Bryan Faust, PhD

I was honored to contribute insights to this piece on San Diego's biotech ecosystem—a market I've watched evolve significantly over 27 years in healthcare and life sciences. The article features 11 powerhouse companies, from Illumina and Thermo Fisher to emerging leaders like Element Biosciences and Crinetics. But beyond the profiles, it captures something essential about what makes San Diego different. Three observations from the ground: 1. Density without bureaucracy. The Mesa creates a true innovation corridor—UC San Diego, Salk, Scripps Research, and Sanford Burnham Prebys interweave with startups and scaled biopharma. This proximity reduces friction for diligence, talent recruitment, and specialized services in ways Boston and the Bay Area can't replicate. 2. Science-led, but transaction-optimized. San Diego has evolved from "discovery-first" to a complete company-building engine. Teams now design programs around pivotal endpoints, clean CMC plans, and partner-ready data packages earlier. Good science doesn't just get published here—it gets built. 3. Capital is increasingly earned. We're seeing more structured financing (tranched rounds, milestone-based pay-ins), CVRs, and hybrid collaborations. Strategic partners underwrite risk more explicitly. The winning teams treat capital strategy as a product—staging proof points and designing deal structures that preserve upside while de-risking 12-24 months out. Looking ahead, I expect San Diego's next growth phase to be defined by modality-driven oncology, neuroscience/neurodegeneration, precision immunology, and industrial-strength enabling platforms. The market increasingly rewards companies that combine compelling biology, manufacturability, and a partner-ready clinical narrative. I hope you find the article worth a read, especially if you're tracking West Coast biotech or thinking about where innovation capital flows most efficiently. #Biotech #LifeSciences #SanDiego #Innovation #InvestmentBanking #Dealmaking #Healthcare

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Great to see Bakar Bio Labs featured in the San Francisco Business Times for reaching a $1 Billion dollar funding milestone. The four-year-old incubator houses 55 biotech startups and graduates. Bakar Labs companies have created approximately 450 jobs total. Read more in the SF business Times: https://lnkd.in/gYEWqSvB

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Biotech has weathered years of layoffs and cash strain, yet one company is growing faster than nearly any in the Bay Area. Cellares, profiled by Ron Leuty for the San Francisco Business Times, has built the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization, uniting every stage of cell therapy production and quality control into one automated system. By helping partners move from research to clinical manufacturing in months instead of years, it is redefining how advanced therapies reach patients. Read the full article to see why Cellares' rise signals a broader shift in biotech toward building for scale, precision and patient impact all at once. https://lnkd.in/eBBVYugy

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Join Iambic Therapeutics’ Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Fred Manby for his presentation "Predictive Drug Discovery with Enchant v2" at the Biocom California Converge Meet-up on September 10th. Fred will detail the continuing evolution of Enchant -- Iambic’s industry-leading machine learning model for molecular property prediction -- and how Enchant is being used to drive small-molecule discovery both for Iambic's pipeline and for partners. Learn more about Enchant V2 here: https://lnkd.in/gRfntzP5 Information on the Converge Meet-Up can be found here: https://lnkd.in/euxxUyxG #AI #TechBio #DrugDiscovery #Biocom #ConvergeMeetUp

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Our Fall 2025 winner of the WIB-San Francisco Bay Area Discovery Award is on a mission to redefine cancer discovery and treatment. 👩‍🔬🌟 Seen Therapeutics, an emerging San Francisco-based startup founded by Althea Stillman, PhD, in June 2025, is focused on uncovering what others can’t see. Using a revolutionary platform that identifies “invisible” protein changes, the team is revealing hidden features of cancer to design therapies that precisely target tumors and leave healthy cells untouched. We’re proud to partner with Women in Bio to champion leading-edge startups led by women entrepreneurs. Since 2022, our collaboration with various chapters has fast tracked six women-led companies into the program, elevating excellence and innovation in the life sciences industry. 💡 Join us at the Innovation Showcase on December 10 to learn more about how Seen Therapeutics is revolutionizing cancer discovery and treatment. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g9RVWNWd

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It was an honor and pleasure to share the stage representing early stage biotech with this illustrious panel. Thanks for moderatingFranklin Rice, and to fellow panelists Lori Hu, Jonathan Norris and Elton Satusky. My takeaways from the event: It is clear that platforms are still viable, they just have to be proven by a lead asset that can make it into the clinic. Our panel agreed that platform supported assets have a strong value proposition in the current fundraising environment, since most stakeholders want to see a pathway to future asset development. That being said, much of the funding in Biotech right now is going to insider extensions and internally seeded mega rounds, leaving many of the most innovative companies with less cash to go around in a tight market. Now more than ever we need VCs to step up and support biotech innovation; as major pharma continue to cut R&D funding, these startups will be the dominant source of novel assets in the coming years. Unless we increase funding to support early stage biotech the pipeline issues seen across pharma will only continue to grow as more and more blockbuster assets reach the end of IP exclusivity. As always Michelle Nemits and Biocom California put on an amazing event. Can't wait for the next in the series!

