Vanloan Nguyen

Founder and Director

Vanloan Nguyen is the founder and director of Berkeley Pharma Tech.  She is a passionate entrepreneur with extensive experience in biotechnology and start-up management.  Since 2018, she primarily works in venture capital as a fellow at Life Science Angels, where she recruits, screens, and provides guidance to start-up companies.  

Prior to her VC experience, she conducted medical research in antibody engineering at Panorama Research Institute, specifically with the goal of creating a novel therapy for erosive bone disease.  In 2020, Nguyen joins the SPARK advisors at Stanford, bringing her knowledge as an industry expert to counsel scholars on research and development, clinical care and business.  For a short time she also served as the President and Managing Director at PurusBio, a startup working to launch a LAMP device for pathogen testing—a technology which emerges from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—in collaboration with Dr. M. Allen Northrup, Ph.D., FRSC. In addition, she volunteers regularly at the Career Center at UC Berkeley.

Nguyen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a pre-medical focus, later completing a Masters’ Degree in Biotechnology Entrepreneurship and Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University in 2019.  She is the lead author of the published paper titled Interleukin-7 and Immunosenescence, with co-authors Andrew Mendelsohn and James W. Larrick.

In addition to entrepreneurship, Nguyen is passionate about charity work; she founded the Hmong Crippled Children Charity in 2017, which organizes surgical missions in Vietnam for disabled children.