About Anavatos Bio

Leah Klein, Founder and CEO, is an accomplished bioprocess engineer and strategic leader with two decades of experience in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. Specializing in the development and commercialization of antibody-based therapeutics, she has extensive expertise in cell culture process engineering, analytical and purification method development, and global technology transfer to GMP manufacturing facilities.

Her career encompasses supporting multiple therapies through process development, process characterization, validation, and regulatory compliance. Leah has held various engineering and leadership roles at Waters Corp., Just-Evotec, Sound Biologics, NanoString Technologies, and Seagen. She has been often recognized for her innovative approach to solving complex problems and integrating scientific rigor with strategic business objectives. Most recently, she served as a Senior Principal Scientist for Waters Corp., leading the Immerse Bioprocess Innovation lab, co-located with NIIMBL at the University of Delaware.

Leah holds and undergraduate degree in biology from Seattle Pacific University and an MBA from the University of Washington.

Todd is a successful entrepreneur with a background in Medicinal Chemistry. He co-founded Geospiza, a bioinformatics software company that was later acquired by Perkin Elmer. After that, he joined Digital World Biology to help with business development and biotechnology workforce education. Currently, Todd actively participates in the NSF ATE (Advanced Technological Education) funded national biotech education center InnvATEBIO.org and is a Co-Principal Investigator on two NSF ATE projects that support the development of Biotech. 

In 2023, Dr. Smith led an NSF ATE consortium linking biomolecular resource labs (core facilities) in universities, research institutions, and industry with community colleges. He mentors at the University of Washington's CoMotion business incubator, guiding new biotech startups in genomics, synthetic biology, structural biology, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. He also advises Phase Genomics and Wayfinder Bioscience and was a science advisor for Stratos Genomics (acquired by Roche). 

Todd holds a BS degree in Genetics and Biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, and a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Washington. 

Jeff is a board-certified physician and engineer with expertise in clinical information technology who is passionate about translating scientific advancements into impactful patient treatments. He brings a wealth of experience in healthcare system design, development, and integrated deployment, and has worked on large innovation projects with institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and Intermountain Health Care. Most recently at IBM, Jeff was responsible for applying experience in machine learning towards analyzing patient data for opportunities to extract population level patterns, guiding medical treatment, and improving algorithms.

His background includes clinical research using large-scale electronic health data, optimized software technology for greater scalability and efficiency in pharma and registry systems, and automated diagnostic systems. Jeff has successfully guided healthcare analytics using large patient population data to determine clinical effectiveness and has worked extensively with the FDA to publish this data. 

Jeff received his BA in biomedical engineering from Wright State University (1981), an MD from the Boonshoft School of Medicine (1985), and an MS in electrical engineering from the Ohio State University (1991).