Keynote

A Saturday morning abuzz with excitement at UCLA CNSI’s auditorium filled with students, budding scientists and entrepreneurs to hear Xencor’s CEO and Co-Founder, Bassil Dahiyat’s 20-year story on building out the company now at 150 employees and valued at an impressive $1.85B. Bassil took attendees on his journey beginning at the end of his doctoral studies at Caltech. During his graduate years, Bassil and his doctoral advisor had been working on improving the efficiency of protein design. From this research, Bassil along with an advisor, decided to start a company with the premise of improving the existing methods in protein engineering, focusing on creating more stable protein structures. In order to raise capital, Bassil started his rounds venturing to conferences to meet potential investors for funding.  He secured his first big seed funding through a friend met at the conference, a lucky break according to Bassil, and certainly not the last! Soon after raising capital, Bas...

On Tuesday September 24, BCLA hosted its first networking mixer of the 2019-20 academic year. Featured in our mixer was a fireside chat at Studio 55, Pasadena,  with Basepaws CEO Anna Skaya, moderated by Christy Conner. 

Anna began the fireside chat talking about the history of Basepaws, from her initial idea to the whirlwind of start-up life and where she sees the of the company.  Basepaws, now based in the Lundquist Institute accelerator (formerly LA BioMed), has allowed for the growth of knowledge for better understanding feline diseases.  In the search for start-up funding, Anna Skaya was featured on the popular TV show Shark Tank, where she successfully attracted investment. 

Aside from the investment, Anna spoke of how the Shark Tank experience made her a much better presenter, and helped her pitch the company to a larger consumer base. Anna also discussed the importance for the motivation of a company. ‘The desire to make something that matters will motivate you muc...

Following last year’s successful event, BCLA hosted a Biotech Career Workshop for the BUGS (Bridge Undergraduate Science) program organized by our core sponsor, The Bridge Institute at USC. We organized a Career Workshop where we invited three speakers from entirely different educational backgrounds to give the high school and undergraduate students insight into their career paths. In the introductory remarks BCLA’s Development Lead, Hammond Sun, emphasized the importance of being aware of the options and requirements for different career paths in the scientific field. He went on to introduce our speakers, Marie Rippen, Angel Gonzalez, and Arthela Osorio and promptly gave the stage to Marie, CEO of Lab Launch.

As a child, her dream job was to become a dolphin trainer, a vision that evolved over time to studying core science subjects in middle and high school. She decided to acknowledge her interest in the sciences by getting a B.S. degree from CSU Long Beach and a PhD from USC, after wh...

Entrepreneurs and academics from all over the LA area came together on June 27th to celebrate the beginning of the summer and the end of another year full of amazing events and success for the BCLA team and our sponsors. The event was hosted at the brand new BioLabs, an 80,000 sqft state-of the-art coworking lab and office space located at the LA BioMed campus in Torrance. The event featured spotlight presentations from our coresponsors Magnify incubator and The Bridge from USC.

First up, Brian Benson, Director of Entrepreneurship & Commercialization at CNSI, recognized the role of Magnify, who’s aim is to accelerate the growth and success of biotech and lifescience startups by providing high-quality, affordable facilities, services, partnership and expertise in the vibrant community of UCLA. Magnify has now developed a rich portfolio of specialized companies in pharmaceutical, medical devices, and advanced materials with more than 20 companies already graduated.

The next speaker wa...

On Tuesday, May 28th, BCLA hosted its annual healthcare focused event, a panel discussion at UCLA’s Anderson school of management. With both early stage startups and healthcare industry giants GE contributing to the discussion, the event proved to be both informative and exciting. The audience learned about how AI is currently employed within various areas of healthcare and future perspectives of the technology.

The evening began with an introduction from BCLA’s president, Evgeny Bondarenko who highlighted the importance of our organisation's mission as well as upcoming events. Following that, Evgeny introduced the keynote speaker, Mania Samiotaki, product manager for AI at GE Healthcare.

Mania, happy with the fantastic turnout, started her keynote with an in-depth overview of the meaning of AI and the foundations of the technology, dating back to the 1950’s! Mania spoke of the main pillars of AI, including machine learning and deep learning, as well as why the technology is now booming....