Join Sept. 18 with George Church and this year’s top biotech startups

I asked AI the oth­er day how many biotechs have been co-found­ed by Har­vard’s George Church. About 50 was the re­sponse, which feels about right. And it made me won­der how many more are op­er­at­ing in stealth mode to­day, out of AI’s sight, as the promi­nent ge­neti­cist’s lab con­tin­ues to test the bleed­ing edge of cell and gene ther­a­py sci­ence.

Longevi­ty. Re­viv­ing ex­tinct species. Church has al­ways steered to­ward biotech’s more ex­ot­ic goals, which of­ten re­quires more ad­ven­tur­ous in­vestors — nev­er a large group. Biotech is risky enough when it keeps to the safer har­bors of me-bet­ter ther­a­pies. But Church is a rare vi­sion­ary who al­ways thinks about a rev­o­lu­tion­ary — and some­times con­tro­ver­sial — fu­ture. And that has clear­ly won the hearts and minds of a large group of sci­en­tists who have come out of his lab with big plans of their own.

I’ve cov­ered some of this work first­hand. So you can imag­ine how pumped I was when Church agreed to join me in a fire­side chat at our up­com­ing End­points 11 awards din­ner on Sept. 18 in The State Room in Boston.

Over the last few years, we’ve had the plea­sure of talk­ing about drug R&D and biotech launch­es with sev­er­al of the most pro­lif­ic sci­en­tists in the start­up world. The list in­cludes Phil Sharp, Tim Springer and Bob Langer.

Church fits right in­to that ground­break­ing group.

The End­points 11 project — our roundup of the most ex­cit­ing pri­vate biotechs in the drug de­vel­op­ment world — has be­come quite the group en­deav­or these days, with a team of writ­ers and ed­i­tors led by ex­ec­u­tive ed­i­tor Drew Arm­strong de­bat­ing can­di­dates and fi­nal­iz­ing each year’s list. As of now, we’re push­ing to­ward a late Au­gust dead­line for pro­files and prep­ping the fi­nal list to share that night at our gala in Boston.

If you’d like to mix and min­gle with the win­ners and join the cel­e­bra­tion, we en­cour­age you to line up your tick­ets AS­AP (we’re of­fer­ing an ear­ly bird dis­count, for a short time). This is a unique ex­pe­ri­ence. A chance for all of us to con­sid­er where the fron­tiers of sci­ence lie, where the next gen­er­a­tion of biotechs is com­ing from. And where the new world of bio­phar­ma is tak­ing us.

— John