Interventional cardiologist and Soley Therapeutics CEO Yerem Yeghiazarians joins In Vivo’s David Wild to unpack how decoding cell stress with live‑cell imaging and AI is driving a new oncology pipeline, and what it takes to build a platform‑plus‑pipeline biotech while still practicing medicine.

Decoding Cell Stress at Soley Therapeutics

Citeline Podcasts

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Citeline Podcasts

## Participants

- **David Wild** (Citeline)
- **Yeram Yegazarian** (Soley Therapeutics)

## Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Citeline Podcasts. I'm David Wild, Senior Biopharma Reporter, and today I'm joined by Yeram Yegazarian, an Interventional Cardiologist at UCSF and Co-Founder and CEO of Soley Therapeutics. Soley is a South San Francisco-based biotech built around a discovery engine that uses live human cells and AI to listen to how cells respond to stress and drug exposure, and then turns those signals into first-in-class medications.

Fresh off a $200 million Series C to advance a lead acute myeloid leukemia program toward the clinic and to scale a broader pipeline in oncology, neurodegeneration, and metabolic disease, Yeram is betting that decoding cell stress will become a new organizing principle for drug discovery. We'll talk about how this platform works, the strategy behind building a multi-indication pipeline, and what it takes for a practicing cardiologist to lead a tech-heavy biotech through its next phase of growth.

Yeram, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to speak with you. Well, why don't we start off with kind of an overview of how Soley came to be and how you came to play a role in it? So even though Soley has been around since November of 2020, the research goes back many decades. And the origin of the company really started around 2010 when my co-founder, Kuro Shamir, and I met. And we had a scientific question that we wanted to address.

And the question was, how do cells determine their fate? Why is it that cancer cells survive a harsh microtumor environment where the oxygen level is low and the nutrient level is low? Cancer somehow has adapted to that environment, and they don't die. They survive. Whereas that's the same micro environment of a heart attack or stroke, where heart muscle cells and neuronal cells die within a few minutes in the same harsh environment. So as you know, I come from a cardiology, cardiovascular research, and stem cell background.

And my co-founder, Kuroosh, comes from a cancer molecular biology background. And my lab around that time, 2009, 2010, had discovered, published, and patented some stem cell-secreted factors that were rescuing dying heart muscle cells from the harsh environment of low oxygen and low nutrients. So my lab was trying to figure out how do these proteins work, and how are we rescuing these dying cells from an ischemic environment of a heart attack?

And we extended to work to neuronal cells, and we're also showing that we can rescue those cells. When I met Kuroosh, I was fascinated with his background because his background in cancer was in the fields of hypoxia, anoxia, and how cancer senses that environment and has adapted to it and survives. So we saw a lot of commonalities, and we actually started working together. Kuroosh joined my lab at UCSF in 2010, and we started a...

Decoding Cell Stress at Soley Therapeutics

Transcript

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Decoding Cell Stress at Soley Therapeutics

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.