People with celiac most likely experience diarrhea due to intestinal inflammation and damage caused by gluten, says Patrick Griffin, MD, gastroenterology specialist and Chief Medical Officer of 9 Meters Biopharma.

When startup TFF Pharmaceuticals raised $14 million in a series A in 2018, its intention was to deploy its dry-powder drug-delivery technology toward making novel inhalable therapies for asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other serious lung diseases. Then COVID-19 hit, and the company saw an opportunity to apply the platform to the emerging virus.

Don’t call Noubar Afeyan a venture capitalist. Sure, the 59-year-old founder and CEO of “venture creation” firm Flagship Pioneering has helped launch some 70 biotech companies in the past several decades. But Flagship both backs and performs the original scientific research of his portfolio companies. Its best-known launch is Moderna (ticker: MRNA), the vaccine-developer and world’s most valuable biotech company.

Selecta’s platform makes use of a biodegradable nanoparticle that encapsulates the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin, and is designed to be given in conjunction with gene therapies to induce antigen-specific immune tolerance.

Brad Margus, chief executive of drug-discovery company Cerevance, said that lowering drug prices will especially hurt companies working on the hardest-to-crack diseases, where even though a drug that works would have a huge market, it’s nearly impossible to persuade investors to support new approaches. “The price controls now being pushed threaten to remove the chance for my investors to get those returns,” he said.

Celyad is focusing on advancing chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T) therapies. “Approved cell therapy products have a very, very high response rate,” he said. “The challenge is in expanding that therapy from hematologic malignancies to other targets – in particular, to solid tumors – where we, as a field, haven’t yet cracked the code.”

Dale Christensen is the Director of Clinical Development at TFF Pharmaceuticals. It’s an Austin-based company and specializes in “Thin Film Freezing”—a technology first created at UT Austin.