Bakar Bio Labs News

Event Recap: Bakar Bio Labs Showcase 2025

4 min read
ResVita’s CTO Chad Miller delivering a lightning pitch to showcase attendees. “A KOL who has been in this field for over 30 years has described our complete clinical data as the best I have ever seen by far… We have our pre-IND meeting for our first program next Tuesday. We are currently raising a Series A to obtain clinical proof of concept in Netherton Syndrome, a rare skin disease, as well as an IND in atopic dermatitis.” Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small

By Bella Liu.

Thank you for coming to our annual tenant showcase! For those of you who missed it, on Wednesday night in the Bakar Bio Labs courtyard, we hosted 29 companies — including dozens of our tenants — and more than 40 VC firms for an afternoon of networking and pitching as the wide extent of what we accomplish here was on display. As our managing director Gino Segre said, “We have a diverse collection of ecosystems represented here” – our own tenants, founders participating in QB3 programs, entrepreneurial Bakar Fellows, and companies supported by UC Berkeley’s Life Science Entrepreneurship Center.

Twenty-nine companies and representatives from 40+ VC firms, plus potential industry partners, attended the showcase. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small

“We recently passed several milestones,” said our director David Schaffer. “We welcomed our 50th tenant company; our tenants have raised more than $750 million since we opened in November 2021, and they’ve created more than 450 jobs in the Bay Area. This showcase brings investors together with our startup companies to fuel their growth, which is so important not just to us, but to our regional and state economy.”

The showcase included a lightning pitch session. “We’re really excited about pushing the boundaries of in vivo cellular engineering,” said Jenny Hamilton, CEO and co-founder of Azalea Therapeutics. “We have an initial focus on in vivo car T generation, and what we have invented at Azalea is the ability to do both cell type specific delivery and site specific genomic modification. And so this makes in vivo Car-T therapies safer and more effective. I’d be happy to talk to anybody here. We’re at Table 13.”

At Table 25 was XCellAssay, which is developing screening technologies to monitor house water for toxic chemicals. CEO Fred Schaufele said he hoped to get two main things out of the event.

“Number one is visibility, let people know what we’re doing,” Schaufele said. “In the long run we want to get a hold of consumers — that’s everybody here. In the short term, we’re trying to get the [attention of] the water districts, who aren’t here. That’s why we still need to get some investors involved, that’s number two. We need help in order to make this happen.”

For investors and biotech venture capital analysts like Brenda Melano, who works with T.Rx Capital, being on the other side of things and scoping out these new early-stage therapeutic companies for potential investment was also rewarding.

“So far I’ve seen a lot of really great opportunities here and a lot of really innovative stuff coming out of the universities,” Melano said. She singled out Lucina Biotherapeutics and Azalea as piquing her interest, but commended every startup presenting at the showcase. “There’s really exciting work going on here.”

Overall, the event highlighted how even though Bakar Bio Labs is located in the Bay Area, an entrepreneurial mecca crowded with other incubators and accelerators, its tenants continue to distinguish it as a cut above the rest.

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