SynBioBeta Speaker
Elena Itskovich
Nest Catalyst
Partner
Elena Itskovich is a scientist, an investor, community builder, and founder of Nest Catalyst Ventures, a life-science fund and global program that helps scientist-founders turn frontier research into venture-ready companies. She partners with exceptional founders that build in the world of bio-engineering, computational biology and frontier science at the earliest stages, grounding her thesis in the rapid convergence of biology, automation, and AI. Through Nest Catalyst, she has built a structured pathway for researchers to refine their technology, validate markets, and engage investors. Companies in the inaugural cohort have already raised more than six million dollars.Elena's work sits at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and community: accelerating new ventures, strengthening cross-border innovation networks, and championing founders who build biology-native platforms with global scale potential. She previously trained in stem-cell biology at Weizmann, MIT, Cambridge and Stanford and now splits her time between investing, advising founders, and raising three endlessly curious kids in Palo Alto.
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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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