The Bio Report

Hosted by Levine Media Group

Business ScienceExplicit

Website RSS feed

Episodes

628

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

About the show

The Bio Report podcast, hosted by award-winning journalist Daniel Levine, focuses on the intersection of biotechnology with business, science, and policy.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 12, 2026Episode 18738 min

How Gilead Is Building Durable Oncology and Immunology Franchises

Gilead today stands at an inflection point. Its HIV and broader virology business still account for roughly two-thirds of total revenue, even as oncology has grown into a mid–single-digit billion-dollar franchise and inflammation and immunology remain earlier-stage bets. The company is tackling the strategic challenge of diversifying beyond HIV while preserving its leadership in virology. Chief Medical Officer Dietmar Berger discusses how the company is raising the bar for mechanistic understanding before making major investments, using targeted acquisitions to build platform-based franchises, and bringing in differentiated therapies and platforms that can be applied across solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, and even future viral threats.

August 5, 2026Episode 18629 min

Protecting the Brain After Stroke

Ischemic stroke remains one of the most devastating and resource‑intensive emergencies in medicine, with the physical removal of a clot, the current gold-standard care, still leaving more than half of patients with poor outcomes at 90 days. Revalesio is developing a next‑generation, oxygenated saline infusion designed to protect the brain during and after clot removal by stimulating mitochondrial function, reducing reperfusion injury, and limiting the spread of damage to surrounding tissue. Revalesio president Greg Archambeau discusses how the company’s experimental therapy may reshape the trajectory of stroke recovery, shorten hospital stays, and change the economics of stroke centers.

July 29, 2026Episode 18538 min

Turning the Thymus into an Engine of Immune Tolerance in T1D and Beyond

Type 1 diabetes is still a disease we manage day‑to‑day rather than prevent, and today’s approaches do little to stop the immune system from attacking beta cells in the first place. Zag Bio is trying to change that by turning the thymus, the body’s training ground for T cells, into a therapeutic engine for immune tolerance, using thymus‑homing antibodies to program long‑lived, antigen‑specific Tregs against type 1 diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. Zag Bio CEO Jason Cole discusses type 1 diabetes, how the company’s thymic training platform fits into the emerging tolerance landscape alongside cell therapies and nanoparticle approaches, and the potential to extend this strategy to a broader set of autoimmune diseases.

July 22, 2026Episode 18425 min

Unlocking Major Targets with Mini Proteins

Most small molecule drugs and biologics miss a large group of important receptors in the body. These receptors, known as GPCRs, play big roles in major diseases, but they are unusually hard to target in a precise and safe way. Skape Bio is trying to change that by using artificial intelligence to design an emerging class of therapies known as mini proteins that can fit these receptors snugly and control them in ways traditional drugs often can’t. Christoffer Norn, co‑founder and CEO of Skape Bio, discusses how mini proteins share strengths of both small molecules and biologics while avoiding some of their weaknesses, why the company’s approach could open up new therapeutic opportunities, and how Skape Bio is building a broad pipeline of differentiated GPCR‑targeting therapies.

July 15, 2026Episode 18341 min

Addressing a Data Problem to Enable AI-Drug Discovery

AI’s promise in drug discovery is being held back by a simple but stubborn problem: the field doesn’t have enough of the right kind of lab-generated data to train good models. Public databases and scattered studies give a patchy view of how proteins interact, mostly showing successful interactions and using different methods and conditions, which makes it hard for AI systems to learn broad rules or understand what doesn’t work. A-Alpha Bio tackles this data gap with AlphaSeq, a lab platform that can test around a million protein pairs in one experiment under the same conditions, producing rich, consistent information on both hits and misses that’s well suited for AI. David Younger, co-founder and CEO of A-Alpha Bio, talks about why far more lab data and infrastructure will be needed than most people expect, why current public datasets fall short, and why the company’s business model is built around providing data and services rather than developing its own drugs.

