Investors and strategics converge on Pittsburgh in September, new investments in life sciences innovation from Harrisburg, recap from BIO 2026, and major customer and award announcements.
Events
StartUP PGH: Welcome to Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is opening its doors to investors, strategics, and innovators during StartUP PGH. The week-long event runs September 14–18 and showcases start-up and growth-stage companies, as well as discoveries on the edge of bio and health, energy, deep tech, robotics, and AI. The week is an ecosystem-wide collaboration across multiple institutions.
Partners include:
The Bio+Health Track and The Event You Can’t Miss
The Bio+Health Track of events throughout the week showcases everything from early discoveries and commercialization 101 for entrepreneurial PIs to case studies on Pittsburgh growth-stage and unicorn companies making national waves.
The anchor event is the Bio+Health Summit on Wednesday, September 16. Hear directly from venture funds in bio and health on where they are deploying capital and looking to build their portfolios; anchor research institutions and health systems on where they are placing big strategic bets; strategics on their corporate development perspectives; and growth-stage operators on what is behind their rapid growth.
Confirmed speakers include General Catalyst, Town Hall Ventures, Redesign Health, ARPA-H awardees, Abridge, FreeMarket Health, Philips, UPMC Enterprises, Allegheny Health Network, Carnegie Mellon University, and more.
Venture capitalists and accredited investors who want an advanced look at investment-ready companies can reach out to us directly at investors@pittsburghlifesci.org for a curated list.
Governor Shapiro signed the 2026–27 budget on July 12 with $125 million to create Innovate in PA 2.0, funded through the sale of insurance premium tax credits and starting in FY28/29. The program funds grants to close regional and statewide gaps for startup, small, and mid-sized life sciences companies; to help technology startups and research universities leverage federal funding; to support industry workforce and education partnerships; and to seed and scale venture studios aligned to regional strengths. It also recapitalizes Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority venture funds.
PLSA worked with dozens of companies and coalition partners over the past two years, alongside Life Sciences Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and the Allegheny Conference, to make the case in Harrisburg. A clear stake in the ground: Pennsylvania is the place to start and grow your innovation company.
Pittsburgh on the floor at BIO 2026 in San Diego, CA
The Commonwealth built new partnerships and business-attraction opportunities at BIO 2026 in San Diego, where Life Sciences Pennsylvania (LSPA) ran the state's booth and the Allegheny Conference anchored a strong Pittsburgh presence.
Pittsburgh's LyGenesis presented its pipeline of cell therapies for organ regeneration on the convention program. Anantha Shekhar, Pitt's Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine, and Evan Facher, Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, led the university's delegation, and Pitt Health Sciences capped the week with a well-attended reception alongside leadership from T.Rx Capital.
PLSA President and CEO Megan Shaw closed the reception by placing the panel inside the larger Pittsburgh story. Her case: the advantage now belongs to the places where the capabilities you need already sit next to each other: where AI is built in the clinic, discovery sits beside the capacity to manufacture, and world-class science sits next door to the health systems that can put it to work. In Pittsburgh, all of it sits inside a single square mile.
CBRE puts Pittsburgh in the top 20 for life sciences R&D talent
Pittsburgh ranks among the top 20 U.S. markets for life sciences R&D talent in CBRE's 2026 analysis, which also names Pittsburgh among the emerging markets that posted some of the biggest life sciences venture-investment gains in 2025. The talent pipeline is moving the industry's way, with pharmaceutical sciences majors growing 20% last year, and computational biology and bioinformatics continuing to grow even as total life sciences degrees fell for the first time in years. Students are following the industry toward AI and data-driven drug development, and that is the intersection Pittsburgh trains for. For example, did you know that CMU and Pitt run a joint PhD in computational biology?
Megan Shaw joined sovaSageco-founder and CEO Will Kaigler on the Project Medtech podcast to talk through what it takes to build and scale a health-tech company in Pittsburgh, and how founders can plug into the ecosystem. The conversation covers her first-employee days at HemoSonics, launching PLSA in 2024, why customer value beats exit fixation, and how to hire an early team without over-hiring. Her Pittsburgh throughline: the payer and the provider sit in one place here, so innovation, clinical deployment, and payer-side understanding do, too.
In May, the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance (PLSA) hosted AI in Action at The Assembly, bringing together leaders from Pitt, TeleTracking, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Philips for a candid look at healthcare AI. The consensus? The tools work, but infrastructure and governance are still catching up. While regional powerhouses like CMU, Pitt, UPMC, Highmark, and the PSC give Pittsburgh an edge, panelists agreed the main hurdle isn't capability so much as it's execution. As TeleTracking’s Michelle Skinner noted, Pittsburgh has 98% of what it needs, but the final 2% is converting theory into production to scale AI from beta to everyday care.
Gastrointestinal surgeons have always worked around a tube they could not see, and poor visualization of GI calibration tubes has contributed to serious surgical complications for decades. Endolumik solved the problem with light.
Founded in 2020 by WVU bariatric surgeon Dr. Nova Szoka, the company built a calibration tube that emits near-infrared light visible to the cameras and surgical robots hospitals already own. In 2023 it became the first device of any kind authorized through the FDA's Safer Technologies Program, and its second peer-reviewed publication arrived in June 2026. CEO and co-founder Mara McFadden, a Carnegie Mellon MBA with product leadership experience at Johnson & Johnson and Philips, leads the company from Pittsburgh and serves on PLSA's Industry Advisory Council.
Find your next role in the local life sciences and healthcare technology sectors, or send a job to the smartest and best friend you have who wants to move to Pittsburgh.
Healthcare Dive The Pittsburgh-born clinical-AI company is co-developing the first clinical-conversation foundation model with NVIDIA and taking a strategic investment from Eli Lilly.
The CMU-led team, with Pitt, UPMC, and Magee-Womens Research Institute, will build OMEGA, a wearable that reads fetal oxygen delivery in real time to replace heart-rate monitoring largely unchanged since the 1970s.
LyGenesis wins a Breakthrough T1D award PR Newswire The award funds preclinical work on inducing immune tolerance for pancreatic islet transplantation at the Pittsburgh company that grows functioning organs using a patient's own lymph nodes as bioreactors.
Bioprocess Online BioProcess Online profiled the Pittsburgh company's lead product ST266, a secretome therapy now in studies for necrotizing enterocolitis; the reporter first met Noveome at Life Sciences Future SW, the event PLSA and LSPA co-host.
Pitt's BioForge brings Panther Life Sciences to Pittsburgh WPXI A 14-month partnership with Pitt's advanced biomanufacturing subsidiary at Hazelwood Green convinced the New York company to build a manufacturing and materials operation here.
We are always looking for your input! Please send suggestions for newsletter content or spotlights to Stephen Biernacki at sbiernacki@pittsburghlifesci.org.
Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance, 115 Atwood Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States
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