the last decade. And Russ will tell you "it's not about him". Today on Lab to Startup, we're going to learn about the magic that happens in his lab. Because one advisor doesn't produce this many founders and researchers by accident. We also explored a few other topics like AI in drug discovery, building Sooth labs, and Geoffrey Hinton's views about AI as an existential threat.

Russ received his PhD in machine learning from the University of Toronto in 2009 working for Nobel Laureate, Geoffrey Hinton, considered the God Father of AI.

• Reasons for such level of success: Luck, student conviction, environment, freedom to explore

• Russ's beginnings at Geoffrey Hinton's lab: Freedom to explore, colleagues with Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Yann André Le Cun, amongst others

• Power of conviction

• Russ's lab absolutely believes in

• Early days were based on models; and now, we are in the age of scaling

• Some things work better at scale

• A little less innovation in industry compared to academia. In industry, innovation happens around scale

• What it takes to believe in something before the rest of the world does

• How can a professor/advisor help these self driven, high conviction students working in their labs?

• Paper reviews are complex, especially when they reject it

• Publishing is good, but people are looking for impact! Don't just optimize for publications

• Scientific community doesn't understand the role of scaling

• Balancing being a skeptic and also supporting a student as a professor

• Building Sooth Labs

• Teaching about AI to kids

• Coming up with ideas

• AI in drug discovery

• Supporting students when things are not going well

• Geoff Hinton now warns the world about existential AI risk.

Nitin Joshi is the CEO and co-founder of CAGE Bio, a clinical-stage company using an ionic liquid platform to deliver drugs into the skin while keeping them out of the bloodstream. He is also a rare kind of founder: someone who spent decades inside pharma companies like Elan and ALZA before building anything of his own, and who has now done it three times. We start with the science. What an ionic liquid actually is, why a deep eutectic system solves the biocompatibility problems that stalled earlier work in the field, and why local concentration with minimal systemic exposure changes what is possible in dermatology. Then we get to CGB-600, a topical DNA aptamer. Pushing a ten kilodalton oligonucleotide through skin was considered functionally impossible ten years ago. Nitin explains how that program came together, and the harder question underneath it: how a founder knows when to trust a platform's reach and when to stay disciplined. The second half is about how he builds. Incline Therapeutics, which he pulled out of a shelved ALZA program and took to market before its acquisition by The Medicines Company. inTUMO, carved out of solid-tumor work. What living through two exits taught him about designing a therapeutics company for acquisition from day one without distorting the science. And how roughly $18M has carried CAGE Bio to two Phase 2 assets, a program headed toward Phase 3, and a preclinical collaboration with Mayo Clinic. This episode has great lessons both for aspiring entrepreneurs building therapeutics startups and a special treat for a mid-career scientist sitting on an idea and wondering whether the window has closed.

Shownotes

• https://cagebio.com/

• Problems being solved at Cage Bio

• Challenges delivering to skin & issues with systemic delivery to treat skin diseases

• What are ionic liquids and how they are being used to treat skin diseases

• Collaboration between three labs: UC Santa Barbara, Northern Arizona University, Los Alamos

• History of ionic liquids and their evolution to deliver drugs (Choline+Geranic acid)

• Invention vs formulation

• Mitragotri Lab for drug delivery at Harvard University

• 3 Immuno-dermatology programs- Atopic dermatitis, Alopecia Areata, Vitiligo

• Building the company in Dallas-Fortworth

• Delivering 10KDa Oligonucleotide

• Experienced biotech executives founding startups: Founding story

• Incline Therapeutics, IONSYS, and rescuing a shelved program

• inTUMO and the loco-regional approach to solid tumors

• Designing a therapeutics company for acquisition

• Platform play vs Product company

• Discipline in fundraising- generally lower cost in dermatology and focus on efficiency

• Fund raising story:Capital efficiency on roughly $18M

• Building in Dallas-Fort Worth

• Unlearning lessons from working in the industry vs lessons that helped as an experienced operator transitioning to founder CEO position

• Advice for the forty-five-year-old scientist with an idea

• Let the team take the credit for wins and take the credit for the failures

Mehdi Kargar, Ph.D., is the CEO and Cofounder of Maxterial. They arecommercializing an affordable metallic coating to protect surfaces against extreme environments and to reduce the use of hexavalent chrome, and cyanides, known to cause cancers. This is the story about how Maxterial cracked the code to replacing Hexavalent Chromium without sacrificing cost, speed, or performance, and the decade of near-deaths, grit, and serendipity it took to build a deep tech revolution.

Maxterial received seed-stage funds from Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs, then backed by the Corporate Venture arms of Saint Gobain and Anglo American; the NSF, and now the U.S. Department of Defense'. In a major development, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee has approved a bill to provide $5M in 2027 for the further evaluation and adoption of their technology, MaxShield.

