Founders at Work: Ridge Bio

​Building better drugs using experiment-informed AI at Ridge Bio

Overview and Speaker Bio
Ridge Biotechnologies is pioneering ML-based enzyme and targeted drug design to power the next wave of precision therapeutics. Ridge Bio uses proprietary ML and high-throughput cell-free wet lab methods to address a wide range of applications including antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), conditionally active prodrugs, in vivo CART therapies, targeted nucleic acid delivery, radiotherapies, and enzyme-based therapeutics. Their current product lines include NativeLink enzymes that build bioconjugates like ADCs with superior stability and efficacy, ProTrigger linkers that provide tissue and disease-specific activation and release of diverse payloads and prodrugs, and new classes of enzyme-based Catalytic Medicines.

Weston Kightlinger, CEO of Ridge Bio, co-founded Ridge Bio while he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, one of the oldest and most successful VC firms in the US. Weston will share a bit about the work happening at Ridge Bio as well as his journey from successfully commercializing his postdoc work through SwiftScale Biologics (acquired by Resilience) through VC and then building Ridge Bio.