Speakers
Managing Director at Washington Research Foundation, WRF Capital
Speaker
Dr. Will Canestaro is a venture capitalist, health economist and meta-epidemiologist with a demonstrated history of working in the biotechnology industry. He manages the Foundation’s biotech and engineering VC investment portfolio. Through WRF, Dr. Canestaro has made 25 investments in 19 Washington-based companies. He teaches courses at the UW School of Business and School of Pharmacy on Health Innovation and Meta-Analytic methods, respectively. Will earned his doctorate from the University of Washington’s School of Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy Program and he received an M.Sc. in medical anthropology from Oxford University and an A.B. in medical sociology from Dartmouth College.
CEO & Founder at Absci
Speaker
Sean McClain is the Founder and CEO of Absci, a leading generative AI Drug Creation company with a mission to create better biologics for patients, faster.
Sean embodies entrepreneurial spirit, having built Absci from basement lab to a publicly traded company and continuing to strive towards his vision to create therapeutics at the click of a button. Under his leadership, Absci scaled to over 200 employees, raised over $525M in capital, established a growing number of industry-leading partnerships, and built an Integrated Drug Creation Platform that merges bleeding-edge generative AI models with proprietary high-throughput wet-lab data.
Sean studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Arizona and has been the recipient of numerous recognitions for his entrepreneurship and innovation. He serves as a board member for the Oregon Translational Research and Development Institute, and Life Science Washington