John Stanford
speaker
1,479 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Aug
John Stanford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
I'm your host, John Stanford.
On today's show, we're digging into what happens after a scientific breakthrough leaves the lab, when an early-stage company has to turn a discovery into something that can actually reach a patient.
This is the third episode of our seven-part series, How America Makes Medicine, celebrating 250 years of American pharmaceutical innovation.
Our guest has gone down that entrepreneurial path more times than almost anyone in the industry.
Sheila McHale co-founded AskBio in 2001 and built it into one of the most consequential gene therapy platforms in the country.
She went on to found Bamboo Therapeutics, later acquired by Pfizer, and Chatham Therapeutics, later acquired by Baxter, before AskBio itself was acquired by Bayer in 2020 for $4 billion.
Today, she's co-founder and executive chair at M34.
Sheila's going to walk us through what it actually takes to build a company around a scientific discovery, the funding, the risk, and the decisions that determine whether a promising idea ever moves forward.
It's a great conversation, so let's get into the show.
As with the rest of our How America Makes Medicine series, before the guests on, we like to do a little history lesson.
So let's talk about how the modern biotech company came to exist at all.
Because for most of American history, the handoff that we described in the teaser for the episode, from a university lab to a company, didn't really happen at all.
For decades, discoveries made in university labs mostly stayed there.
Even when federal funding poured into research after World War II, there was no clear mechanism for turning a slightly government-backed funded discovery into a commercial product.
The patents typically sat with the federal government or the university, and companies had little to no incentive to license and develop them.
Two things changed that.
As we've mentioned before, on the science front, in 1973, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer developed recombinant DNA technology, splicing genes from one organism into another.
This, for the first time, made it possible to manufacture biological molecules like insulin at scale.
Boyer went on to co-found Genentech in 1976 with venture capitalist Robert Swanson, widely considered the first true biotech company built specifically to commercialize university-born science.
But it was actually a couple years later that something truly transformative happened, and it didn't happen in the lab.
Showing 161–180 of 1,479 · page 9 of 74
← Previous
Next →