California Biotech Insights

Eswar Iyer is the Co-founder and CEO of Aikium Inc., a therapeutics company pioneering new treatments with Yotta-ML², the world’s first AI-driven trillion-protein wet lab screening platform. With over 100 patents spanning single-cell and spatial multiomics, protein and tissue engineering, hardware, and AI, Eswar has dedicated his career to advancing high-definition biological design and discovery. He completed a postdoc with George Church at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, working on groundbreaking synthetic biology approaches, and holds a PhD from George Mason University. His innovations have driven multiple industry-defining platforms and contributed to technical diligence for acquisitions totaling $480 million. Today, Eswar leads Aikium in developing targeted protein therapeutics for diseases with significant unmet needs, focusing on areas where traditional approaches like antibodies and small molecules fall short.

Venkataraman Sriram is an accomplished researcher with more than 15 years of biopharmaceutical research experience developing biological and small molecule therapeutics against tumor immunotherapy targets. Prior to joining Max and Michel in starting Foundery Biosciences, Sriram was an early employee at Pionyr Immunotherapeutics. At Pionyr, Sriram played a key role in building the research team. He also led the operational move from the incubator space to an independent facility and served as the nonclinical lead for the PY314 (anti-TREM2) program. Further, Sriram worked with a cross-functional team in filing Pionyr’s Pre-IND and IND regulatory documents. Before his time at Pionyr, Sriram worked at Gilead Sciences. Sriram established and successively led several immuno-oncology programs at Gilead Sciences and Merck. At Merck Research Laboratories (formerly the Schering-Plough Biopharma prior to its acquisition by Merck), Sriram also served as the cross-site pharmacology lead for all the immuno-oncology programs, including the anti-PD-1 antibody, Keytruda. Sriram received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Immunology from the University of Madras, India, and completed his post-doctoral training in immunology at the Indiana University School of Medicine.