July 18, 2023

Ep. 15: Jacob Glanville on Vaccine Development & Startup Funding Challenges

Ep. 15: Jacob Glanville on Vaccine Development & Startup Funding Challenges
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VibeCast - A Vibe Bio Podcast

In this episode, VibeCast host Ray Dogum speaks with Jacob Glanville, Founder and CEO at Centivax, about developing vaccines and funding challenges that startup companies face. This video was recorded at SynBioBeta 2023 in Oakland, CA.


Jacob Glanville is an serial entrepreneur, and computational immuno-engineer. He built and sold his first company Distributed Bio from founding in March of 2012 to a 104M dollar sale to Charles River Laboratories in December of 2020. During that period, he developed the core business model, the research teams, and the technologies that enabled Distributed Bio to become profitable without investment. As part of the acquisition agreement, he founded Centivax Inc and spun-out his assets in COVID-19 therapeutics, broad-spectrum vaccines, antivenom antibodies, anti-wound pathogen antibodies, anti-CXCR5 autoimmunity therapeutics, and blood-brain barrier translation technologies into Centivax, where he is now CEO.

He has developed multiple seminal methods in the fields of high-throughput antibody repertoire sequencing (PNAS 2009), repertoire decoding algorithms (Nature 2017), single-cell TCR receptor & phenotype sequencing (Nature Biotech, 2014), deconstructing genetic variation in the adaptive immune system (Nature Communications 2015, Nature Reports 2016, PNAS 2011, TI 2017), and computationally guided antibody library engineering (JMB 2011, JMB 2013, COSB 2015). He is the inventor of the Centivax Universal Vaccine technology, the SuperHuman discovery library technology, and the Tumbler technology. He is a Stanford University Scientific Advisory Committee member for the Sean Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, a Scientific Advisory Board member for the University of San Francisco's Biotechnology program, a repeat Gates Foundation/Stanford University Computational and Systems Immunology Grant Recipient while a PhD Candidate with Mark Davis at Stanford, a Recipient of Pfizer Achievement award 2010 while Principal Scientist at Pfizer, and has been a course-founding instructor and guest lecturer for multiple graduate-level applied computational and systems immunology courses at Stanford and USF.

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About VibeCast VibeCast is our weekly informational podcast and content series exploring the hottest topics in drug development and Web3 with some of the dynamic people that make up the Vibe community. VibeCast is a collection of long-form and short-form video content intended to help our community learn about the current opportunities and challenges in biotech fundraising and community engagement innovation. Guests include biotech founders, regulatory experts, drug development executives, blockchain technologists, web3 community builders, patient community advocates, and many other Vibe Bio community members seeking to accelerate the development of breakthrough treatments. Disclaimer: VibeCast is intended to be used for educational and entertainment purposes, and no information or opinions shared constitute advice or services. While guests are invited to listen, listeners acknowledge they are not being provided professional advice from the podcast or the guests. The podcast is for private non-commercial use and guests do not necessarily reflect any agency, organization, or company that they work for.