The spirit of entrepreneurship was within Lieza Danan from a young age. As a grade schooler in the Philippines, Danan sold milk candies and stationery to her classmates and teachers. By high school, she had discovered an affinity for math and the sciences, specifically biochemistry. Below her photo from her yearbook, Danan wrote that she wanted to be a medical researcher.
“I didn’t even know what that meant,” said Danan, reflecting on the aspirations of her 16-year-old self.
Despite not knowing what the job entailed, working towards that goal shaped Danan’s career and path to self-discovery as an entrepreneur.
Today, Danan is CEO and co-founder of LiVeritas Biosciences, a company that uses liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and machine learning methods to help those in the biopharmaceutical industry efficiently identify drug candidates most likely to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Tens of thousands of drug candidates are in development every year. It’s a $200 billion research and development industry,” Danan said. “But guess what? Only about 50 drugs are approved by the FDA annually. At LiVeritas, we improve the level of effectiveness in selecting drug candidates that have the best chance for clinical success and FDA approval.”
Since its founding in 2020, LiVeritas Biosciences has worked with 15 drug development companies to advance 10 drug candidates to the clinical phase from thousands of samples.
“So far, we’ve generated $1.5 million in revenue coming from our clients,” Danan said.
“A serial biotech entrepreneur,” as she’s referred to on LiVeritas’ website, Danan has thrived for more than a decade in the biopharmaceutical and startup industries. The skills she needed to succeed in those realms were honed throughout her life, including during her years at UC Davis, where she earned a Ph.D. degree in biological chemistry in 2009.
Finding herself at UC Davis
Danan first heard about UC Davis while working at the National Chemistry Instrumentation Center in Manila. She attended a lecture given by Carlito Lebrilla, a Distinguished Professor of chemistry at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. Later, a friend of Danan’s attended UC Davis and told her about the campus’ strong skillset in mass spectrometry, a method harnessed by researchers to analyze molecular compounds at incredibly fine levels.
When she enrolled at UC Davis for graduate studies, Danan joined the lab of Julie Leary, now a professor emerita of molecular and cellular biology.
“That exposure, that opportunity to work with Julie and the post docs and graduate students in her group, was spectacular,” Danan said. “Julie brought in the best of the best collaborations and resources coming from the mass spectrometry community. Two of our collaborators are now Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna (2020) and Carolyn Bertozzi (2022). Julie was way ahead of her time."
"The pioneering research projects we focused on in graduate school are still relevant to this day twenty years later," she added. "As a graduate student, the years in Julie’s lab offered me the opportunity to play around with highly sophisticated instruments and learn to design workflows at the molecular level. I learned to not be afraid of operating and troubleshooting million-dollar instruments, and think of proteins and chemicals as ‘living systems.’”
Beyond sharpening her technical skills, Danan’s time at UC Davis was also marked by a period of personal growth.
“Being Filipino — we’re not a really confident group of people because we were colonized by so many different countries, one after the other, like Spain, Japan then eventually the United States of America for four hundred years,” she said. “So, when we step out of our country, we default to feeling inferior to a point.”
Being at UC Davis, surrounded by brilliant professors and extremely bright peers, helped Danan overcome that self-perception.
“I needed to be independent. I was away from my community, away from my country, away from my family, away from my closest friends, I had to learn more about myself,” she said. “It was a great opportunity for me to start re-building my confidence in a new country, as a graduate student, as an immigrant and as a subject matter expert.”
A career in startups
After graduation, Danan spent another year at UC Davis, working as a part-time lab manager in Leary’s lab and as an instrumentation analyst specialist at the Campus Mass Spectrometry Facilities.
“I loved the experience,” Danan recalled. “I was able to work with many UC Davis scientists, from chemistry, from the Genome Center, from biochemistry and molecular biology programs and environmental programs.”
Though UC Davis is a nonprofit institution, the experience taught Danan about commercializing mass spectrometry services.
Experiences in the private sector followed. Danan was a principal scientist at Eurofins Lancaster Laboratories, played a pivotal role in biotech startups Stemcentrx (eventually acquired by AbbVie for $6 billion) and Sutro Biopharma (IPO 2018), and co-founded InterVenn Biosciences with Carolyn Bertozzi and Carlito Lebrilla as academic cofounders. The company leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand the role glycoproteins play in human health and disease.
“That was my first startup, but I had leadership style differences with my former co-founder from the tech industry, so I eventually decided to leave the company,” Danan said.
The experience prompted Danan to reevaluate her approach to business. What type of culture and values did she want her company to embody? And who did she want to work with?
“I wanted to create a culture of excellence grounded in integrity, mutual respect and trust. I wanted a culture that is also fun and balanced where team members can work together in flow,” Danan said. “I wanted a culture that empowers and respects women.”
“That was my spiritual journey, my Eat, Pray, Love journey, so to speak,” she added.
Founding LiVeritas amid social and personal strife
LiVeritas Bioscience was founded just before the coronavirus pandemic. With the company unable to offer mass spectrometry services due to society’s shuttering, Danan surrounded herself with business advisors who mentored her on the nontechnical side of startups, including business formation and communicating complex scientific information for non-scientific audiences.
“That was the first year of LiVeritas and then during the second year, we were able to raise funds, so we started operations,” Danan said.
Just as the company got its footing, life threw another obstacle at Danan. She was diagnosed with classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Since launching her first startup InterVenn, Danan experienced symptoms of a weakened immune system. She got sick easily; more often than normal. The nine-month break after leaving InterVenn — when Danan took her spiritual journey— allowed her to rest and regain health before starting LiVeritas.
But two years into LiVeritas, Danan developed a cough that continuously plagued her. No medicine alleviated the symptoms, so Danan went to the doctor.
“I was very lucky that my cancer was caught relatively early, and so I was given this cocktail of chemo drugs and a new drug that cured me very quickly,” she said.
Danan has been in remission for roughly two and half years.
To Danan, this was her life coming full circle. The type of drugs used to treat her cancer — antibody drug conjugates — are a class she became an expert in while working in the drug development industry. She likened the drug to a smart missile. It targets cancerous cells, treating them with the chemotherapy drug, while lessening the toxicity to the surrounding healthy cells.
“It’s a very complex drug, but it’s known to be helping patients,” Danan said. “I’m one of them.”
This is the exact kind of therapeutic that Danan wants her company to help develop and get to market sooner, potentially saving lives.
“Our goal at LiVeritas is to turn testing into something much more efficient,” she said. “In this current age of artificial intelligence and digitization, the goal is to revolutionize the entire testing process. Hopefully, we get to deliver on that mission.”
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