Introducing Amplify Bio's new advisors

Amplify was founded based on a simple but powerful idea: great engineers, researchers, and scientists have the potential to become great founders. Rather than searching for MBAs with a crisp business plan, we searched for brilliant technologists with deep earned insights about where the world was going.

A firm designed to serve this phenotype—the technical founder—requires a distinct set of resources. We endeavored to build a platform to help accelerate a founder’s journey from product builder to company builder. This platform manifested in our Build Team, which helps founders solve real problems, like landing their first hire or closing their first deal.

Today, we’re announcing the first set of team members dedicated to helping our Bio founders build and scale their businesses. We’re very excited to welcome Hani Goodarzi, Michael Fischbach, Steve Holtzman, and Patrick Loerch to our team. All four individuals bring distinct skills and experiences that will be invaluable to the entrepreneurs that we partner with.

Hani

Hani Goodarzi is joining Amplify as a Venture Partner. Hani is one of the most compelling, and prolific, scientists working in biology today. A Princeton-trained computational biologist, he is a Core Investigator at the Arc Institute and an Associate Professor at UCSF where he has led his own lab for over a decade.

Hani has advanced the frontiers of machine learning and cancer biology in multiple dimensions. He has developed multiple platforms at the intersection of computing and bench science that have uncovered novel cancer progression mechanisms. His work has attracted over 14,000 citations and earned him the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise and the AACR-MPM Transformative Cancer Research Award, among others.

Hani is also a builder. As co-founder of Tahoe Therapeutics (Amplify portfolio company), Exai Bio, and Therna Biosciences he has moved ideas from computational design, to wet lab discovery, and ultimately into clinical development; he understands firsthand what it takes to translate a scientific insight into a company.

His expertise and experience gives our founders rare and invaluable insights on research strategies, platform development, and navigating the transition from science to product - among others. We couldn't be more excited to have him on our team.

Michael

Michael Fischbach is joining us as a Bio Advisor. Michael is simultaneously the scientist’s scientist and a deeply entrepreneurial builder. He lives in Pasteur’s quadrant.

In his academic life, Michael is the Liu (Liao) Family Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, an Institute Scholar of Stanford ChEM-H, and the director of the Stanford Microbiome Therapies Initiative. His lab is responsible for multiple foundational scientific and technological advances in microbiome research. His work is highly multidisciplinary, spanning biochemistry, genetics, bacteriology, and computer science. Michael has over 66,000 citations and is widely recognized as a leading thinker about the meta-practice of science and engineering. He teaches the course, “Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering,” to both graduate students and fellow faculty members at Stanford.

Michael has also made a big impact in biotech. He is a co-founder of Revolution Medicines ($RVMD), Kelonia, a co-founder and director of Azalea, a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Stand Up to Cancer, and TCG Labs/Soleil Labs, and an innovation partner at The Column Group. In these roles, Michael has helped guide some of the highest-performing organizations in the industry.

Michael has a truly unique combination of big picture thinking and a rigorous grasp of the smallest details. He frequently zooms out to consider the impact of his work and size up new opportunities, before zooming in and attacking problems with full intensity. Few scientists make as many original—and distinct—contributions in their career as Michael. He will be an invaluable thought partner to our team and founders. (And we are grateful he is patient enough to advise Elliot twice, having been his graduate advisor.)

Steve

Steve Holtzman is joining us as a Bio Advisor. Steve is one of biotech’s great platform strategists and dealmakers, and a longtime advisor to ambitious technical founders.

Steve’s rigorous thinking dates back to his days studying philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Afterwards, he picked the most obvious next career move and founded DNX Corporation, the first company developing transgenic animals. He later became the Chief Business Officer of Millenium Pharmaceuticals, one of the first companies applying genomic technologies to drug discovery. Millenium is an iconic case study in biotech partnering. The business struck over 20 deals that brought in over $2B in committed funding, and was ultimately acquired by Takeda for $8.8B.

Steve went on to lead Infinity Pharmaceuticals as the CEO for a decade, before moving to the other side of the dealmaking table at Biogen. As the EVP of Corporate Development, he played a key role in several critical global partnerships and acquisitions. Biogen more than doubled its revenue during his tenure.

In the last chapter of his full-time operating career, Steve was the Founding CEO of Decibel Therapeutics, a business developing gene therapies to treat various forms of congenital hearing loss. Decibel was acquired by Regeneron in 2023. Last year, Decibel’s programs delivered transformative clinical results, restoring hearing in deaf children.

Steve has had an objectively impressive career. But he’s not done making a big impact. He now actively advises the next generation of great biotech entrepreneurs. Steve serves as an executive chair at Manifold Bio and Qihan Biotech, holds board positions at Camp4 and Cellular Intelligence, and advises many other founders and startups. Founders seek out Steve for his ability to break down complex problems, shape strategy, and negotiate important deals.

Patrick

We are excited to welcome Patrick Loerch as an Advisor to Amplify Bio. One of the biggest blind spots for early-stage biotechs is what happens on the other side of the table. Building extraordinary science is not the same as navigating clinical development, managing the tradeoffs of an R&D portfolio or preparing to bring a therapy to patients. 

Patrick brings a perspective that is rare in the venture world. He began his career at Rosetta Inpharmatics, a genomics pioneer behind  expression profiling before its acquisition by Merck. Over the next two decades, he built and led data science organizations across some of the industry’s most respected pharma companies like Merck, Celgene, and J&J/Janssen. Along the way, he also co-founded Shift Medical, a clinical health tech software provider. 

Today, Patrick serves as SVP of Clinical Data Science at Gilead Sciences, where as he oversees Biometrics, Clinical Bioinformatics, Real World Evidence, Clinical Pharmacology and is deeply involved in the broader buildout of the company’s AI capabilities. He is also a member of Gilead’s Research and Development portfolio committees.

Patrick’s PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard, along with his early research on aging brain transcriptomics give him deep scientific fluency. But what makes him especially valuable to Amplify founders is his operating perspective on how ambitious biology translates to novel therapies.