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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!
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!
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I think this is the 1000th time I’ve seen a VC post this “non-consensus” content
Maybe it’s just the founders I roll with but everyone I know checks all of these boxes, but most have not been copiously showered with capital
Why do VCs persist in this performative founder mythologizing while their actual returns are all mid?
Maybe it’s just the founders I roll with but everyone I know checks all of these boxes, but most have not been copiously showered with capital
Why do VCs persist in this performative founder mythologizing while their actual returns are all mid?
After 10+ yrs focusing almost exclusively on non-consensus founders, we discovered several high-signal datapoints that virtually no VCs look for:
(1) Non-linear career paths. Many generational founders had very unconventional routes into being a founder, with multiple career pivots and short-lived stints across many different, atypical sectors.
(2) Prior history of failure. Most great founders had at least one big failure before starting their winning business. This could have been an unsuccessful prior company, early job, college application or sporting goal.
(3) Unusual geographical shifts. Frequently moved countries or cities across both childhood and early adulthood, both for education and work.
(4) Polarising references. Managers and colleagues either loved them or hated them with no in-between. This high variance was very important.
(5) Anti-people-pleasing. Reject social norms. Are not obsequious or sycophantic and speak their mind regardless of the consequences. Very comfortable with not being universally liked.
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I’ve been thinking this for a while now, but the reverse is also true:
VCs don’t need meatbag founders when they deploy a swarm of agents
Agentic founders vs founder agents — fun times ahead
VCs don’t need meatbag founders when they deploy a swarm of agents
Agentic founders vs founder agents — fun times ahead
What's going to be left for early-stage VC once the upcoming IPOs mint hundreds of new superangels who are more technically savvy and have larger investment budgets than the median seed fund?
The adverse selection seems dire
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Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
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!
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!
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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!
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!
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Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
Spreading the founder-mode medicine gospel like lives depend on it
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they got it backwards:
should have started with a dire wolf and leveled out aggression with crispr edits
should have started with a dire wolf and leveled out aggression with crispr edits
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another yc bio company making waves — love to see it!
(proud investor, btw)
(proud investor, btw)
mRNA will be crucial to beating cancer and solving disease but only if we can deliver it to the right cells.
Nanograb's AI-designed multivalent nanoparticles address a cell's unique receptor fingerprint, now proven in vivo across multiple cell types and scaling to many more.
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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…
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…
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Thank you @AnthropicAI for granting @PerlaraPBC approval to the Life Sciences Verification Program!
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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
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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..
got some proprietary drug discovery/virtual cell data for you to train on..
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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…
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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. 👀
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. 👀
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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, re”, 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 cancer@sytse.com, 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.
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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!
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