July 8, 2026Episode 18229 min

Turning Multi Specific Antibody Design into an Engineering Discipline with AI

Multi-specific antibodies promise to unlock complex biology that conventional monoclonals can’t touch, but their added mechanisms of action also introduce safety and developability risks. These antibodies—especially T‑cell engagers—behave differently from traditional monospecific antibodies, and seemingly minor architectural tweaks can cause disproportionate shifts in potency, selectivity, and cytokine release. LabGenius is trying to turn multi-specific design from an intuition-driven art into a genuine engineering discipline by generating proprietary data at scale and feeding them back into machine learning models. Angus Sinclair, chief scientific officer of LabGenius, discusses why many safety failures in early solid-tumor T‑cell engagers were effectively locked in at design, how the company’s AI platform engineers multi-specific T‑cell engagers that are both potent and selective in solid tumors, and where AI is actually adding value in multi-specific design today.

July 1, 2026Episode 18130 min

Addressing the Treatment Gap in Ischemic Stroke

Acute ischemic stroke is both ubiquitous and undertreated. Only a small fraction of patients currently receive clot-busting drugs or mechanical thrombectomy because of the small treatment window. That’s because existing therapies require rapid presentation to specialized centers and carry nonreversible bleeding risks that make clinicians hesitant to use them. Basking Biosciences is developing a first-in-class, reversible thrombolytic that targets von Willebrand factor to expand access to safe, effective treatment. Basking Biosciences CEO Julia Owens and co-founder and chief scientific officer Shahid Nimjee discuss the tension between restoring blood flow and causing irreversible intracranial hemorrhage that clinicians face in treating ischemic stroke, the narrow treatment window for existing therapies, and how modulating von Willebrand factor may open a much larger treatment window across a broader range of care settings.

June 24, 2026Episode 18024 min

A Pipeline in a Product that Reimagines Control of Inflammation

Plasma gelsolin is an abundant, endogenous regulator of inflammation that is consumed during severe inflammatory insults. When levels fall too low, patients are at higher risk of organ damage and death, particularly in settings like acute respiratory distress syndrome where a dysregulated inflammatory response floods the lungs with fluid and leaves patients dependent on ventilatory support with no approved therapies today. BioAegis Therapeutics is working to turn recombinant human plasma gelsolin into a pipeline-in-a-product. Susan Levinson, CEO of BioAegis, discusses recombinant human plasma gelsolin as a potential first-in-class treatment for ARDS and other inflammasome-driven conditions, how it modulates cytokine storms without suppressing the immune system, and its potential in other conditions including neurodegenerative diseases.

June 17, 2026Episode 17952 min

Building a Genetics Engine to Crack the Target Bottleneck

A chronic shortage of high‑quality targets remains one of the biggest constraints in drug discovery, even as therapeutic tools become more powerful and diverse. Regeneron is tackling that problem with its Regeneron Genetics Center, which has built a genetics‑driven discovery engine that integrates human genetics with rich clinical data, large‑scale proteomics, and AI‑driven analytics. Aris Baras, head of the Regeneron Genetics Center, discusses how proteomics is reshaping RGC’s view of risk prediction, how AI helps his team sift through hundreds of millions of variants, and what it really takes to scale this kind of effort and translate it into more successful, transformative therapies for patients.

June 10, 2026Episode 17828 min

Stopping Shape-Shifting Tumors with a First-in-Class Epigenetic Drug

Epigenetics, the layer of chemical switches that controls how genes are turned on and off, can act like cancer’s operating system when a single epigenetic enzyme becomes essential for a tumor to survive. K36 Therapeutics is developing first‑in‑class medicines that block an epigenetic enzyme that helps certain multiple myeloma cells grow, change identity to escape treatment, and become resistant to today’s drugs. Terry Connolly, CEO of K36, discusses a new way to fight cancer by changing how cancer cells read their DNA instead of chasing one mutation at a time, how K36’s experimental therapies aim to re‑sensitize tumors to existing treatments, and the potential to create new options for people whose cancers have stopped responding.