SynBioBeta Speaker
Kristina Kitko
Eli Lilly
Director of Venture
Kristina E. Kitko, PhD, is currently a Director of Venture at Eli Lilly and Company. She is based in San Francisco as part of larger Corporate Business Development efforts, primarily targeting early-stage external innovation across Lilly’s core therapeutic, functional, and business units. Her role supports Lilly’s multiple external venture investments in both funds and companies globally (>$2bill), as well as due diligence and search and evaluation initiatives. She focuses primarily on investment across AI tools and technologies broadly, spanning early-stage R&D, clinical, and commercial applications. Kristina comes from an operational background within biotech. Prior to Lilly, she worked in Corporate Strategy at Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, and in venture creation at Flagship Pioneering and as an independent consultant. Kristina completed her PhD in Pharmacology and Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University as an NSF IGERT fellow, and her postdoctoral training in Brain and Cognitive Sciences across MIT and Harvard.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
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Kristina
This Year
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
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