Alpha Hours / 01 - Private Fireside @ BIO
At today's pace, humanity will wait 500+ years for every known disease to have a cure.
What would the industry do differently if we acted as though we had 50?
We're taking a small group of 20 on a yacht out on the water, off the San Diego Convention Center, for a discussion on compressing the path from discovery to cures, and where AI actually moves the timeline. This is a private evening for the people working at the frontier.
Fireside
Viswa Colluru - Founder & CEO, Enveda
Jack O'Meara - Founder & CEO, Aerska
Thore Buergel - Co-Founder & CEO, Pheiron
Timetable
18:00 - Doors open + boarding
18:45 - Fireside chat
19:45 - 21:00 Discussion & Mingling
Why join?
Small room, genuine, candid, off-the-record conversation.
This is the first gathering in Alpha Hours, a private series hosted by Pheiron. Our goal is to build a long-term community around one shared question: what would biotech look like if the industry truly optimized for compressing timelines to patients?
Speakers
Viswa Colluru
Viswa built Enveda from $55k of personal savings into a multi-asset clinical-stage unicorn in just six years. His career spans over a decade of translational biomedical discovery, from academic research to building and scaling drug development platforms. He previously served as the first Innovation Scientist and Product Manager at Recursion, where he also established the Portfolio/Early Commercial team. Viswa was named a UBS Global Visionary in 2023, and serves on the World Economic Forum's Unicorn Innovator Community. In his spare time, Viswa enjoys playing and watching racquet sports of all kinds, trying to read several books in parallel, and traveling with his wife Haliee.
Jack O’Meara
Jack O’Meara is the CEO of Aerska, a biotech company developing RNAi medicines to address neurodegenerative diseases. Prior to founding Aerska, Jack co-founded and served as CEO of Ochre Bio, which applies advances in data science and organ perfusion to develop RNAi medicines for patients suffering from liver diseases. Between both he has raised over $100M in top tier venture capital and closed pharma partnership deals worth up to $1B. He began his career in management consulting, where he supported the global launch of Zolgensma at Novartis Gene Therapies. Jack holds technical degrees from the University of Galway in Ireland and the University of Notre Dame in the United States. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the Financial Times.
Thore Buergel
Thore Buergel is the Co-founder and CEO of Pheiron, an applied AI lab dedicated to Biological Alpha: the ability to know what biology will work in humans early enough to change the outcome of a drug program. Thore holds a Ph.D. in Computational Biology, conducted research at Stanford and EMBL/EBI, and is an Honorary Lecturer at University College London. His research on multi-modal AI on large-scale human data has been featured in leading scientific journals.
20 seats. Approved guests get the boarding point.
For questions or requests to join reach out to [email protected]