Open Door Salon

Six hundred investable opportunities in a year. Five investments. Christian Schubert, Vice President and Global Head of AbbVie Ventures, walks Lori Ellis through where the other 595 fall out, and almost none of it is about pitch quality.

Mike Goguen joins him from the other end of the market. He spent twenty years as a general partner at Sequoia Capital before founding Two Bear Capital in 2019, and has served on more than eighty com...

David Esposito has built biotechs to exit and taken biotechs into bankruptcy. Pavel Khrimian spent most of 2026 winding down the company he co-founded, after a pharma collaboration collapsed at the diligence stage. They talk about what the last ninety days actually look like, the three questions that separate a pivot from a closure, and the obligation to patients that outlives the company.

Lori asks about the ninety days before the ...

An AI fabricated a scientific citation. When Raphaël Ognar pushed back, it apologized, saying it had not wanted to fall short by giving him an unsatisfactory answer. He told it that "I don't know" would have been better than lying, and stopped using it that day.

That anecdote opens a conversation that escalates. Ryan Cawood pastes in a DNA sequence he already knows the answer to and gets a confident, wrong one back. A cell line take...

The A, B, C round path that funded biotech for thirty years is not currently available. Sara Jane Demy has just come out of her own Biotech CEO Summit, where that was the main topic. Jeremy Levin, who ran Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and sat on the executive committee at Bristol-Myers Squibb, has a specific answer about where the money went instead.

Host Lori Ellis asks them where biotech capital actually is now, why chief executi...

Alzheimer's science is finally moving. Two disease-modifying drugs are approved. Two blood

tests are approved. Biogen has taken an anti-tau drug into Phase 3. And early-stage

neuroscience companies still cannot raise money.

Lori Ellis sits down with two investors who fund brain health from opposite ends of the

capital stack and asks the question founders actually need answered: what has to be true

before you write the check?

They do not ...

Most biotech CEOs assume nation-state hackers are a big-pharma problem. Raja Mikkili and Anne Elise Herold Li explain why the opposite is true: the small and mid-size companies doing the innovative R&D are the more interesting target, because they are the R&D labs the big companies shop from.

Continuing the conversation that started at BIO, they break down what a nation state actually wants from a biotech (the roadmap, not t...

Robert Califf is the only person to have served twice as Commissioner of the FDA. Vid Desai was the agency's first Chief Information Officer to report directly to the Commissioner. Both left in 2025. Host Lori Ellis asks them what the current turnover is doing to the agency, and they do not hedge.

Califf calls the situation calamitous, describes political oversight that "looks somewhat like a kleptocracy," and argues that any Americ...

Learn more about ISCT: https://www.isctglobal.org/home

The science works. Cell and gene therapies are curing diseases that had no answer. So why can't patients get them? Host Lori Ellis continues a conversation started at the ISCT meeting in Dublin with Bambi Grilley, President-Elect of ISCT and its former Chief Regulatory Officer, and Jaap Jan Boelens, Chief Medical Officer of ISCT, on access as the real bottleneck: why regulatory ...

This episode is made possible by MedTech World: https://med-tech.world/

Medtech launches don't fail for one reason. They fail at the FDA, at the payer, or at the firewall. Host Lori Ellis continues a conversation started at MedTech World with Christian Espinosa, Founder and CEO of Blue Goat Cyber, and Edwin Lindsay, Principal Consultant and Managing Director at CS Lifesciences, on all three forces at once: why FDA cybersecurity defi...

Two wars, a pandemic threat, and a regulatory system under strain are hitting global health at the same time. Anna Titkova, who led clinical operations in Ukraine through the invasion, and Prashant Yadav of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the world's leading voices on healthcare supply chains, join host Lori Ellis on Open Door Salon.

They cover what happened to clinical trials and patients when the war stopped shipments int...

New US rules are reshaping how pharma and biotech can do deals with China, and BIOSECURE was only the start. Theresa Campobasso, Senior Vice President at Aardwolf Global and a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, returns to Open Door Salon to read the regulatory signals with host Lori Ellis.

They cover what the BIOSECURE Act actually restricts, why it's an early signal rather than the finish line, the likely next targets (AP...

China is on everyone's mind in life sciences, and the pharma supply-chain risk runs deeper than the BIOSECURE Act reaches. Theresa Campobasso, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, explains where the real exposure hides.

Most companies vet a new partner, clear the third-party check, and call it done. Theresa Campobasso, Senior Vice President at Aardwolf Global Solutions and a former Marine Corps counterintelligence office...

We have to apologize for the video quality. Ali's recording corrupted.

GLP-1s hit $13 billion in sales last quarter — the highest-selling drug class globally. But a surgeon who still practices emergency medicine is seeing side effects the clinical trials didn't predict.

Ali Pashazadeh (Treehill Partners) is a surgeon-turned-banker who still works the ER. Jon Rees (MitoRx Therapeutics) is building next-generation obesity treatm...

"There's probably about a 15 minute window on a certain Tuesday where you fit into the right window for an investor. You're too early. You're too late."

Edwin Stone is the CEO of Cellular Origins, building robotic manufacturing for cell therapy.

Erik Digman Wiklund is the CEO of Circio Holding, developing next-gen gene therapies. Both actually got funded in a market where almost no one does.

Two CEOs on why investors move in herds, w...

"AI is going to augment — it's going to allow things to work quicker, more efficiently. But it's not going to cut corners. It's not going to allow us to not do what's required to deliver the care people deserve."

Steve McWilliams is the VP and CIO at the Georgia Hospital Association. Richard Hicks is the CEO of Inspiredu, a nonprofit providing equitable access to technology and broadband education.

A hospital CIO and a communit...

"When you start to peel back the onion of what Iran provides to us, healthcare is at the very top."

A former CIA Chief and a former Microsoft VP on what the Iran war reveals about healthcare's hidden vulnerabilities.

Clinton West is the Former CIA Chief, Office of Supply Chain Risk Management — 20+ years at the agency including deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Europe.

Mike Walker is CEO of Agentic Data Systems, Former Mic...

"Some of the best companies were founded during some of the worst times. It's almost Darwinian."

That's Mike Goguen — founder of Two Bear Capital, 20 years as a general partner at Sequoia Capital. With him is Rob Williamson — serial entrepreneur and 35+ years in drug development.

A 30-year venture capitalisst and a serial drug developer on surviving biotech's worst times, the AI bubble, and why founders should "beware the...

"Our transplant doctor at Hershey wrote us off and never spoke to us again. We signed her out against medical advice. And it saved her life."

Tom Whitehead is the co-founder of the Emily Whitehead Foundation and father of Emily Whitehead — the first pediatric patient in the world to receive CAR-T cell therapy. In 2012, when Emily was 6 years old and facing end-stage leukemia after two relapses, they defied medical advice, enro...

Jim Kremidas spent 24 years at Eli Lilly and started the industry's first Patient Recruitment Department. Then he got bladder cancer — and couldn't find a clinical trial using the tools he helped build.

Elisa Cascade has 30+ years in clinical research technology. Former CPO at Science 37 and Advarra. Past Chair of ACRP. Built a 2.7 million patient community for direct-to-patient recruitment.

In Today's Episode:

• "Impossible t...