Hey, this is Michael from The Bioentrepreneurs: Stanford. Each month, I bring you key updates and exclusive insights straight from the teams driving innovation across Stanford's life sciences ecosystem. Here's what's happening in May 2025:
This Month's Companies
DropXcell
DropXcell is happy to introduce Tony Sandrasagra as Co-Founder and CSO. Tony is a 30 year pharma veteran and has been a co-founder and scientific leader of several biotech companies that have been acquired. He has advanced multiple pharmaceutical programs from target identification through to the clinic and has extensive experience developing, implementing, and advancing high-throughput functional screening programs for antibodies, proteins and small molecule drugs.
Luke Blauch, CEO and Co-founder, will be at the 23rd Biopharma Drug Discovery Nexus in San Francisco from 5/7 - 5/8. Luke is excited to discuss how DropXcell's HTS platform will create a new paradigm in antibody discovery on both panel and roundtable discussions with top industry leaders.
Enable Medicine
Launched the largest commercially available single cell spatial proteomics Atlas in collaboration with Akoya Biosciences.
The Enable Atlas comprises over 100 million single cells, spanning 8,500+ samples and 15+ cancer types, with rich cellular features, including up to 60 protein biomarkers, accompanying H&E images and spatial transcriptomics measurements, and comprehensive clinical metadata.
If anyone believes the could benefit from access to this data, please feel free to reach out directly to Aaron Meyer, co-founder, at [email protected]
Fauna Bio
Ashley Zehnder, CEO and Co-founder, spoke at the A4LI Summit
Ashley Zehnder was a panelist for partnership strategy at Fierce BD&L in San Diego
Foldscope Instruments
Observer Premiere at NSTA - The global debut of Observer at the NSTA Conference spotlighted Foldscope to thousands. With Holly Stuart and Ken Ta at the booth, all special kits sold out by Day 2, drawing major attention from educators worldwide.
Event & Conference Highlights
NC3ABI Conference: Holly Stuart led a workshop for North Carolina community college biology instructors. Professor Tandeka Boko won a Foldscope kit and plans to launch a youth outreach program.
Tri-Valley Innovation Fair: Ken Ta showcased Foldscope at this interactive STEM festival featuring over 70 exhibitors. The booth engaged families, educators, and science enthusiasts of all ages.
PIEFEST STEAM Fair: Brian Tanabe represented Foldscope as a sponsor of this Pasifika-centered science and culture event in the Bay Area.
Teach For All Webinar: Paola Moreno-Roman and James S. Cybulski presented the Foldscope Peru project, sharing its reach across five regions and inspiring global interest in replicating the model.
NER-SDB Conference: At the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Holly Stuart introduced Foldscope to scientists and educators, who praised its potential for outreach, fieldwork, and home science exploration.
Parallel Health
Announcing: Parallel in Japan! Selected out of 2000 startups, Parallel will be presenting and exhibiting at Sushi Tech Tokyo this month, launching with dermatology and longevity clinics within the country
Parallel Health featured in Zoe Report - "Your Skin's Microbiome Might be the Key to Clearer, Healthier Skin"
PyrAmes
CEO and Co-Founder Xina Quan, PhD, shared insight about Boppli®, PyrAmes' groundbreaking blood pressure monitoring solution for infants under critical care, on The Incubator Podcast. Boppli is a wearable, non-invasive, continuous medical device, cleared by the FDA and based on technology licensed from Stanford University. The podcast episode, New solution for non-invasive blood pressure monitoring in the NICU, highlights Boppli as an alternative to cumbersome cuffs (providing only spot measurements) and invasive arterial catheters.
Range Biotechnologies
Clinical Benchmarking - completed their first clinical benchmarking study comparing Range Bio’s platform to gold-standard assays from Quest Diagnostics and Roche. Results show strong inter-platform concordance for high abundance samples, and Range outperformed both Quest and Roche in low abundance samples.
Pilot Studies - Successfully completed pilot studies across three high-impact areas: Parkinson’s Disease, Cardiovascular Disease, and Aging.
TwoStep Therapeutics
Recently completed non-GLP repeated-dose NHP safety studies for their lead drug conjugate program, showing excellent safety at doses at and above the anticipated effective dose in humans
Caitlyn Miller, CEO and Co-Founder of TwoStep Therapeutics, will be presenting as an invited speaker at the PEGS Summit in Boston on May 13
Velocity Bio
Used its QUIKER technology to assay its second large-scale enzyme variant library, identifying both novel and previously known allosteric sites. Velocity has generated thousands of highly quantitative and accurate measurements of enzyme function (kcat, KM, stability, etc.), providing insight into structure–function relationships on enzyme surfaces at an unprecedented scale.
Presented two posters at the 2025 Drug Discovery Chemistry Conference, showcasing their capability to discover allosteric sites and recent breakthroughs in scaling parallelized small molecule selections for allosteric drug discovery.
Will be attending the 2025 BIO International Convention in Boston and is now live on the BIO Partnering platform. They’d love to connect!
Velocity Bio’s QUIKER technology leverages quantitative enzymology for accelerated early discovery. This animation shows timelapse imaging of an enzyme activity assay featuring three different enzyme variants within hundreds of microchambers. These variants were selected for their differing catalytic activities, which were used to recreate the Velocity Bio logo and highlight the quantitative relationship between an enzymatic reaction’s activation energy and its observed rate.
Where you can find me this month:
Wednesday, May 7th - SynBioBeta (San Jose)
Wednesday, May 7th - Synthetic Biology for Sustainability Symposium (Palo Alto/Stanford)
Coming Soon! Expansion of The Bioentrepreneurs
We’ve stayed close to Stanford—until now. June brings the next chapter: more breakthroughs, more founders, more to discover.
