🧬 Resilience, Reinvention & Next-Gen Antibody Discovery | Martin Brenner Rerelease (3/3)

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"If you don't solve a problem, don't even think about talking about it."

Martin Brenner, CEO & CSO of iBio, closes out his three-part conversation with Jon Chee by tracing the arc from Stoke Therapeutics to Recursion to Phenex — and into the reinvented iBio. Martin unpacks the resilience required when nothing works, the line-of-sight portfolio system he built to run 100 programs with 20 biologists, and how a team of opposites at Phenex became the most effective R&D unit of his career. He then dives deep into iBio's current antibody discovery platform — epitope steering, masked antibodies, and StableCube — and shares an unfiltered look at what it's really like to run a NYSE-listed micro-cap biotech.

Key Topics Covered:

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Find our guest, Martin Brenner at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinbrenner/ 

Website: https://ibioinc.com/ 

Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee/ 

Learn more about Excedr:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/ 

Website: https://www.excedr.com 

 

Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin, Owned by Excedr:

Website: https://flow.page/kyojin 

Resources & Articles:

The In Silico Human Surfaceome (Bausch-Fluck et al., PNAS): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1808790115 

AlphaFold2 Applications in Biology (Nature): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-023-01381-z 

Mammalian Display for Antibody Discovery (PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11459229/ 

Stoke SCN1A/Dravet Syndrome Study (PubMed): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32848094/ 

Nucleate: https://nucleate.org 

Companies, Universities, & People Mentioned:

iBio: https://ibioinc.com/ 

Stoke Therapeutics: https://www.stoketherapeutics.com/ 

Recursion Pharmaceuticals: https://www.recursion.com/ 

Phenex Pharmaceuticals (now OmniAb / Pyrus): https://www.omniab.com/ 

Ligand Pharmaceuticals: https://www.ligand.com/ 

OmniAb: https://www.omniab.com/ 

Enveda Biosciences: https://enveda.com/ 

Apple Tree Partners: https://www.appletreepartners.com/ 

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: https://www.cshl.edu/ 

Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ 

Adrian Krainer: https://www.cshl.edu/research/faculty-staff/adrian-r-krainer/ 

Isabel Aznarez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabel-aznarez-aaa21417/ 

Art Levin: https://www.stoketherapeutics.com/about-stoke/leadership/arthur-levin/ 

Vishwa Gulati: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishwas-gulati-a4474338/ 

Thomas (Gus) Gustafson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-gus-gustafson-96210a14/ 

Matt Greving: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewgreving/ 

Felipe Duran: https://www.bioxconomy.com/finance-and-accounting/cfo-felipe-duran-leads-ibio-s-financial-strategy-with-agility-and-vision/ 

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:50 Choosing Your First Startup — Team, Runway, and Technology

02:24 Stoke Therapeutics: Resilience When Nothing Works

05:30 Learning to Run Lean — Art Levin's IND Lesson

07:13 The Mental Shift from Big Pharma to Biotech Accountability

09:41 Building a Peer Network When You're the Last Expert in the Room

11:36 What Recursion Taught Martin About Challenging Every Assumption

15:31 Running 100 Programs with 20 Biologists: The Line-of-Sight System

18:31 Deconstructing Drug Discovery Truths After Recursion

20:08 Vishwa Gulati, Enveda, and the No-Plan-B Entrepreneur

24:02 Phenex: The Magic of a Team of Opposites

30:54 The Ligand Acquisition — M&A, Due Diligence, and the Cooling-Off Period

35:57 Why Martin Joined iBio and What the Plant Technology Promise Looked Like

41:03 The Pivot: Acquiring Rubric's ML Technology and Laying Off 70 People in Texas

41:40 iBio's Current Platform — Epitope Steering, Masked Antibodies, and StableCube

51:54 iBio's Layered Business Model and the Pursuit of Validating Deals

55:04 Cultivating Innovation Culture — Free-Flowing Conversation Over Structured Meetings

01:00:44 Running a Public Biotech — What They Don't Tell You After the IPO

01:06:34 Communicating Science to Investors with Integrity

01:10:24 iBio's Horizon: Survival Mode, Data Flywheel, and the Dream Sequence

01:15:02 Shout-Outs: Manuela, Dodd Michael, Gus, Isabel, and the iBio Team

01:17:41 Advice to 21-Year-Old Martin: Get Into Biotech Faster

The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science company—from pre-seed to IPO.