The Bio Report

When Amy Burroughs stepped in as CEO of Terns Pharmaceuticals, she not only had to fill a void created by the death of her predecessor, but also lead a strategic shift from an increasingly crowded area of metabolic disease to focus on its experimental therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia. The company’s allosteric BCR-ABL inhibitor binds to a different site on the fusion protein than most first- and second-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors. The data have the company and its investors believing the drug can reset the bar for both efficacy and tolerability in a multibillion-dollar market. We spoke with Burroughs about reinventing the company, the decision to seek partners for non-core assets, and how she is charting a clear path toward a broader oncology future.

A One‑Two Gene Therapy Punch to Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Non–muscle invasive bladder cancer is a common, slow-progressing form of bladder cancer that makes up a majority of the roughly half a million new cases diagnosed each year. For decades, doctors have relied on a weakened bacterium called BCG, an intravesical immunotherapy, as a standard treatment for early-stage disease, but it fails in about 30 to 40 percent of patients. EnGene is taking a different approach with detalimogene, an experimental, non-viral gene therapy designed to trigger a powerful but localized immune response right where the cancer lives in the bladder. We spoke with Ron Cooper, CEO of EnGene, about this therapy for non–muscle invasive bladder cancer, how its dual payload is meant to activate both an innate and adaptive immune response in the bladder, and the company’s $130 million financing at the end of 2025.

One of the challenges of treating brain tumors is delivering potent biologic therapies across the blood-brain barrier. Adaptin Bio has developed platform technology that harnesses a patient’s own T cells to transport bispecific therapeutic payloads across the blood-brain barrier and into other targeted tissue with an initial focus on treating glioblastoma. We spoke to Michael Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Adaptin Bio, about the unmet need in glioblastoma, the limitations of current blood-brain barrier–crossing strategies, and how the company’s platform seeks to change the treatment paradigm by using patient-derived T cells as delivery vehicles for targeted biologics.

Despite the emergence of new modalities and drug development technologies, the cost and time to produce new therapies has changed little, and failure rates remain high. Xaira aims to change that with a systematic, AI‑driven approach that tackles three pervasive bottlenecks—choosing the right targets, designing the right molecules, and matching the right patients—by running as much work as possible in silico and using high‑dimensional causal datasets to train “virtual cell” foundation models. The company is initially focusing on high‑value, historically undruggable targets and ultimately on building a pipeline of differentiated biologics. We spoke with Marc Tessier‑Lavigne, co‑founder and CEO of Xaira, about applying end‑to‑end AI across target discovery, molecular design, and patient stratification; the company’s more than $1 billion in funding, and how it seeks to enable a new generation of scientists fluent in both AI and biology.

Finding New Targets on the Surface of Misfolded

One of the biggest hurdles in drug development is targeting proteins found in both healthy and diseased cells without triggering toxic side effects. In cancer, this challenge often translates into narrow therapeutic windows, collateral damage to normal tissues, and forced dose reductions that limit efficacy. The result is a crowded field where many companies chase the same well-known targets, leaving vast patient populations without effective options. Immuto Scientific is taking a different approach. The company is redefining how targets are identified—focusing not on genetic sequence, but on disease-specific protein conformations. By studying the structural shapes that proteins take in malignant cells, Immuto aims to distinguish cancerous from healthy tissue, broaden therapeutic windows, and unlock new or previously undruggable targets across oncology and beyond. We spoke with Faraz Choudhury, co-founder and CEO of Immuto Scientific, about the company’s AI-enabled structural surfaceomics platform, how it allows drugs to selectively home in on diseased cells while sparing normal ones, and Immuto’s plans to extend its science into immunology and inflammation.

Proteins