Smita Shankar

Founder & CEO at CUVIA

Speaker

Smita Shankar is the Founder and CEO of CUVIA, a biomanufacturing company she founded in 2023 to shorten the path from engineered strain to commercial supply for recombinant proteins and peptides. CUVIA's platform spans protein design, strain engineering, fermentation and purification process development, and manufacturing from laboratory through commercial scale, across research and pharmaceutical applications. Smita holds a PhD in Biochemistry from Cornell University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF.

She has spent close to fifteen years taking engineered biological products from bench to commercial scale. She began her industry career engineering strains at Codexis, then spent nearly a decade at Impossible Foods, where she led the development and commercial-scale manufacturing of the company's recombinant heme protein. She went on to serve as Chief Business Officer at Fermic, an FDA-GMP contract biomanufacturer, partnering with microbial product companies to scale their processes and bring products to market.