Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Life sciences strategy | Continue reading
New frontiers in life sciences | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Life sciences strategy | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Studying investment decisions | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Studying investment decisions | Continue reading
Unique business models in life sciences | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Surveying great inventors and businesses | Continue reading
Life sciences strategy | Continue reading
Studying investment decisions | Continue reading
New frontiers in life sciences | Continue reading
Life sciences reflections | Continue reading
Studying investment decisions | Continue reading
The Boston University Bridge has my favorite spot to sit at and relax while jogging along the Charles River. Also, BU probably throws the best college parties in Boston. MIT is second. Harvard is close to last. In terms of scale of research programs, the ranking is flipped somewh … | Continue reading
Tools Right now, the most lucrative business model in life sciences is making a new medicine. However, tools comes in second-place neck-to-neck with diagnostics depending on the modality/indication. New tools enable new business models. Tools reimagine what’s possible. Cloning en … | Continue reading
The Eighth Day of Creation The Eighth Day of Creation was handed out to me to read on my first day in graduate school. Many of the world’s best life sciences programs do the same. The book is an incredible historical overview of molecular biology - the idea of having multiple way … | Continue reading
From Seaborg and Merrifield in the past to Heck and Hsiao now, UCLA has been home to incredible inventors. As well as some incredible college basketball dynasties. On the edge of the world and all of western civilization, UCLA has built exciting companies from these inventions fr … | Continue reading
Colorado is probably most well known for skiing, South Park, and the Buffs sports team. Under the radar, the University of Colorado, Boulder is home to some of the world’s greatest life scientists. With a world class cell therapy center mainly around the Gates Biomanufacturing Fa … | Continue reading
Benchling is a biological design tool. Saji and the team have done an incredible job to build a piece of software initially focused on a low-value academic market then transition toward drug development and industrial biotechnology. I was playing basketball at the RSF on Saturday … | Continue reading
National University of Singapore was the first independent research university in the city-state. This flagship institution has been churning out great inventors with work in life sciences particularly focused on studies at scale. A recent batch at the institution have been focus … | Continue reading
The Scripps Research Institute is an institution completely focused on life sciences research and advancing medical work. Originally financed by Ellen Browning Scripps (part of a vast newspaper fortune) in 1924 as a medical center (she was inspired by the discovery of insulin to … | Continue reading
Axial partners with great inventors creating unique business models. Profiling exciting life sciences companies at the earliest stages is important. Rather than talk about their work specifically conveying the opportunity set is more important where the company and others in the … | Continue reading
Evotec is a drug discovery and development partnering company. Similar to Adimab, Evotec relies on partnerships to bring drugs through the clinic and to patients. However, Evotec relies on focused CRO-services instead of a unique invention. By integrating various types of experim … | Continue reading
Innovative Targeting Solutions (ITS) is a protein engineering company. On the other side of Vancouver from AbCellera, ITS is centered around a breakthrough technology to generate antibody diversity. Over 10 year in the making, ITS was founded by Michael Gallo, who previously led … | Continue reading
Over the last few centuries, business models have undergone an incredible transformation: Medieval — guilds (i.e. smiths) 19th century — factory system (i.e. textile mills) 20th century — production line systems (i.e. Ford) 21st century — network systems (i.e. Google) | Continue reading
Chimeric molecules In line with PROTACs and the work the Crews Lab pioneered (forming Arvinas based on this work) to design bifunctional molecules to selectively degrade target proteins, work from Genentech used the same premise to enable selective de-phosphorylation. This is an … | Continue reading
Axial partners with great inventors creating unique business models. Profiling exciting life sciences companies at the earliest stages is important. Rather than talk about their work specifically conveying the opportunity set is more important where the company and others in the … | Continue reading
Caltech is the monastery for science. With a campus that can be walked across in ~20 minutes, some of the world’s greatest inventors have worked in Pasadena, CA to make incredible breakthroughs and create unique businesses. Particularly in life sciences, Caltech takes a unique ap … | Continue reading
In Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern has an exciting core of life sciences inventors that have the tools and discoveries to form unique companies. Jewett Lab Engineering biology for medicine, materials, and energy. Recent A leader in the field of synthetic biology whose work has s … | Continue reading
Axial partners with great inventors creating unique business models. Profiling exciting life sciences companies at the earliest stages is important. Rather than talk about their work specifically conveying the opportunity set is more important where the company and others in the … | Continue reading
Merck is one of the greatest drug companies ever. With one of the best selling medicines in the world the company can trace its roots to a small German pharmacy centuries ago. Roughly the Merck story can be divided into 7 major events/parts: The establishment of Merck in the US a … | Continue reading
From various inquires, feel free to forward this and axial.substack.com in general. It’s been awesome to build out a network of scientists, founders, and investors. I appreciate it. Foundation Medicine is a fantastic business bringing the power of genomics to cancer patients. The … | Continue reading
Adimab showed a licensing model is a pathway to build a large business in the drug industry. Founded in 2007 by Dartmouth professor Tillman Gerngross who had previously sold his last company, Glycofi to Merck, Adimab created a platform that solved the intellectual property confli … | Continue reading
Observations #2 Every Friday morning (only if there is something unique to write about) a set of ideas and observations from a week’s worth of work analyzing businesses and technologies. Drug marketing I was listening to quite a few Roy Vagelos talks - he talks about Merck and dr … | Continue reading
Drugs Zymeworks Strategy: Bringing a validated protein engineering platform to a large biopharma in crisis. In 2011, Zymeworks struck their first deal with Merck. Founded in 2004, Zymeworks originally was pursuing industrial enzymes and validated its protein engineering platform … | Continue reading
University of Southern California is more well known for football and its film program than basic research. I have a lot of good memories of USC winning games with Bush, Leinart, and Carroll. One of my teammates ended up starting there and many of my friends from back home ended … | Continue reading
Axial partners with great inventors creating unique business models. Profiling exciting life sciences companies at the earliest stages is important. Rather than talk about their work specifically conveying the opportunity set is more important where the company and others in the … | Continue reading
An offspring of Regeneron and its culture is a company called Alexion. Like Regeneron, Alexion was formed around scientific integrity and a owner culture and ended up transforming the lives of patients with atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome and paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuri … | Continue reading
PatientPing is a healthcare coordination network. The company connects providers with real-time clinical information. Founded by Jay Desai, who previously worked at CMS and whose uncle is a physician, set out to build a community of providers. Jay’s background and collective expe … | Continue reading
Founder-driven life sciences companies Historically founders have created some of the world’s most important businesses from Standard Oil to Amazon to Genentech. Simply if you’re the initial designer of a business or anything in general, you’ll know the limits of the company and … | Continue reading
Inventors are consistently at the forefront of business but historically have trouble accruing value. Unique business models often use a new technology to unlock value that was previously constrained. Unfortunately, the business models usually constrain themselves by not being op … | Continue reading