Yesterday, I had the opportunity to chat with the CEO and founder of a YC- backed biotech startup. Their goal is to cure genetic diseases such as Leukemia by identifying the mutation that causes the disease and eliminating only that cell. The following includes the questions I’ve asked and a synthesis of his answers.
If your company works exactly as planned, what does the world look like in 20 years?
While the near-term is cancer, the bigger ambition is go upstream and target conditions correlated to diseases before they’re diagnosed. He hopes that the genetic agency currently present will be amplified through his drug that serves as a preventative measure: “You walk into the clinic, do a test, find out about early warning signs of genetic diseases, take the drug, you’re good.” In other words, the future he envisions is one where cancer isn’t even allowed to happen.
What kind of founder or personality/ mindset do you have to have to work on something this high stakes?
“If you’re software, you can go full barbaric and competitive. But when you’re trying to save lives, you have to balance your competitiveness with compassion,” he says. He mentioned the importance of ‘retaining some humanity in you’ and not being engulfed by a pure competition environment.
YC is 12 weeks, which is nothing for the timeline of a biotech company. What did you actually get out of the batch?
“The founders obviously didn’t have a biology background, so there’s not much they could help with if we walked in and said something wasn’t working.” The time pressure of a demo day that doesn’t wait forces one to do exactly what they say: do things that don’t scale. For him, it meant “paralyzing things and doing things really fast. So much so that you skip things you’d usually do and revisit them later. At the end, you’ve gathered so much evidence and conviction as opposed to a normal timeline.” This allowed his team to prove the mechanism behind their drug in 40 days, whereas he’d originally envisioned something that would’ve taken years.
Drug companies often struggle with the gap between lab work and actual human trials. DO you have a path mapped out?
He began by acknowledging the truth in that statement: “it doesn’t matter how awesome your approach is if you can’t get it to the right place in the body.” This means a major portion of hsi work is to consider how the drug is delivered, and make sure that the initial drug targets are working. However, the advantage of genetic medicine is that animal trials become much more translatable. Whereas other modalities like a drug targeting protein would behave very differently in a animal vs a human cell, DNA is pretty much identical. This makes their work much easier as animal trials will be able to largely predict success in human trials.
If a high schooler told you they want to end up doing what you’re doing, where should they start?
His advice was unexpected. He argues that Biology is easy to learn at one’s own leisure, as opposed to foundational sciences. If he were able to go back, he’d do something like Physics or Chemistry and learn Biology on his own. He validated the benefits of doing a internship early on and admits that location matters more than most admit; benign near the capital and surrounded by ambition changes what’s possible.
“Have a concrete plan to take over the world. That’s pretty much what you need,” he says.
