In this Convo of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Maria Cho, CEO of Triplebar, a biotech firm using advanced technology to tackle the urgent issues of food and drug supply. She leads a team in a mission to heal and sustain people and the planet by removing a key bottleneck in the bioeconomy. This is being achieved with a proprietary screening platform to accelerate and innovate food and pharma product discovery.

Based in East Bay, San Francisco, she shares with Ted that growing up, she was deeply intrigued by science and wanted to be a medical doctor. She began working as a medical assistant at a doctor’s office, where she gained experience in the medical environment. While working as a medical assistant, she came to the decision that she did not want to pursue being a doctor. She realized her passion was more about the process of creating drugs rather than being a prescriber, and began thinking about how to get involved in creating products to help fight diseases worldwide.

This discovery led to work and experience in various industries, including sales, research, biopharmaceuticals, and skincare. In her current role as CEO at TripleBar, she is leading a team focused on innovation and strategic growth to address some of the world’s most challenging sustainability problems around food and healthcare by developing products that can meet current and future unmet needs for healthy nutrition and better disease treatment outcomes on a global scale. 

She and Ted delve into how they apply this in food and nutrition to bioactives, functional food proteins and cultured meat, and in pharma to better and novel biologics. Maria also discusses the broader implications of these technologies for the future of food and healthcare industries. She emphasizes the potential for bioengineering to not only solve current issues, but also to foresee and mitigate future challenges. Her vision includes fostering a more resilient and health-conscious global community through the application of science and technology.