🩺 Issue #76: The Doctor Reshaping Medicine
🩺 Issue #76: The Doctor Reshaping Medicine
Claremont Professor and co-founder of Cardea Bio Dr. Kiana Aran shares how she is bridging the gap between modern electronics and healthcare
💬 Welcome to issue #76 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. We hope you all had a great Christmas weekend. After today, we’ll be taking the next week off for a holiday break. Thank you to all our readers for joining us this year as we’ve told the stories of Claremont’s entrepreneurs — we can’t wait to see you in 2023!
To close out the year, this week, Claremont alumnus Dr. Kiana Aran discusses with BioSpace her life, her accomplishments with Cardea Bio, and what it means to be a successful woman in science on a global scale…it’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh & Miles
📢 👥 Community Voices: How One Doctor is Working to Reshape Medicine
Authors: Christie Adams & Dr. Kiana Aran
Claremont Professor Dr. Kiana Aran is a successful biomedical engineer and entrepreneur who is bridging the gap between modern electronics and healthcare. She is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cardea Bio – the world’s only mass producer of biocompatible semiconductors, the BPU (Biosignal Processing Unit). BioSpace sat down with Dr. Kiana to discuss her life, her accomplishments, and what it means to be a successful woman in science on a global scale.
As a young woman in Iran, Dr. Kiana Aran made the choice to study electrical engineering. She didn’t know it at the time, but this would lead her to her true passion: biology.
It was also the decision that eventually led her to achieve some significant breakthroughs in healthcare. By bridging the gap between her chosen study and her true passion, Aran also succeeded in bridging the gap between modern electronics and healthcare.
The result is novel bio-integrated electronic platforms and a hope that we will soon be able to predict diseases in people before they start.
It’s one of the many reasons Aran is not just a scientist at the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), but she’s also a successful biomedical entrepreneur. Aran is also a co-founder and chief scientific officer at Cardea Bio and a consultant with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Analeah Heidt
Analeah Heidt is a Claremont alumnus with 15+ years of experience in developing biological therapeutics. After graduating from Claremont and completing her Ph.D. at the University of California, she joined the biotherapeutics team at Novartis, where she spent eight years in the design and development of biologics. From there, Analeah left to be the EVP of Translational Research at biotech company Inhibrx where she built a team and enabled IND applications for oncology, immuno-oncology, and orphan disease therapeutics.
Analeah is now the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Enlaza Therapeutics – the first covalent biologic platform company creating a groundbreaking new class of protein therapeutics to deliver safer treatments for patients. Enlaza recently announced a $61M Seed round led by Avalon Ventures and other biotech investors. The company will use the financing to further enhance its War-Lock platform and create covalent biologics, focusing on developing cancer therapeutics with targeted efficacy and low toxicity.
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Sparrow Pharma & Ensemble VC
Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, founded by Claremont alumnus and Chief Scientific Officer David Katz, is developing proprietary new drugs for conditions of glucocorticoid excess - one to prevent the side effects of glucocorticoid drugs (e.g., prednisone) and another to treat the consequences of tumors that make the natural glucocorticoid cortisol. After their $50M Series A last year, Sparrow currently has three ongoing Phase 2 clinical trials. David is looking for a Clinical Project Manager to lead operations for one of those trials and support the CPMs who lead the others. If you’re interested or know anyone who is, email David.
Clinical Project Manager (They aren’t accepting any more applications through LI, but you can still apply by reaching out to David or us).
Ensemble VC is an early-stage VC firm that applies data science to identify and invest in founders, and the firm invests in areas including enterprise software, consumer internet, healthcare IT, and financial services. Previous investments include Zoom, Casper, Carta, Udemy, Groww, Icon, and Sidecar Health. A friend of Claremont, Collin West, is a Managing Partner at Ensemble VC and he’s currently looking for a full-time Associate who will focus on sourcing new investments and report to the Managing Partners directly:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Orbillion Bio was featured in WSJ as a possible solution to America’s growing food-related emissions problem. Orbillion, co-founded by Claremont alumnus and COO Samet Yildirim, is a cell-cultured meat startup working on heritage meats such as bison, elk, lamb, and wagyu beef. The company also just announced its partnership with Solar Biotech to sustainably scale up cell-cultured meat production and strengthen its ability to deliver products in the US.
This week’s must-watch 📺
Claremont alumnus and founder Victor Penev shares how his company, Edamam, is combating illnesses and working towards helping everyone live up to 120 years old. Edamam sits at the intersection of food, data, and health and organizes the world’s food knowledge to help businesses build a future where people can heal with food.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to Recast, who just closed a $3.4M Seed round led by Lerer Hippeau, Good Friends, and Vibe Capital. Claremont alumnus Thomas Vladeck is the co-founder of Recast — a media measurement platform helping marketing teams cut out wasted ad dollars.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
✅ Find The Right CDP For Your Brand..... Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can be useful tools for managing customer identity data, but they have limitations. Claremont alumnus Nancy Marzouk wrote on Forbes about the strengths and weaknesses of CDPs and why they’re emerging as a critical piece of how brands work to consolidate first-party data. She also shares how to identify which CDP to use for your own brand. Nancy is a leader in marketing technology and the founding CEO of MediaWallah, an identity solutions company.
🏦 The Future Of Money & Banking….. Claremont alumnus Bobby Tzekin is the co-founder and CEO of Wisetack – a fintech startup that is building consumer lending products to help service-based businesses thrive. He recently shared with Authority Magazine his thoughts on how the banking industry will drastically change in the next decade with open banking, the rise of digital currencies, and the use of artificial intelligence.
💡Words Of Wisdom For Aspiring CFOs….. Claremont graduate Abhi Sharma is the CFO of Coda Payments – a Singapore-based fintech unicorn that collects payments for online game publishers and other digital content providers. He sat down with The Economic Times to discuss the company’s strategies for coping with the ongoing macroeconomic struggles and to share some wise words for other aspiring CFOs.
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