This year Tango Biosciences celebrates their ten-year anniversary, a milestone that resonates with scientific innovation and a sustained commitment to solving complex challenges in drug discovery and diagnostics. Visionary founders Dr. Brian Kay and Michael Scholle recently sat down to take a deep dive into the company’s incredible journey. They revealed an origin story that perfectly fuses sharp scientific insight and savvy market awareness with a consistent focus on solving meaningful problems in human health.
After spending 35 years as a professor at several top universities, Brian Kay was eager to bring the cutting-edge tools his lab developed into the commercial arena. “Ten years ago, the rise of precision medicine brought a focus to companion diagnostics, yet many tests still relied on antibodies generated through outdated, animal-based methods,” Brian explained. Brian’s lab helped establish a powerful, fully recombinant tool called phage display, which has become a new gold standard and a sustainable alternative. Beyond being a Nobel Prize winning technology (George Smith and Sir Gregory Winter, 2018), phage display facilitates the discovery of antibodies for challenging targets and alleviates the batch-to-batch variability that has long plagued traditional methods. Brian’s research pushed the envelope even further by identifying paired binders, a breakthrough he dubbed the Avidimer. This platform discovers antibody pairs in a single pass, streamlining diagnostic discovery. “This technology, along with the idea that our team would partner with other companies on diagnostics programs, embodied the idea that it takes two to Tango, which inspired our name: Tango Biosciences,” Brian noted with a smile.
Over the last decade, the market has shifted, and interest in peptide therapeutics has surged. Tango Biosciences seized this opportunity with two game-changing strategic initiatives. Firstly, co-founder Michael Scholle stepped in as Chief Executive Officer in 2025, bringing in decades of commercial experience and success in building biotech and contract research companies. This allowed Brian to sharpen his focus as Chief Scientific Officer. “I had an incredible opportunity to reunite with Brian from our days at Argonne National Laboratory,” Michael highlighted. “Tango Biosciences was at an incredible inflection point, primed and ready to dominate as a leading provider of screening solutions for peptide drug discovery!” Michael also had the scientific “chops” in phage display and its applications, having designed many of the original screening libraries at Tango Biosciences. One of his first major efforts was leading the development of the world’s largest commercial peptide library collection for phage display, now at 30 and counting. These tools provide Tango Biosciences’ partners nearly one trillion opportunities to discover their next blockbuster peptide therapeutic.
The company’s expansion also forged a powerhouse team and a culture focused on speed and excellence. The Tango Biosciences team doesn’t just deliver initial discovery hits; they provide a comprehensive understanding of peptide properties and binding kinetics. Their highly integrated approach has solidified Tango Biosciences as the go-to partner for de-risking programs and moving toward pre-clinical development with total confidence. Looking ahead, the frontiers of artificial intelligence, drug delivery technologies, and complex biological targets will reshape the field, but the core engine of Tango Biosciences—innovation, adaptability, and impact—is strengthening. For Brian, Michael, and the Tango Biosciences team, this anniversary is less about reflection and more about momentum. “It’s incredibly exciting to see our contributions moving the needle,” said Kay. Scholle added, “That’s always been the goal: creating molecules that ultimately change patients’ lives.”
Building a successful, bootstrapped CRO that achieves this kind of longevity and explosive growth is a monumental feat. As Tango Biosciences pivots toward the next decade, its partner-focused approach, proprietary Avidimer technology, world-class phage libraries, and elite expertise prove that it truly does “take two to Tango.” They’ve found their rhythm in the antibody and peptide space, and they are helping the rest of the industry do the same!