Congratulations to Vahe Bandarian and Karsten Eastman on receiving the Founders of the Year award!
Eastman completed his Ph.D. in 2023 in the lab of U Chemistry professor Vahe Bandarian. The pair launched Sethera Theraputics last year to commercialize their discoveries made at the university with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Their efforts were honored by the
U’s Technology Licensing Office last week, naming them the 2025 Founders of the Year for developing their PolyMacrocyclic Peptide (pMCP) Discovery Platform, revolutionizing peptide-based drug treatment. This kind of drug treatment utilizes a chain of amino acids that bind to cell surface receptors in the body and regulate biological processes and treat diseases from there. Sethera Therapeutics’ pMCP Discovery Platform is designed to engage multiple targets at once, and it allows company partners to modulate intricate biological pathways, install complex functionalities and engineer peptides according to their goals and needs.
Bandarian and Eastman’s enzymatic cross-linking technology places their company in a unique position in drug discovery. They have both leveraged their many years of biochemical research on enzymatic transformations at the University of Utah to commercialize and translate their findings, ranking them among the most notable researchers of the year.
10/16/2025
See all of the 2025 Innovation Awards recipients from @theU.
Read our article about Eastman and Bandarian’s recent discovery in collaboration with Andrew Roberts.
Learn more about Professors Andrew Roberts and Vahe Bandarian and their research