ceo @1000cures, ceo @PerlaraPBC (w16 @ycombinator), founder @metabolisbio
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Joined January 2011
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I've met so many entrepreneurial rare disease parents over the years that I’ve lost count.
They have moved or are moving medical mountains to save their kids and others like them.
But rare parent founders get no love from institutional players.
Those days are done.
Science, talent and compute are no longer limiting.
Priority Review Voucher alpha makes the economics work.
The missing spark is access to cure capital.
That's why I’m incredibly pumped to relaunch @1000cures with my cofounder @ryan_1000cures!
Ryan and I teamed up to create a “YC for Rare” that unites our biotech houses with complementary expertises, experiences and networks.
1000 Cures is an accelerator for lean startups led by parents on mission to cure pediatric rare diseases.
We ride at dawn.
Let’s go!
All the frontier intelligence, lab automation and agent swarms won’t by themselves lead to cures.
Goes without saying, right?
The missing ingredient — in fact, the essential catalyst — is founder-mode medicine.
The tools are here.
Now we just need the builders!
they got it backwards:
should have started with a dire wolf and leveled out aggression with crispr edits
another yc bio company making waves — love to see it!
(proud investor, btw)
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
Today, we’re announcing an open call for guest investigators in life sciences. Over 8–12 weeks, guest investigators will work directly with my team and other Anthropic researchers to produce analyses and tools for their work. We’ll run our models and harnesses, at no cost to them. We’ll work together to open-source the resulting data, artifacts, and code, and write preprints about what we find.
We want humans to remain at the center of scientific discovery, deciding what questions to pursue, and how to pursue them. Those decisions are not ours to make alone. This open call is part of our ongoing efforts at Anthropic to support researchers and accelerate scientific discovery.
I’m looking for principal investigators and their research groups at academic institutions, nonprofits, or government labs, working in causal human biology, structural and computational molecular biology, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, and clinical science.
Applications are open for about 14 days: anthropic.com/news/open-call…
Thank you @AnthropicAI for granting @PerlaraPBC approval to the Life Sciences Verification Program!
Founder-mode medicine is the antidote to all diseases
People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X:
1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself.
2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund
3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now
4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine
5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents
6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through
We're going to make it
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
attention all AI companies that raised a ton of money and are frantically pivoting from software to RL environments, give me a call!
got some proprietary drug discovery/virtual cell data for you to train on..
PBCs are finally cool
Anthropic is committing 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund (pending stockholder approval), growing as the company grows. A public-benefit commitment written into ownership itself. anthropic.com/news/public-be…
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
We have a new look but our mission is the same.
The new 1000cures.com explains how we back family-founded biotechs (FAMCOs), the parents building cures for their own children's ultra-rare diseases.
Our model is simple. When a rare pediatric drug is approved, it can earn an FDA Priority Review Voucher, and selling that voucher funds the next family's program. Cures fund more cures.
Our first FAMCO partnership will be announced this quarter! A family, a child, and a cure that's already in progress. Stay tuned. 👀
founder-mode medicine in action
We’ve just made public 125,091 DICOM radiology images from across my cancer journey (link below). The data is both longitudinal and multi-modal, dated and linked to my treatment timeline, so you can compare imaging across initial diagnosis, standard of care, first remission, “founder mode cancer care”, and second remission. It’s viewable in OHIF, the standard open-source viewer used in radiology research.
Given the long history of applying deep learning to radiology, we’re hoping to see a variety of methods and models applied to my data. If you find something interesting, please reach out to [email protected], or if you know a researcher who should see this, tag them below.
Thanks to Terra LaFerriere for organizing these images, and Kamil Slowikowski for building osteosarc.com into the resource it is.
Looking forward to working together at some point soon!
At @GamowLabs, we are committed to solving rare disease. This means understanding the clinical impact of >9B possible mutations in the human genome.
Computational models like @GoogleDeepMind AlphaGenome, @arcinstitute Evo2, and @biohub ESM3 serve their purpose, but the only way to accomplish our mission is through large-scale collection of experimental data on variant effects.
The only way to collect these data is through robotic labs like ours, which historically have required deep expertise in automation engineering to scale, limiting velocity.
To solve this problem, we are building frameworks to enable AIs to drive our lab robots and just unveiled our first eval showing that we have some work to do!
attention all AI companies that raised a ton of money and are frantically pivoting from software to RL environments, give me a call!
got some proprietary drug discovery/virtual cell data for you to train on..
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
Bingo. If we want to keep biotech in the US -- robotics is the way. Automate the lab bench or lose it.
It’s really simple. Our Robots and AI vs their Robots and AI. If we can catch up on robotics/software , and can stay ahead on AI, there is zero reason manufacturing won’t come back, or initiate here.
At Cost Plus Drugs, the only thing holding us back from making generic drugs cheaper in Dallas than we can buy from Asia, are the fees we have to pay.
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
love getting emails from yc bio portco founders who are able to raise for therapeutics in this climate 👏
looks who’s finally leaning into their PBC status 👀
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…