Shownotes

• https://www.maxterial.com/

• Problems with hexavalent chromium (also known as chromium-6) and why it has been difficult to

• Product ecosystem fit: Founder is basically having to create a whole ecosystem for the product while developing good ROI for everyone involved.

• Solution: Nickel & Molybdenum alloy

• Listen to customers! They might be looking at a different use for your technology

• Evolution of technology: From grad school (Virginia Tech) to startup- pivot from focusing on publications to patents

• Serendipity: Scanning Electron Microscopy image that lead to bigger use cases

• As a founder, be less rigid!

• Pitch to Peter Thiel's investment arm https://breakout.vc/ that won them over by saying: "Good entrepreneurs are like a superbug (MRSA). I am going to build this startup successfully!"

• Move from Blacksburg, VA (Virginia Tech) to Silicon Valley: Why moving to better startup ecosystems was important

• For startups/aspiring founders, trade shows are a better place to understand industry needs

• Evolution of customers

• A "No" from anyone during the journey can change into Yes by persistence- always work towards it

• Invest in relations: People invest in people

• Kindness of strangers

• Working with the government: "Applying for SBIR and getting money is not working with the government!"

• Understanding the ecosystem: Working with DoD, lobbyists, retired personnel from armed forces

• Maxterial's MaxShield aims to replace hard chrome in cylinder use

Doug Crawford, Ph.D., is the founder of MBC BioLabs and also a Managing General Partner of Mission BioCapital. Doug's goal is to help entrepreneurial scientists create successful startups. His dream is that every entrepreneurial scientist with a dream be given a chance. Since its founding, this program has helped launch 500 companies and helped raise over $20 billion in capital.

Robert Blazej, Ph.D., is a Partner at Mission BioCapital and Director at MBC BioLabs. He is a passionate biotechnologist with a diverse skillset spanning business, life science, engineering and intellectual property. Robert Blazej brings 10 years of operational experience both as a successful entrepreneur and as a leader within an international corporation. Previously, Robert was CEO of Allopartis Biotechnologies, a company he co-founded with the vision that microdroplets would transform the scale and pace of life science research. Allopartis was acquired by Novozymes in 2013.

This conversation can be considered as the 2026 State of the Union for early-stage biotech. The biotech landscape has shifted drastically- we moved from the grow-at-all-costs zero-interest-rate era to a world of tight capital and high discipline. The undisputed capital of biotech in Boston is facing unprecedented lab vacancies. AI is dominating every pitch deck. And China has rapidly evolved from a manufacturing hub into a multi-billion-dollar discovery engine.

Shownotes

• https://mbcbiolabs.com/; https://www.missionbaycapital.com/

• How did Doug and Robert meet?

• Progress Mission Biolabs made in the past 4 years

• God's eye view of the biotech startup world- What is being built?

• DNA of the founders: repeat founders on the rise

• Capital restraints and advances in science made the current period the best time to launch biotech startups.

• With the advent of AI, we should not be making knowable mistakes

• Companies are using AI to jumpstart what they are going to work on

• Discovery costs are the overall cost of drug discovery- So, don't get too excited!

• How to address reduction in NIH non-dilutive funding

• ⅓ of startups in incubators are serial entrepreneurs; ⅓ are mid-career scientists from established companies

• Comparing Boston and the Bay area biotech ecosystems

• 73% of pharma's revenues are from discoveries sourced externally

• Alternate models: Arena bioworks, Arc Institute, Chan Zuckerberg institute

• Book recommendation - Thinking in Bets

• Actual impact of AI at Mission Biolabs

• Where Ai might have the most impact- healthcare delivery?

• China affairs: Regulatory changes, investments, return of talent

• European biotech affairs

Jared O'Leary, Ph.D., is the co-founder and CEO of SirenOpt, and Ali Mesbah, Ph.D. is his cofounder and also his former PhD advisor. Ali is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley.

SirenOpt is a Berkeley spin-out that is solving one of manufacturing's biggest blind spots.

Their PlasmaSens platform uses cold atmospheric plasma and AI to non-destructively inspect thin films and nanomaterials in real-time—catching defects and inconsistencies that traditional methods miss entirely. They're helping manufacturers of batteries, semiconductors, and aerospace components accelerate R&D, optimize production, and dramatically improve quality control.

In this episode of Lab to startup, we talk about how the industry currently solves the problems, and how SirenOpt is improving them; Then we deep dive into their technology; the origins of the startup from research at UC Berkeley; customer discovery, especially importance of relationship building and how it is different from just interviewing potential customers; lessons from working with industry; their fundraising journey and many other topics including Jared's experience working at Theranos.

