In March 2023, I took the opportunity to speak with Luis Alvarez about the founding of Theradaptive. The company specializes in engineering recombinant proteins, with an initial focus on developing therapeutics for regeneration of soft, vascular, and bone tissue. “Theradaptive grew out of my thinking about combat injuries,” Alvarez told me. Before earning a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working as cofounding deputy director of the US Department of Defense’s regenerative medicine program,…