
SynBioBeta Speaker
Connor Tsuchida
Azalea Therapeutics
Scientific Co-founder, VP, R&D
Connor Tsuchida is a Scientific Co-Founder and the Vice President, Research & Development at Azalea Therapeutics, a biotechnology company pioneering in vivo genome editing therapies with cell and genomic precision. He earned his PhD in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and UCSF, where he trained under Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna. His doctoral research focused on developing novel technologies to enhance the efficacy and safety of CRISPR-Cas genome editing in T cells -- work that was foundational to the founding of Azalea Therapeutics. Connor has been recognized by Forbes 30 under 30, the San Francisco Business Times 40 under 40, and the Seibel Scholarship for Bioengineers.
Sessions Featuring
Connor
This Year
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Human Health
Programmable T Cells: Engineering Living Immune Systems
T cells are evolving from targeted killers into fully programmable cellular systems. Advances in synthetic biology, AI-driven receptor design, and genome-scale datasets are enabling immune cells that not only recognize disease, but sense context, compute signals, adapt over time, and execute coordinated responses inside the body. This session brings together leaders across academia and industry to explore how next-generation CAR and TCR design, structural modeling, and large biological foundation models are reshaping immune engineering. Beyond receptor optimization, we will examine logic circuits, combinatorial sensing systems, control layers, and in vivo reprogramming strategies that transform T cells into dynamic therapeutic platforms. As immune cell engineering moves toward off-the-shelf products and in vivo editing approaches, we will address the deeper architectural questions: How do we design cells that avoid exhaustion, function within hostile tumor microenvironments, and maintain safety over time? What does it mean to treat T cells as living software systems? And how do we build programmable immune therapies that are scalable, durable, and globally accessible?
Featuring

Lilly Wollman
Synteny
CEO & Co founder
From growth equity to gen-AI T-cell engineering.

Kyle Daniels
Stanford University
Assistant Professor
Engineering immune-cell “programmable receptors” with synbio + machine learning.

Connor Tsuchida
Azalea Therapeutics
Scientific Co-founder, VP, R&D

Abhishek Singharoy
ASU
Professor

John Robson
BioOra
Managing Director
Deep-tech investor turned CAR-T scale-up leader.

Victoria Mascetti
University of Bristol
Assistant Professor
Stem-cell biologist translating regeneration into real therapies.
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Human Health
Programmable T Cells: Engineering Living Immune Systems
T cells are evolving from targeted killers into fully programmable cellular systems. Advances in synthetic biology, AI-driven receptor design, and genome-scale datasets are enabling immune cells that not only recognize disease, but sense context, compute signals, adapt over time, and execute coordinated responses inside the body. This session brings together leaders across academia and industry to explore how next-generation CAR and TCR design, structural modeling, and large biological foundation models are reshaping immune engineering. Beyond receptor optimization, we will examine logic circuits, combinatorial sensing systems, control layers, and in vivo reprogramming strategies that transform T cells into dynamic therapeutic platforms. As immune cell engineering moves toward off-the-shelf products and in vivo editing approaches, we will address the deeper architectural questions: How do we design cells that avoid exhaustion, function within hostile tumor microenvironments, and maintain safety over time? What does it mean to treat T cells as living software systems? And how do we build programmable immune therapies that are scalable, durable, and globally accessible?
Featuring

Lilly Wollman
Synteny
CEO & Co founder
From growth equity to gen-AI T-cell engineering.

Kyle Daniels
Stanford University
Assistant Professor
Engineering immune-cell “programmable receptors” with synbio + machine learning.

Connor Tsuchida
Azalea Therapeutics
Scientific Co-founder, VP, R&D

Abhishek Singharoy
ASU
Professor

John Robson
BioOra
Managing Director
Deep-tech investor turned CAR-T scale-up leader.

Victoria Mascetti
University of Bristol
Assistant Professor
Stem-cell biologist translating regeneration into real therapies.
Session lineup still growing
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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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?
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon





































