KuriBio Wins Inaugural Amgen QB3 Innovation Award
By Kaspar Mossman & Ruhani Chhabra.
KuriBio, a startup developing precisely targeted nanoparticles to treat B-cell lymphoma, won the QB3 Amgen Innovation Award this June following a pitch session at UC Berkeley’s Bakar Bio Labs incubator.
Amgen created the award in collaboration with QB3, in order to support startup companies with promising new biotechnologies. The award will assist KuriBio in developing its nanoparticle platform.
“We are grateful to receive this Innovation Award from Amgen in support of our work at KuriBio,” said Judee Sharon, CEO of the company, which she co-founded with CSO Neal Shah. “For an early-stage company like ours, this award goes a long way. We also look forward to connecting with the Amgen team and learning from their valuable experience pioneering technologies that create real impact in patients’ lives.”
Amgen’s grant to KuriBio—awarded through the QB3 early-stage mentoring program—reflects their support of innovative science and its potential impact on disease. Beyond funding, Amgen will provide mentorship to the KuriBio team.
KuriBio joined the QB3 program in 2022, advised by Manfred Lee, COO at Mirvie, and investor Ben Sun. Manfred volunteered his time to sponsor Judee and Neal through the national NSF I-Corps program for customer discovery and Ben provided mentorship in relationship-building when connecting with funders. Through this process, the KuriBio co-founders learned that they needed to pivot their approach from a diagnostic to a therapeutic. In 2024, Judee was named an HS Chau Entrepreneurial Fellow at the Innovative Genomics Institute, where she and Neal have been gathering preclinical data and validating their platform.
“In this difficult environment for bio entrepreneurs, we’re doing everything we can to help them innovate new medicines,” said Kaspar Mossman, managing director of QB3. “That means connecting them with resources that only industry can provide. It’s more than just financial support; it’s about sharing scientific expertise to help companies like KuriBio move their science forward.”