Shownotes:

• https://www.sirenopt.com/

• Advance coatings, thin films and micro/nano scale materials are critical in several industries. But manufacturing these components are inherently probabilistic

• SirenOpt providing hardware and software solutions for real time tracking

• Overview of current solutions

• SirenOpt technology overview

• Initial medical applications

• Challenges with cold atmospheric pressure plasma

• Transition from an academic project to startup journey

• Feedback from industry

• Lessons from Jared working at Theranos

• Importance of transparency and building trust while working with customers

• Importance of academic thinking while building deeptech startups

• Market exploration: Foray into battery industry

• Customer discovery vs relationship building

• Support from Ali: from an academia-industry relationship point of view

• Venture scalability: Demonstrating the size of the market

• Working with semiconductor industry

• Lessons from working with academic PI as your cofounder

• Fundraising journey

• Role played by accelerators and incubators: Berkeley Skydeck & Activate

• Lessons from hiring

• Long term vision & lessons transitioning from academic scientist to a startup CEO

Yogev Debbi and Prof Avi Schroeder (Technion Israel Institute of Technology), co-founded Mana bio along with Dr. Kira Radinsky and Roy Nevo. They are leveraging data, machine learning and high throughput screening to design novel Lipid NanoParticles for targeted extrahepatic delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics and vaccines. Lipid nanoparticles are microscopic fatty bubbles that deliver genetic medicines into your cells—think of them as the FedEx trucks of molecular biology. Remember the mRNA vaccines that saved millions during COVID? They used lipid nano particles as the delivery vehicle.. The little secret behind those vaccines is that we got lucky. Those lipid nanoparticles worked beautifully for the liver and immune system. But if you try to deliver RNA to your brain, your lungs, or a tumor, those would be a massive failure! Scientists are still running thousands of experiments hoping to stumble onto the right formulation. This actually was my postdoc work as well, which makes this episode very special. I always wished there was a better way to design these delivery vehicles—and that's exactly what today's guests have built with AI." We talk about how they founded and currently building Mana Bio- a big part around how biologists and chemists can interact with technologists, especially data and AI geeks to build something important. Their story provides a great framework for scientists and tech folks to work together. Shownotes:

• https://www.mana.bio/
• How Avi got started using data/AI to design LNPs
• Optimizing LNP formulations targeting different organs
• Working with Bob Langer and Dan Anderson @MIT
• Yogev transitioning to gene editing
• Defining the problem & cross disciplinary conversations and projects
• Language that helps interactions between scientists and software/AI folks
• Deepdive into the platform- building data sets
• Data scraping, validation, improvisation, new data generation (both positive and negative data)
• Cleaning data and normalization
• Work in the wet lab: 'I trust my colleagues and believe data can be replicated"
• Data moats: Proprietary data vs public data
• Daily routine in the lab and interactions with the data/AI team
• Cross Functional dynamics
• Scientists trying to save money vs optimizing for more valuable time
• Lab hypothesis predictions vs AI predictions: competitive spirit
• Factoring in errors by the machines and humans
• Business model: Building customized solutions for drug delivery
• Potentially becoming a pharma company
• Regulatory affairs
• Fears that keep them up
• Dynamics of a diverse founding team: Roy Nevo and Dr. Kira Radinsky (the other two co founders)
• Message to academia: "Publish more data- including failures. This will accelerate science"
• Omri Drory, Kira Radinsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5hX3vq3iNk

Dana Foss and Ross Wilson are the cofounders of Editpep, a biotech startup focused on developing CRISPR-based therapeutics. They are using a proprietary peptide-based delivery platform that enables targeted delivery to specific cell types, particularly for hard-to-reach areas like the brain.

While Dana Foss is the CEO, Ross Wilson is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and also the Director of Therapeutic Delivery at the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of those very few academics that co-founded a startup and is very active in building Editpep. Ross explains how he does it all so well!

Dana was previously a postdoc in Ross Wilson's lab, where she developed the technology. Ross was a postdoc in Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna's lab. Now he has his own lab and collaborates with Jennifer Doudna at the Innovative Genomics Institute.

In this episode of lab to startup, we will explore their initial decisions that lead to launching the startup; existing CRISPR delivery technologies, their challenges, and then do a deep dive into their delivery technology. opportunities,; fundraising efforts, and their future goals.

