Portrait No. 001
Lieza Marie Danan
Founder & CEO
LiVeritas Biosciences
Raised — $14M
I founded LiVeritas after more than a decade working as a bioanalytical mass spectrometrist leader across the biopharma industry from Eurofins and Genentech to Sutro Biopharma and the unicorn startup Stemcentrx. Inside those laboratories I saw something deeply wrong: the scientists responsible for evaluating life-saving medicines were working with painfully inadequate tools. I regularly worked 80-hour weeks reviewing massive datasets with little automation or intelligent support. Many nights I lay awake asking myself how excellence was even possible under those conditions. Around the same time, several close friends in the biopharma mass spectrometry community were diagnosed with cancer. Eventually, in 2022, I was too. During treatment, one of the drugs added to my chemotherapy regimen was an antibody-drug conjugate called Adcetris. It is from the same class of complex therapeutics I had spent a decade helping advance through bioanalytical mass spectrometry. In that moment, the circle closed. The science I had devoted my life to was now helping save it. LiVeritas was born from this realization.
In her words
“I build from wholeness. As a scientist and founder, I turned years of unseen labor, inequity, and lived experience into LiVeritas, a system where data drives truth, and women scientists and engineers can rise, lead, and redefine what excellence looks like in high-tech spaces.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
I grew up in the Philippines in a culture that celebrated academic excellence regardless of gender. From childhood through university I ranked among the top 0.05% of students nationwide, surrounded by teachers, family, and communities who believed deeply in my potential. Everything changed when I moved to the United States for graduate school in 2004. Suddenly I was a young Filipino woman immigrant with an accent working in laboratories filled with powerful million-dollar instruments and senior scientists who sometimes made it clear they didn’t think I belonged there. I learned quickly that excellence alone does not guarantee belonging. When promised promotions disappeared, I found new paths. When doors closed, I built new ones, becoming Head of Mass Spectrometry or cofounding a venture-backed startup that raised $250M alongside a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. Later as cofounder, I was pushed out of that company due to misaligned leadership values. I took a brief sabbatical and asked myself a hard question: Do I still believe in the problem enough to build again? And my answer was YES. When we built LiVeritas, I intentionally created the culture I wished existed earlier in my career, grounded in trust, respect, accountability, and low ego. Today more than half of our founding team, angel investors, and advisors are women, and our team reflects the global nature of science itself. Resilience, I’ve learned, is not about being fearless. It’s about continuing to build when the path becomes steep.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I’m obsessed with solving a quiet crisis inside biopharma: the lives of the scientists responsible for making critical drug development decisions. Biopharma mass spectrometrists spend exhausting hours with high stress tight deadlines, extracting insights from enormous datasets. The datasets carry signals and numbers that determine whether a therapeutic is safe, effective, or ready for patients. The insights are critical for drug development decision-making, but the tools remain painfully fragmented and incomplete. My vision is simple: scientists should be able to pursue excellence without sacrificing their health, sleep, and relationships with family and friends. LiVeritas is building AI-based digital catalysts that capture expert biopharma mass spectrometry knowledge and turn it into intelligent systems capable of interpreting complex datasets and turning them into FDA-review ready outputs. When we succeed, expertise will no longer live only in the minds of a few overworked specialists. It will become infrastructure, enabling faster, more reliable decisions and accelerating how quickly life-saving medicines reach patients around the world. LiVeritas is part of a broader shift: transforming scientific expertise into enduring digital infrastructure for regulated science supporting drug development decision-making.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Thirty years from now, I hope we helped transform how drug development decisions are made. Too often today, critical decisions are shaped by hierarchy, personality, or whoever speaks the loudest in the room. I believe they should be guided by clear, unambiguous data like mass spectrometry data. Data-first decision making creates true meritocracy, where the scientists who generated the evidence are heard and credited regardless of gender. When LiVeritas succeeds, it will help lower the cost and uncertainty of developing new medicines and expand global access to life-saving therapies, including in the developing world where I grew up. And it will show future women founders, especially immigrant scientists, that they don’t just belong in laboratories. They belong building the future of science. ***Two proposals for one liner: 1) I built the AI-based tools I wish existed when I was the exhausted scientist at the bench. 2) The ground-breaking novel class of drugs I helped advance as a biopharma scientist became the treatment that saved my life. ***Archetype: A scientist who survived the broken system she worked in, and then rebuilt it so others wouldn’t have to experience the pain she had to endure.