The Biotech Startups Podcast

"You have to learn to embrace serendipity. You can't plan everything out because it will never go to plan."

​In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we explore Partner at Bison Ventures, Caleb Appleton's formative years growing up in College Station, Texas, where being surrounded by Texas A&M University shaped his worldview and exalted academia as the ultimate career path. Now a Partner at Bison Ventures, Caleb takes us through his journey to Georgia Tech, where he dove into biomedical engineering and landed an extraordinary undergraduate research opportunity working with CRISPR technology in its earliest days, collaborating with pioneers like Feng Zhang when the field was just emerging.

Through hands-on lab work—pipetting, troubleshooting Western blots, and contributing to published research—Caleb began questioning whether a PhD was truly his path forward. The episode explores pivotal lessons about embracing serendipity, how a neighbor's connection unlocked a transformative research experience, and why growing up without exposure to business and industry careers ultimately shaped his unconventional journey into venture capital.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Dr. Judy Chou shares how she walked away from leading global biotech operations at Bayer to take a risky first‑time CEO role at AltruBio, transforming a struggling predecessor company—alongside a “Genentech mafia” of former colleagues—into a lean, patient‑centric startup built around a novel PSGL‑1 immune checkpoint mechanism aimed at restoring immune balance and breaking the remission ceiling in ulcerative colitis, all while navigating near‑bankruptcy, a 30‑day fundraising sprint that led to a record $225M Series B, launching a translational lab in Taipei, and drawing on formative experiences at Yale and MIT as a young mother and mentee to shape her gritty, values‑driven leadership philosophy.

“If you want to make money, really follow your passion rather than follow the money, because the money later on will come.”
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In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Dr. Judy Chou shares her journey as employee number one at Tanvex, walking into an empty 50,000 square foot facility and building a biosimilar company from scratch after a close friend’s death from metastatic lung cancer reshaped her understanding of drug access and affordability. She recounts an extraordinary FDA meeting where, as the sole company representative, she fielded questions from 32 regulators and ultimately convinced them to waive all preclinical animal studies, then later took on unexpected responsibility for building three manufacturing suites when multiple VPs were fired. The conversation also follows her move to Medivation, where she scaled technical operations from two people to a global network of over 50 CDMOs and CROs, culminating in a high-stakes bidding war among five pharma giants that ended with Pfizer acquiring Medivation for $14.3 billion, up from a $9 billion market cap just three months earlier.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, President & CEO of AltruBio, Judy Chou, shares her pivotal transition from academia to industry, revealing how she left AbbVie when the company went idle after Humira's launch to pursue more meaningful work at Wyeth. Despite Humira becoming one of the most successful drugs in history, the company's uncertainty about biologics left Judy feeling unable to fulfill her mission to make a difference for patients.
Judy describes how she pioneered high-throughput screening for biologics at Wyeth, earning the nickname "High-Throughput Lady" when colleagues thought her ideas were crazy. She explains how she adapted small molecule screening techniques to biologics despite widespread skepticism, ultimately generating 10 grams per liter antibody production for the first time and winning Wyeth's President Award for the biggest business impact of the year. Judy also recounts being recruited to Genentech to build a revolutionary product-driven department in Oceanside, where Ann Lee's vision to break vertical silos and create a "startup within a major company" generated much of the pipeline Genentech still develops today.

In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr, AltruBio President and CEO Judy Chou traces her journey from an arts-driven childhood in politically tense, conservative Taiwan to leading a clinical-stage biotech company in the U.S., sharing how an “inner rebel,” a love of physics, and two pivotal uncles redirected her from an elite engineering track into medicine and biology at National Taiwan University, where she hustled her way into research labs each summer. A heartbreaking encounter with a young boy whose mother was dying of leukemia convinced her that treating one patient at a time was not enough, propelling her to Yale for a PhD, where she earned five Honors in a single semester, dove into cutting-edge neuroscience and synaptic vesicle biology, and survived a “Home Alone” phase after her advisor left—pushing a cart of reagents between world-class labs and forging the resilience, independence, and multidisciplinary mindset that now underpin her leadership and her pursuit of first-in-class therapies for immune and inflammatory diseases.