ImmuneBridge

I am beyond excited to announce that I have been promoted to Chief Scientific Officer at ImmuneBridge! This is something that, until recently, I had only dreamed about - to be honest, it’s still sinking in that this is real and the company I love so deeply is giving me an opportunity to steer the ship. I joined ImmuneBridge two years and ten days ago as Head of Research for our NK Therapeutics division. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, fresh out of Stanford University with zero knowledge of what it actually takes to get a therapy into the clinic for patients who need it. But I did know one thing with absolute certainty: the technology developed by ImmuneBridge represents the best design and manufacturing approach for cell therapies. In the two+ years I’ve been here, that hasn’t changed at all. What has changed is the amount of love and respect I have for the scientific and leadership teams at this tiny, gritty, visionary, passionate startup. We have grown from just being coworkers into a real team that asks the hard questions, faces adversity head-on, and has fun along the way. The scientists fuel my fire every day by teaching me something new or rolling up their sleeves to help their teammate during a twelve hour assay day. The leaders push me to grow, embrace uncertainty, and always remember why I’m on this path. I am incredibly lucky. I need to give a lot of credit to my team for getting me to this point. I have earned this opportunity because I built a group of truly astounding researchers - they design and execute killer experiments, turn complex data into beautiful figures, and make me look like a good manager because they actually just manage themselves! Their success in the lab, and the stellar work done by the Process Development team (led by Rui Tostoes), has enabled us to unlock critical milestones for our cell manufacturing pipeline. In parallel, our Computational Biology team (led by Oliver Zill and Miguel Madero) has generated striking data proving the power of our donor screening platform. This gives us the confidence to kick off a new funding round, and I’m thrilled to represent us in that process.

I just got back from San Diego, and my brain is still processing! Serving as the chair for the 2nd Annual Donor Selection & Cell Source Summit was one of the highlights of my year. It was so refreshing to hear frank discussion around the (sometimes comical) challenges of donor recruitment & retention, the wild west of semi-scalable cell manufacturing and cryopreservation, and the pros and cons of various cell types as starting material. I left feeling truly fired up about some donor tracking challenges that I’m hoping we can actually solve if we work together - more on that at a later date - and with some new scientific bonds forged that may lead to fruitful partnerships. In my opening remarks, I asked about people’s preferred ripeness for their bananas to underscore how different our opinions can be on something seemingly quite simple. If we all differ in our desired donor metrics AND the way we calculate or measure those metrics, we’ll never make any progress! So as part of my closing remarks, I listed some new terms I think the field should adopt so we can begin quantifying things in similar ways and aligning on a common language for preclinical development and commercial manufacturing. I was asked to post those on LinkedIn to foster discussion, and here they are: CDA = Critical Donor Attribute (age, sex, prior mobilization status, etc.) CMA = Critical Material Attribute (cell count, viability, etc.) CQA = Critical Quality Attribute (of final product) CPA = Critical Patient Attribute (antigen positivity, etc.) LOSR = Likelihood of Successful Recall (of a donor, ranked 0 to 1 with 1 being 100% certainty they will come back - although based on our discussions, this seems impossible to achieve) DDV = Donor-Driven Variability (same process, different donors) CDV = Collection-Driven Variability (same donor, different collections) BDV = Batch-Driven Variability (same sample, split and processed twice the same way) PDV = Process-Driven Variability (same sample, processed two different ways) These are essentially “standard deviation” measurements and can give people an idea of how consistent or variable a final product is based on differences in the donor, sample, batch, or process. Ideally, BDV and CDV remain low while PDV and DDV can both be quite extreme - and we need to learn how to harness that! And lastly, I hope the cord blood banks start adopting YOBO (you’re only born once) to emphasize the precious and irreplaceable nature of their samples! Huge thanks to Colleen Delaney, Lee Buckler, Stacey Cranert, Ivone Bruno, PhD, Karen Moniz, MHA, and so many others for the compelling presentations and discussions. Great job Evey Hegewisch Solloa, PhD and the team at ImmuneBridge for generating the awesome data we showcased in our talk. And thank you as always to Rochelle Samuel for organizing. I can’t wait to see how much we achieve by next year’s summit! #donorselection #allogeneictherapy #celltherapy #cellmanufacturing #NKcells #Tcells

?? Big news! The official calendar of events for #SFTechWeek and #LATechWeek is now LIVE! And thrilled to announce that this is officially our BIGGEST Tech Week, ever! - 850+ events ?? - San Francisco: Oct 7-13 ?? - Los Angeles: Oct 14-20 ?? Link to register below to see all events?? Sneak peek of a few events you can't miss... - The Future of Entertainment with Andrew Chen (a16z), Carter Reum (M13), Jeffrey Evans (Mantis), David Sabow (HSBC) - Founder Fireside Chat with Chris Best, Substack Founder & CEO - Game Changers: Breakfast with Fenwick and a16z with Jonathan Lai (a16z GP) and Kat Duncan (Partner, Fenwick) - How Design, Story, and AI are Changing Software with Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway - AI Breakthrough: Finding Product-Market Fit with executives from Mistral AI, Pinecone, Anyscale, HSBC and a16z - SPEEDRUN Demo Day by A16Z GAMES 40%+ of the events self-report having an AI theme. We're also seeing a ton of diversity in topics, including: B2B, fundraising/investing, fintech, engineering, deeptech, infra, consumer, games, media/entertainment, SaaS... In just 2 years, the Tech Week community has grown to 100k+ folks and has evolved from primarily VC deal flow to deal flow AND a diverse range of use cases: - B2B Lead Generation - Product Launches - Sourcing Talent - Meeting Investors / Fundraising - Brand Building It's been amazing to see Tech Week serve as a bridge between different cities, connecting the SF, LA, and NY ecosystems. Our back-to-back scheduling for SF and LA is designed to encourage cross-pollination. ??Tech Week wouldn’t be possible without incredible partners. Thank you to Andreessen Horowitz Fenwick & West, HSBC Innovation Banking, Dialpad, Stripe, Atlassian, PwC, and Nasdaq for your support and belief in the mission ?? And Tech Week would not be possible without the incredible (and growing!) team behind it - huge shoutout to Andrew Chen Rose Johnson Shrikala Kashyap Joung Lee for your dedication to the community ?? Make sure you're following us at TECH WEEK by a16z for more updates, and register at tech-week.com!