Shownotes

• https://www.editpep.bio/
• CRISPR Delivery problem and current solutions
• Existing solutions like AV, LNPs are mostly limited to mice
• Ribonucleoprotein, a complex of RNA and protein (RNP): Technology deep dive
• Outsiders bringing in fresh perspective
• Dana transitioning out of academia: working on a shared goal
• Hard to shepard the technology towards the patient by depending on a third party
• Self motivation and gumption: Ways to move technologies out of the lab
• Early stage co-founder chemistry
• Ross's innovative role being an academic and entrepreneur
• Fundraising journey
• Open mindedness to non-traditional investors
• Investors: Berkeley Skydeck, Lindonlight Collective
• Filters for selecting investors
• Getting to market: Parallels from other delivery companies like Alnylam
• Counterintuitive decisions
• Future goals
• Connecting the dots

Chandana Haque is the Executive Director of Altitude Lab, a healthcare startup accelerator building a community of diverse entrepreneurs in Utah. Altitude Lab was cofounded in 2020 by Chandana and Chris Gibson, the co-founder & CEO of Recursion in Salt Lake City. They recently announced the launch of a pre-seed venture fund aimed at supporting early-stage biotech startups impacted by recent federal funding policy shifts.

This pre-seed venture fund is dedicated to funding the highest impact ideas transitioning from basic research to industry. In partnership with Altitude Lab, they provide capital, lab space, and mentorship to high-potential SBIR reviewed companies, offering continuity for startups affected by recent funding policy changes while strengthening Salt Lake City's position as a national biotech hub.

We talk about the Altitude fund, Altitude lab, lessons learned from other ecosystems; support from Recursion, better ways to support healthcare founders and many other topics.

Shownotes

• Altitude lab fund: a pre-seed venture fund dedicated to funding the highest impact ideas transitioning from basic research to industry.

• Fund announcement: https://ir.recursion.com/news-releases/news-release-details/altitude-lab-launches-pre-seed-venture-fund-anchored-recursion

• Altitude labs: a health care accelerator building a community of diverse entrepreneurs in Utah

• Lessons learned (and unlearned) from Boston and Bay Area startup ecosystems

• Criteria for selection: Technology vs market readiness

• Founder fit, connecting founders to the right resources

• Turning a scrappy startup to a fundable one

• Overhyped areas in biotech

• Finding winners and lost opportunities

• Support from Recursion Pharma

• Supporting diversity: Anecdotes of diverse founders

• Support from the University of Utah

Monica Rosoff, the founder and CEO of LBBAL™ Alianza. Prior to launching Alianza, Monica was a partnering executive with roles of increasing seniority at Genentech, Gilead, Kite and Exelixis. Over the course of over two decades, she had the opportunity to lead and participate in a wide diversity of deals, negotiations, diligence exercises, alliances, technology transfers, M&A integrations, dispute resolution negotiations, amendments and terminations–at all stages of the drug development and commercialization lifecycle and in multiple therapeutic areas.

Dr. Rosoff earned a doctorate in Pharmacology from the University of Washington and conducted her postdoctoral work at Stanford. We talked about lessons learned from her experiences in alliance management, especially for early stage startups.

Shownotes

Monica Rosoff https://lbbalalianza.com/

• Monica's entry into alliance management

• Principles that guide a good partnership: What's best for the patient? Find synergies, timing and motivations

• Who to approach at a big pharma when identifying a partner?

• Evaluating motivations of a big pharma: Get specific

• Building trust

• Performing due diligence-How?

• Power dynamics: How to deal with a big partner when you have a power imbalance?

• Role of lawyers

• Communicating failures

• Have a list of "To-dont's" as opposed to "To-do" list

• Conflicts might be important

• Repeating problems: Lessons learned

• How to prepare for unexpected changes at big companies?

• Conflict resolution: What to pick fights on?

• Allocating resources

Zack Shildhorn is an investing Partner at venture firm Lux Capital. He played multiple key roles that helped the firm scale from less than $100M to more than $4B in assets under management. After witnessing thousands of pitches, he saw that even the most disruptive startups often struggled to develop effective narratives.

Having worked closely with leading technology companies as an investor and Board member, he brings a unique ability to connect with key stakeholders and distill complex ideas into engaging and relatable presentations.

In order to help founders beyond Lux, He launched a firm called Series Z, to help a select group of tech companies and funds bring their vision to life. Zack also recently partnered with Khosla ventures to help founders there as well.

Zack kindly agreed to share some of the lessons from his experience teaching the art of storytelling to founders and VCs. I think you will benefit tremendously from this episode.

Show Notes:

Series Z: https://www.series-z.co/

Zack Schildhorn: https://x.com/zacktrak

• Most founders are in a challenged position

• Repetition, iteration, feedback

• Founders have the disadvantage of not knowing an investor's mindset

• Selling vision: Why should investors care?

• Framing your pitch: Ways to capture investor's attention

• How to appeal to the emotions of an investor? Fear and greed

• Starting a presentation with words and not slides

• Presenting technical idea: How not to inundate listeners with too much data

• Reframing problems: Addressing known apprehensions

• How to not get offended by a question or being defensive?

Media links:

Power of Narrative for Entrepreneurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-llii7frwco

Framing your pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4V89rywlR0

Pitching investors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYkOoRJGuvk