Luke Ursell

I’m a biotech founder with a focus on diving deeply to align what is compelling to build with what needs to be built with ambition people

Background

Born in the UK, raised in the US
Started programming in 3rd grade with BASIC and Visual Basic.
PhD in Computational Biology in Rob Knight’s lab at University of Colorado Boulder (now at University of California San Diego).
Published articles in Cell, Nature, and Science, including the microbial impact of drug interventions, and how western societies have altered our primate microbial signatures.

Currently exploring the intersection of agentic pharmaceutical development with the unrealized potential of peptide medicines, applied in novel areas and via novel delivery
In 2014 I cofounded Biota, when Exxon Mobil was competing with Apple for the largest company in the world. My graduate work became the foundation for the first new oil and gas diagnostic for 30 years, driven by genomic diagnostics. Led the development of Genesis AI, a platform for the integration of subsurface models and genetic signatures. Biota was acquired by Novozymes (now Novonesis, market cap $33B) in 2021.
I ran the business development and portfolio strategy functions at Artisan Bio, a cell-therapy company that developed the novel STAR-CRISPR editing system (acquired by Cellistic), and at Aizen Therapeutics, a Caltech spinout developing foundational AI models for the design of non-canonical D-amino acid peptides.