February 2026

February 2026: Product expansions, data milestones, and Biocom speakers!

Hey, this is Michael from The Bioentrepreneurs: Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley. Each month, I bring you key updates and exclusive insights straight from the teams driving innovation across these cutting-edge life sciences ecosystems. 

As a reminder, the email version now has a trimmed down version of the updates. Click through the web version (or see it in the archive) for a read of the updates with all the details and enhanced formatting.

Now, here's what's happening in February 2026:

🗞️ Featured in Bloomberg article on the future of male birth control

👋 Added several new members to their clinical advisory board, including experts in depression, serotonin signaling and translational research methods

🎙 CSO Dr. Sam Banister will be presenting at both the Psychedelic Therapeutic and Drug Development Conference (Feb 26-27) and the International Society for Research on Psychedelics Conference (Feb 27-March 1) in New Orleans, LA

👤 HIRING: Opened a new job posting for Head of Radiopharmaceuticals

👤 HIRING: Opened a new job posting for Chief Medical Officer

📈 Successfully completed the NSF Hub: Northwest Region Calvanize Program @ UC Berkeley. As part of this program, did a rapid customer discovery round connecting with plastic molders and municipally owned landfills in Santa Cruz County for sources of plastic waste, in addition to connecting with crop growers in the Central Valley in search of sources of agricultural waste to divert. Through the connections, they found growers willing to supply them with ag waste for R&D, in addition to discussing a potential partnership with Santa Cruz County and City of Santa Cruz.

🗞️ From Stanford to Startup: Dr. Neal Amin on Building Sculpta Bio - MBC BioLabs published an interview with Sculpta's CEO about his transition from Stanford University faculty to full time biotech founder.

📆 The Ridge Bio team will be at the Biocom Global Partnering and Investor Conference February 24-26 in La Jolla, CA discussing Ridge Bio's experimentally-informed and AI-designed ProTrigger linker systems for ADC activation in the tumor microenvironment, as well as their NativeLink-AXC bioconjugation enzyme for more stable and homogeneous antibody conjugates with CRDMO and pharma partners. Reach out via their website or the Biocom Partnering app if you're interested in meeting up there.

🗞️ Ridge Bio founding team members Grant Landwehr and Mike Jewett's work on "Enzyme cascades ReFormed" made the cover of Nature Chemical Engineering in January, showing the power of cell-free systems for tackling difficult enzyme specificity design problems.

🎙 Weston Kightlinger, Ridge Bio's CEO, spoke at the 4th Agentic AI summit during JPM week and will be presenting more about Ridge Bio's work at the Founders at Work speaker series at MBC at 1030 Brittan Avenue, San Carlos February 12, 2026. At MBC, Weston will also discuss his journey through VC and entrepreneurship from founding SwiftScale Biologics (successfully acquired by Resilience in 2021), to working at Sutter Hill Ventures, to starting Ridge in 2025.

📊 Successful pre-IND meeting with the FDA for lead asset RVB-003 in rare disease Netherton Syndrome

📊 Completed IND-enabling studies and on pace for IND for RVB-003 in Q2 of 2026

📈 Parallel Health is now in-network with Aetna in CA! If you're an Aetna member in California and would like to explore skin longevity and microbiome dermatology™ with them, email [email protected] to check eligibility. Read the full announcement HERE.

🚀 The MD-03 Rosacea Protocol™ is now available. Rosacea can be complex and frustrating. This is where Parallel's platform technology changes patient trajectory. For those who have struggled with rosacea with no clear answers, they're now offering a specialty protocol that provides skin microbiome testing, dermatological guidance, custom phage therapy, and custom compounded Rx that is personalized to you. Other specialty protocols available. Inquire at [email protected].

🚀 Are you a clinician? Skin Microbiome Discovery Testing by Parallel is now available in dermatology, longevity, and functional medicine clinics in California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida. If you are a clinician interested in expanding your practice to offer advanced microbiome testing, for complex, chronic issues or skin longevity, please contact them at [email protected].

🧑‍🦱 Expanding the team and hiring additional software engineers as they onboard new Enterprise customers

📈 Highlights from recent customer engagements: Cell therapy manufacturing acceleration - reduced process time by 70% and drove cost savings; Pipeline expansion - identified additional SLC26A4 mutations addressable by client’s existing pipeline, enabling a more focused and strategic screening approach.

🚀 Shipped a major production release with powerful new capabilities across Nextnet Copilot and Explorer: Instantly move curated literature from Copilot to Explorer in one click, transforming reading lists into visual knowledge maps that reveal deeper scientific relationships (here); Discover novel connections between genes, drugs, biomarkers, proteins, people, and institutions across multiple degrees of separation using the new “Expand” node feature (here); Explore a growing set of actionable Explorer tools designed to turn complex biology into clear, navigable insight (here).

📊 Converted first human ISF study results into a concrete biomarker and product roadmap. Data also demonstrated strong concordance with matched serum and disease biology accelerating initial sensor development and upcoming patient deployment studies

🗞️ During an NVIDIA-hosted event at JPM 2026, Jensen Huang recognized Genesis founder and CEO Evan Feinberg for advancing AI drug discovery with the launch of Pearl, a foundation model for protein and small-molecule prediction developed in collaboration with NVIDIA.

🎙 CEO Evan Feinberg will attend the Biocom Global Partnering & Investor Conference in Torrey Pines (Feb. 24–26) and speak on the panel “AI & Drug Discovery: The Scorecard as of 2026.”

📆 Will be at SLAS in Boston from Feb. 8 - 11th as a nominee for the SLAS Ignite award for early stage companies. Come see one of their three talks or visit their booth at Innovation Avenue

👀 Actively looking for early stage founders or academics interested in discovering lead antibody candidates for 1/10th of the normal upfront cost. Contact their CEO Luke Blauch at [email protected] to learn more

📈 Expanded DiffuseSandbox with end-to-end binder design capabilities—users can now generate up to 10,000 VHH, scFv, or minibinder designs per job, then seamlessly screen up to 100,000 designs against up to 100 antigens using integrated RamaX screening. This workflow enables AI-designed binder libraries to reach experimental validation in weeks. Check out their blog for more details. Researchers interested in integrated design-to-validation can explore the platform or contact [email protected].

📈 New orders from UMich, HHMI/Janelia, and from Ashoka University in India! Their microscopes will be a central part of an open instrumentation lab being set up at Ashoka University later this year.

📆 Will you be at SLAS or BPS this February? ✈️ Come say hi, check out their microscopes, and explore how they may support your imaging needs!
📍 SLAS Boston: Booth 1656 (Feb 8–11)
📍 BPS San Francisco: Booth 529 (Feb 22–24)

📆 Cache will be on the road at several upcoming events, raising awareness about its innovations for ambient molecular preservation. Reach out to [email protected] if you'll be at any of these events: AGBT (February 23-26, Orlando FL) or ABRF (March 28-31, Pittsburgh, PA)!

Thursday, Feb. 12 - MBC Biolabs Founders at Work Series: Ridge Bio (San Carlos)

Sunday, Feb. 22 - Bio-Health SF Run (SF)