PETRI DISH PERSPECTIVES

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we explore Anew Labs, the AI drug discovery company that emerged from one of the most unexpected places in biotech: ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Fresh off a $290 million raise at a $1.5 billion valuation, Anew is betting that artificial intelligence can fundamentally change how we discover medicines, not by making existing drug development slightly faster, but by rethinking the entire discovery process from the ground up...

Send us Fan Mail After a career spent racing against the clock in emergency rooms, Dr. Elliot Justin found himself chasing a very different kind of vital sign, one most men never think to track. Before FirmTech, he built and exited a telemedicine company and a physician staffing group. But it's the wearable ring, designed to quietly monitor erectile function, that's turning heads for an unexpected reason: the data may predict cardiovascular risk years before symptoms ever show up. In this epi...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we take a step back from individual companies to examine one of the most powerful forces shaping the pharmaceutical industry: M&A, licensing, and the global competition for innovation. We explore how today's pharmaceutical giants were built through decades of consolidation, from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis to some of the industry's biggest modern transactions and why dealmaking has increasingly become essential for com...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to your essential overview of the global biotech and pharmaceutical landscape for August 2026! This month was defined by major dealmaking, a resurgence in biotech financing, and growing questions about where the global biotech industry is headed. Roche made a $2.5 billion bet on Hanmi, McKesson acquired Precision Medicine Group for $2.25 billion, and the investors behind Metsera quickly returned with Sentivera and a licensing deal worth up to $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, ...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Petri Dish Perspectives, we explore Cellares, the biotech company trying to solve one of the biggest and least discussed challenges in cell therapy: how do you manufacture these complex, personalized medicines at commercial scale? From CAR-T to gene-edited cell therapies, the science may be advancing rapidly, but manufacturing remains labor-intensive, expensive, and difficult to scale. Cellares believes the answer is automation. We’ll break down the origins...