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Accipiter Biosciences, a Seattle-based biotech startup born from Nobel laureate David Baker’s lab at the Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington, has officially emerged from stealth with $12.7M in funding and partnerships with Pfizer and Kite Pharma. Using advanced AI tools, Accipiter Bio is pioneering a new class of de novo proteins designed to bind to multiple cellular targets at once, which could transform how complex diseases are treated. Led by CEO and co-founder Matthew Bick, the company aims to establish this multi-target protein approach as a new therapeutic modality, building on the idea that coordinated, combination-like therapies can outperform single drugs by acting together at the right biological sites. https://lnkd.in/esQRQhTk #LifeScienceWashington #AcceipiterBio #ProteinDesign #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation

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DCVC company Valar Labs is demonstrably increasing survival time and quality of life for cancer patients, including pancreatic cancer patients

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SV Health Investors took home Exit of the Year at The EUVC Awards 2025 — $1.3 B upfront / up to $3 B total for EyeBio (sold to Merck). I sat down with Charles Dunn (Principal) & Ruth McKernan (CPE, ex-CEO Innovate UK) — the dynamic duo who you'll soon love as much as I've come to. Oh and they're also the team behind the fresh €140 M launch of Draig Therapeutics 🤩 I'm no expert in bio - as I also said a few times throughout the pod - but here's what I took away: 1️⃣ Company creation is still the highest-return play in biotech — if you do it right EyeBio: created by SV in 2020 → sold 4 years later for up to $3 B. Draig: spun out with phase-1-ready assets from Cardiff University → €140 M raised in one of the toughest markets ever. Both started with deep domain experts + SV’s network of repeat operators → instant management team, instant credibility. 2️⃣ The barbell is real in biotech too — but it’s therapeutic area, not just stage Oncology: oversupplied, pharma portfolios already full → lower valuations. Neuroscience / psychiatry: chronically underinvested → massive white space + surging big-pharma appetite (Cerevel $8.7 B, Karuna $14 B, MapLight IPO pipeline). Ruth's explanation was something like “10 years ago everyone fled neuro after late-stage failures. Now biomarkers + digital endpoints have de-risked it — we’re in the ascendancy.” 3️⃣ Platform hype is hard — asset-centric works COVID era: broad platforms raised billions far from the clinic. 2025 reality: pharma acquires for late-stage assets, not discovery engines. SV’s playbook: take the best 2–3 programs that are already past the highest-risk biology → wrap a company with outstanding execution engine around them → massive valuation uplift fast. 4️⃣ Europe’s edge is still world-class foundational science + translational grit 4 of the top 10 global research universities are in the UK. Cardiff’s Medicines Discovery Institute (Wellcome/MRC/Welsh Gov funded) produced Draig’s entire phase-1-ready portfolio before SV wrote a cheque. Problem: growth capital gap remains brutal — best companies still IPO on Nasdaq or get acquired early. 5️⃣ AI in biotech: real, but narrow Speech analytics + digital biomarkers are finally stratifying psychiatric patients (huge for trial success). LLMs cut weeks of complex MEG data explanation down to 8 minutes for fundraising decks. But: no big-pharma buyer is paying $3 B for an AI platform alone — they buy validated drugs. This is the clearest, least-hype conversation on the state of European biotech I've had this year. Full episode on EUVC as always.

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UC Davis has announced two new strategic partnerships aimed at accelerating life science innovation and expanding the impact of Aggie Square.🚀 The first with FLANN Inc., an international bio-pharma accelerator, and another with HM Venture, a leading healthcare-focused venture capital firm. These partnerships aim to attract global biotech startups and fast-track the commercialization of cutting-edge advancements in human health through Aggie Square. 🎉#AggieSquare, a development by Wexford Science & Technology, is University of California, Davis’ new innovation district in the City of Sacramento that opened in May 2025.🎉 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gUMtPBwz #BeMoreDoGreater #DoGreaterSacramento

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Hepta, a Bay Area startup, have raised $6.7M in seed funding led by Felicis Ventures V LP and Illumina Ventures to advance its AI-driven epigenetic analysis of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) for detecting chronic diseases. 👨‍🔬 The company’s technology focuses on subtle methylation changes across millions of genomic sites to identify conditions like metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis with impressive diagnostic accuracy, cutting false positives threefold compared to existing blood tests. 🩸With this funding, Hepta plan to expand datasets, scale its platform, meet regulatory milestones, and move closer to bringing its assay into clinical practice. The team includes former GRAIL scientists, combining expertise in bioinformatics, AI, and translational research. Kudos to Hamed Amini & Soheil Damangir - give them a follow to see the next milestones... #LiquidBiopsy #Diagnostics #funding

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