Biotech, investing, sports, culture. Cui bono?
Bay Area
Joined December 2019
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A fun exercise I'm trying out is a running list of cool, ideally lesser known companies I run into. Not only is this a good current resource, but it'll be useful to go back and see how things evolved over time.
I'll post them here. As a disclaimer, themes will vary and I may know the founders / have relationships with the folks involved.
Cody is fantastic.
Btw, this is a glimpse of what’s coming in drug development.
The China-US arms race and AI design tools are ushering in a molecularly abundant world. With dramatically increased supply on the preclinical side, differentiation will increasingly come from the ability to generate the right ideas and leverage AI to execute on them, well beyond molecular design.
Only the fittest biotech operators will survive, and the surrounding ecosystem will need to evolve alongside them.
A new world is coming. Which operators and investors are up to the challenge?
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
We’re still so early on so many fronts. I was already predisposed to believe AI was clearly the future, and I still only got over my inherent bio-cynicism on timelines by working with LLMs every day and watching the rate of improvement skyrocket in late ’25.
Most people don’t have that exposure yet. I still hear about funds / orgs restricted from even getting Claude / GPT accounts, and I’d guess 0.1% of life-science workers outside computational biology have opened Claude Code / Codex, let alone the foundation models being built cross the drug dev system.
Pretty awesome opportunity set across the entirety of life sciences right now.
Separate from the current pro-rata rights debate, one of the most thought-provoking things I heard in VC was that “investing pro rata is, by definition, almost always wrong.”
As an insider, you have an updated view of the thesis every round. Blindly taking pro rata is just lazy.
the Day One - Valar controversy made me realize that we're really in a hot market when the the right to invest is being squabbled over
only a few years ago the challenge was to figure out how to get insiders TO keep investing into an uncertain follow-on / exit horizon, not FROM investing more into it
Imagine seeing the most dynamic market environment in over two decades and thinking "it's all over there's nothing left to build"
there's got to be a word in another language for the satisfaction of when something lives up to the hype
reading East of Eden for the first time and I get why people won't shut up about Steinbeck. The imagery of deeply specific places that feel universal and these little turns of phrase that are just so precise but say so much about human condition. technically marvelous
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
The vast majority of biopharma/biotech spent a decade plus dismissing AI as hype and nonsense and the thing is that they were demonstrably right on the seemingly dismissable nature of the AI, its immediate capabilities and its near term growth at basically every point along the curve... until it became undeniable that the entire economy was going to be dominated by AI and pharma was no exception.
When you are in these seats of long standing success, power and prestige the danger is that you are right in your long standing views and supported by all the data as being right until you are just beginning to be wrong
With the risk then you are behind those who committed and understood how the tide was changing earlier and bought in at the right time
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
We benchmarked the comprehensiveness of our free pipeline database against a leading paid incumbent database -- our asset coverage is 28% higher overall. If you're paying for a pipeline database and not happy with the data quality try ours out at platform.convoke.bio
$NVS signs a $7.8B+ deal with 🇨🇳 Abogen Biosciences to advance mRNA-encoded therapeutics, including an in vivo CD19xCD3 T-cell engager for autoimmune diseases. abogenbio.com/news/company/n…
💰 Deal terms:
• $575M upfront
• Up to ~$7.2B in potential milestone payments if all options are exercised
• Potential royalties on future product sales
• Exclusive worldwide license to lead asset ABO2203
• Options to exclusively license additional programs from Abogen’s RNA platform
ABO2203 is an mRNA-encoded CD19xCD3 T-cell engager.
Abogen says ABO2203 is the first mRNA-encoded T-cell engager to enter clinical evaluation for autoimmune diseases.
Founded around RNA innovation, Abogen has an AI- and automation-driven mRNA/LNP platform.
Its pipeline covers oncology, autoimmune diseases and vaccines, including ABO1108, a lyophilized mRNA shingles vaccine in Phase 3 trials in China.
You’re unable to view this Post because this account owner limits who can view their Posts. Learn more
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
I'm at ARDD in Boston this week. Apropos of the conference, @PeterAttiaMD dropped a new podcast on longevity drug development.
Lloyd Klickstein is one of the few people in pharma who has done bona fide longevity drug development: mTOR inhibitors, bimagrumab, now cancer prevention
When I was at NIBR, I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd. I was really inspired by how his Translational Medicine team built programs from the ground up with the end patient in mind
His conversation with Peter is a rare look at the full lifecycle of a first-in-class drug told in first-person using bimagrumab: discovery though clinical development, deprioritization, spin-out, revival, and eventually acquisition
The podcast left me thinking about the importance of measurement
What endpoints actually matter to patients?
Which of those can you measure?
Which can you quantify well enough to run a trial?
One of the early programs Llyod discusses was fall prevention. Falls matter to older adults. His team built a fall-detection device. But it only caught 20% of real falls. 80% of its alarms were false positives. That result points to a key bottleneck in longevity drug development.
As I argued before, osteoporosis is the precedent.
DXA made bone density measurable. The WHO turned a bone density T-score into a diagnosis. Then the drugs followed.
Hopefully the recent SABRE decision recognizing BMD as a surrogate endpoint will catalyze a renaissance in novel, first-in-class drugs for osteoporosis.
If you're at ARDD and want to learn about the future of osteoporosis care including fall and hip fracture prevention, please reach out.
We're working with the end in mind to build drugs for that keep people independent and stronger, for longer.
peterattiamd.com/lloydklicks…
blog.egan.bio/p/evolution-of…
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
Much effort has gone into improving and benchmarking LLM performance on drug discovery, but what about commercial, development, or operational work?
In our new biopharma knowledge work benchmark, we find that OpenAI models lead with strong performance on a diverse set of tasks
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
The current barrier to greater AI diffusion isn’t model capability. In my eyes, the barrier is three things (in order):
1. Most people don’t understand what AI can do
2. They need to fundamentally think differently about their life and work
3. Human preference. Even if AI can do the thing, people still want to do it (like shopping)
Each layer is a more rigid barrier. First, someone must be motivated to understand.
Then, they have to build a habit of flipping their thinking to a more AI-forward way. They need to consider how they would deconstruct and assign out work as if they were a manager. They need to understand abstract capabilities and apply them to their own use cases, or understand what previous use cases were uneconomical that are now available.
Then they need to want to assign that task out to AI in the first place
All of this leads me to believe that we are still incredibly early. It will take 3-5 years for the middle of the curve to even understand today’s AI capabilities and change their mindset to put this technology to work on their behalf. And by then we will be much more advanced.
The technological capability isn’t the blocker. It’s our understanding, creativity, and preferences that will determine the pace of diffusion
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
We've significantly improved the preclinical and China coverage of our free drug pipeline tracker in the past week or so. If you're in biopharma corp dev or investing check it out and let us know what you think! (link in quoted post)
