From PlayStation to Psychedelics: A Brain Health VC's Pivot | Matias Serebrinsky

In this episode of the Nucleate Podcast, Dr. Jo Viney, co-founder, president, and CEO of Seismic Therapeutic, shares her trajectory from academic immunology training in London to major biotech companies and startup leadership. She discusses how early clinical lab exposure to autoimmune patients sparked her passion for translational science and highlights why the Boston ecosystem is an ideal place to launch biotech startups due to its unparalleled funding, incubator space, and collaborative peer networks. She also reflects on the lessons learned from co-funding Pandion Therapeutics—including how following surprising data led to a major asset acquisition by Merck—and describes the bittersweet feeling of handing off a company she helped build.

In this episode of the Nucleate Podcast, Joe Betts-LaCroix, co-founder of Retro Biosciences, traces his path from Silicon Valley hardware startups to longevity biotech, explaining that a liquidity event from his first company prompted him to reflect on the limited real-world impact of most tech products compared to medicine, which almost always meaningfully helps people. He describes Retro's approach to navigating biotech regulation through a "daughter test" – asking whether a given regulatory requirement is one he'd genuinely want applied if it were his own family member's treatment on the line. He then explains why the company has set an ambitious but achievable mission of extending healthy human lifespan by 10 years, framing it as a "right-sized" goal for a venture-backed startup.

She started out as a small-town GP in South Africa with zero idea a "biotech industry" even existed. Three decades later, Deborah Dunsire had led the launch of Gleevec — the first targeted cancer therapy ever approved — steered Millennium Pharmaceuticals through an $8.8 billion acquisition, and run two more companies through drug failures, board showdowns, and billion-dollar bets. In this episode, she takes us inside the moments that don't make the press release: a phase one cancer patient still alive today, decades after a drug nobody thought would work; a multiple myeloma patient who happened to be trial patient #007 and was actually named James Bond; and the $60,000 milk-budget cut that nearly tanked employee morale company-wide.

In this episode of the podcast we are joined by Dr. Phillip Sharp, Nobel Prize Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT, who shares his story behind the groundbreaking discovery of RNA splicing. He explains how the work ethic and problem solving instinctions he built early on eventually led him to Caltech, and then MIT, where his 1977 discovery changed how we understand gene expression.

This episode of the Nucleate Podcast features host Sam Kessler in conversation with Nolan Townsend, CEO of Lexeo Therapeutics, a New York-based clinical-stage biotech developing gene therapies for genetically driven cardiovascular disease. Nolan traces his path from healthcare investment banking at Lehman Brothers into more than a decade at Pfizer, where international P&L roles in Korea, Ukraine, and Western Europe sharpened his ability to navigate ambiguity and different healthcare systems, and where leading Pfizer's rare disease unit gave him a front-row seat as tafamidis, a treatment for a once-obscure cardiac amyloidosis, grew into one of the company's largest products. That experience drove his decision to found Lexeo in January 2020, just months before COVID hit, betting that cardiovascular disease would follow oncology's path toward genetically defined subtypes treatable with precision therapies delivered via AAV-vector gene therapy.