Altitude Labs, an offshoot of AI-focused techbio Recursion, is teaching scientists to build companies, one founder at a time.
AI wunderkind Carmen Kivisild dashes out of a meeting room, breathless and a little frazzled, going over notes for her investor pitch later in the day. She’s in the heart of Salt Lake City, at a biotech accelerator that serves as something of a Biotech University. Instead of attending class, she and her fellow students—biotech founders buzzing with ideas and optimism—are preparing to ask real-life investors for funding.
This is Altitude Labs. And today is graduation day, so to speak.
Once a year, Altitude hosts Demo Day, giving each resident founder the chance to pitch in front of investors, peers, friends, family and more. This year, the event coincided with BioHive Week, a celebration of Utah’s biotech community.
Altitude was launched by AI-focused techbio Recursion in 2020, and since then, participating companies have raised $185 million, with four series A rounds completed and six clinical trials in progress. The ultimate goal is to launch 100 companies by 2035.
Kivisild is CEO at one of a few dozen biotechs that are pitching today. She shouldn’t be nervous as the founder of Elnora, an AI agent that learns from successful and failed studies to build biomedical lab protocols. Kivisild got her first $100,000 investment from Boost VC with just a cold email.
She later got accepted to Altitude Labs as the first Gibson Founder Fellow—named for Recursion CEO Chris Gibson—uprooting her life in Estonia to move to Salt Lake City, sight unseen. And now she’s holding her own among investors with an AI agent she hopes can help pharmas learn from their mistakes and build better clinical trials.
She’s in good company, and in a place designed to help her succeed. Instead of snacks, the vending machine, provided by Thermo Fisher, is packed with everything one might need to conduct an experiment. In the lab space, seed-stage biotechs are working on breakthroughs. One is developing non-opioid pain drugs. Another is reviving cadaver eyes for research. Another is revisiting the lifesaving blood thinner Heparin to find a new, nonanimal source.
Kapil Sharma is doing dual duty at Altitude. As director of partner and investor relations, he helps connect the accelerator’s residents with investors. But shortly after accepting the position, the Department of Defense (DOD) awarded him a grant for an idea he had sent off more than a year earlier. Rather than step aside, he was encouraged by Altitude’s leadership to launch his biotech.
Sharma is now the poster child for the Altitude program, serving as CEO of the bioelectric medicine biotech Vira Regen. The biotech is developing electrostimulation devices that address injury by awakening the body’s own repair mechanisms. The DOD has already given the company $2 million in funding to develop a bone growth stimulator to accelerate limb fracture repair.
Donna Cross is the no-nonsense, academic-minded CEO of Caelium, a biotech developing a new brain-penetrant therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. After publishing research in the field for years in her position at Brigham Young University, she got tired of waiting for someone to notice it. After seeking out advice on what to do, the path was clear: found her own company. But Cross had no idea where to start.
She joined Altitude earlier this year and got a crash course in biotech creation. At Demo Day, she stood up to present her work. While her voice shook a little, facing investors rather than working behind the bench, her words about the research carried conviction.
She described being told to hurry up by a friend with dementia stemming from a traumatic brain injury years earlier. That friend died before a solution was found.
Caelium’s solution is an old one paired with new technology. Breaking from the scientific lingo, Cross described microtubules in the brain as “tiny train tracks or tinker toys” that provide structure for brain cells to transport cargo from one region to the other. Without these vital proteins, the brain begins to die and dementia occurs.
Caelium is applying paclitaxel, which binds to microtubules and has been used as a chemotherapy agent for years, directly into the brain in low doses via a novel delivery system. Treated mice with dementia have shown the ability to navigate and exit a maze as quickly as wildtype mice.
Cross is working on an investigational new drug (IND) application with the FDA right now. While Caelium is starting in Alzheimer’s, Cross believes the paclitaxel-delivery combo could have applications across traumatic brain injury and other indications.
“I founded Caelium to help the millions of people who still need me to hurry up. We’re looking for partners to take us to the next level,” Cross told the Demo Day crowd.
Another biotech phenom, Evita Weagel, remembers her dad doing everything he could to encourage her love of science from an early age. He ordered textbooks on biology and cancer to be shipped to Peru from the U.S. so that Weagel could pour over them, learning English along the way. He even helped her move to the U.S. when it was time to take her dream to the next level.
Now, Weagel is the CEO and co-founder of Eris Biotech, which is developing an oral small molecule cancer drug designed to be easy to take, manufacture and deliver to places like her home country of Peru.
Weagel said that cancer patients have to take time off, travel for care and suffer great side effects. Eris, backed by Y Combinator, Altitude Labs and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, wants to change that.
“Oral was nonnegotiable,” Weagel said. The Eris team, also co-founded by Rachel Garlick, has identified a pathway to block immune evasion with a small molecule inhibitor.
Weagel speaks with conviction, buzzing with energy and confidence. She says her husband calls it “Evita energy.”
“I was able to sell an idea,” she says, “but 99% of the time, I’m Evita the scientist.”
