Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
John Cassidy, general partner, Kindred Capital
On the surface, delegates at this year’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference have reason to be pleased. The Nasdaq Biotech Index was up 30% last year. After years of public market woes, it looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Some structural issues still exist – 10 years to get a molecule to clinic, regulators that need a shot in the arm, and (I’d argue) a negative enterprise value on most new programs. But Big Pharma isn’t stupid. Patent cliffs are looming, pipelines are thinning, and the market is hungry for new assets.
So the industry did the rational thing: it looked East.
The new playbook is simple: license clinical-stage assets from China and run them globally.
Reuters pegged the trend: in just the first half of 2025, U.S. drugmakers signed 14 China-licensing deals worth $18.3 billion, compared with just two deals the year before. Morgan Stanley framed it cleanly: China has gone from “generics factory to innovation engine.” And Western pharma wants in.
Some of these assets will be great. Patients will benefit. There will be headlines about “win-win” globalization.
But this licensing wave is also, in many cases, window dressing. It tells a story about where molecules are sold, not where they’re made. It celebrates downstream commercial rights while ignoring upstream capacity loss.
One nuance matters here. The West still runs the clinical machine. Late-stage trial execution, global site networks, data management, regulatory choreography, pharmacovigilance — this is still a Western strength. This piece is not arguing we forgot how to run Phase III. It’s arguing we made a quieter bet: that preclinical biology is a commodity you can safely rent.
Clinical dominance can hide preclinical dependency. The clinical layer is visible, audited, and legible to boards. The preclinical layer is where the learning curve compounds, and where “process innovation” quietly becomes the innovation.
Western companies, in the name of asset-light models and operational efficiency, spent years transferring preclinical execution into Chinese platforms. Not just isolated tasks, but entire modalities. The result?
We now have Western companies licensing from ecosystems that Western capital helped train.
This wasn’t one grand conspiracy. It was a thousand “reasonable” decisions:
“We’re asset-light.”
“We’ll rent capacity.”
“We don’t need in-house biology.”
“This CRO is faster.”
“This is just execution; the IP stays with us.”
If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. We’ve seen this movie before.
In the 2000s, Apple built the world’s most iconic consumer hardware. But it built it in someone else’s factory. That choice, logical at the time, drove speed, scale, and margins.
It also seeded something harder to unwind: dependency. Operational know-how leaked. Local capability compounded. Today, reversing that reliance takes decades, not quarters.
Tesla walked the same path. In 2019, it became the first Western automaker to build a wholly owned factory in China. In 2025, it lost global EV leadership to BYD, a company born in part from the ecosystem Tesla helped fund.
Now biotech stands at the same crossroads.
The product isn’t phones. It’s the infrastructure that discovers, tests, and manufactures medicine.
Take WuXi AppTec. In 2024, it synthesized over 460,000 new compounds. It booked RMB 25B ($3.6 billion USD) in revenue from U.S.-based customers, more than 60% of its total. It reinvests 23–25% of that revenue into expanding its own capacity. That’s self-funded CapEx at geopolitical scale.
Now layer in AI. Drug discovery is becoming a loop: design → make → test → learn → redesign. The tighter that loop, the stronger the model. The better the wet lab integration, the better the output. Eli Lily has embraced this and become the first $1 trillion market cap pharma (granted this may be partly because of Novo’s missteps…).
When you outsource that loop, two things happen:
This is how virtual pharma becomes vulnerable pharma. And it’s how TechBio turns from a buzzword into a national priority.
In AI x Bio, patents are just one layer. What matters now is what you can build, execute, and ship, over and over again.
Software already ran this experiment. Bill Gurley’s version is blunt: patents rarely decide outcomes. Elon’s move is even blunter: open source what others hoard, then win anyway. In practice, distribution plus iteration plus execution eats legal exclusivity for breakfast.
Pharma feels like the exception, because here IP is oxygen. Without patents, there’s no pricing power, no exclusivity window, and capital stops showing up. True. Also incomplete. Because “IP” is no longer a single thing. It’s a stack.
At the bottom is legal IP: the molecule, the claims, the regulatory scaffolding that turns a chemical into a business.
Above that is system IP (or proprietary know-how): the data, the loop, the meta learning. The machinery that lets you generate, select, and improve candidates faster than anyone else.
Above that is capability IP: the tacit knowledge of how biology breaks in the real world. Assay design. Troubleshooting. Batch drift. The instinct that tells you “this dataset is lying” before the slide deck does. This doesn’t live in a patent. It lives in teams and workflows.
To be fair, pharma has always been a know-how business. What’s changing is that AI and robotics can scale that know-how: faster data creation becomes faster insight generation, which becomes faster iteration, which becomes enduring advantage.
This is where biotech starts to rhyme with software. As distribution shifts, defensibility shifts with it. Molecules don’t live in a vacuum anymore. They live inside an experience: symptoms, testing, triage, prescription, and a box on your doorstep. In that world, molecule IP is necessary but not sufficient. The moat starts to include the channel and the interface.
Add AI and the boundary blurs again. In AI x Bio, value is shared between the asset and the engine that produced it. If your model, data, lab automation, and experimental loop compound faster, you don’t just make one drug. You build a machine that makes many drugs.
The uncomfortable implication is that control may drift away from the molecule holder and toward whoever owns the interface. If a platform can interpret diagnostics, recommend next steps, and steer treatment decisions, it can become the choke point without inventing the drug. None of this is new. Formularies, guidelines, and default pathways have always shaped outcomes. What’s new is that software and AI-mediated triage can encode those defaults and scale them, turning interface control into a tighter choke point.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Western system can select winners without selecting for upstream process excellence. You can win by licensing the molecule, then outcompeting others on reimbursement strategy, access, marketing, and distribution. That is profitable in the short term, but it quietly degrades the one thing that compounds: the industrial capability to discover, test, and make the next generation of drugs.
But systems still run on messy human capability. Biology is not a clean API. The loop only compounds if you own the ugly middle: how experiments actually get done, how failures get debugged, how quality is enforced, how intuition forms.
That’s why outsourcing is more than a margin decision. When you outsource enough of the wet work, you export capability IP. And it’s almost invisible because it shows up as OpEx, not CapEx. It doesn’t trigger alarms. It just compounds, until the industrial base you rented becomes the one that out-iterates you.
Over the last two decades we built a miracle: rapid hypothesis generation, global testing pipelines, molecules into patients faster than ever. But under the miracle was a trade. We outsourced the compounding parts of biology, the work that makes IP real. The result is we didn’t just globalize execution. We underwrote rival bio industrial capacity. Now the bill is coming due.
So the argument isn’t “IP doesn’t matter.” It’s that IP expanded. Patents still anchor value, but defensible advantage increasingly lives in the loop (system IP), in the craft (capability IP), and in the interface (distribution). If you don’t own those layers, you end up with strong claims and weak control. And in an era of AI-mediated care, control is the thing that cashes the check.
The BIOSECURE Act was an early signal that the policy world is waking up. The U.S. is moving to limit federal work with firms like WuXi, BGI, and MGI. The subtext is the real story. Biology is not just a supply chain anymore. It is infrastructure. And infrastructure has borders.
We saw this in semiconductors. When the supply chain became a strategic liability, the response was not a better procurement spreadsheet, it was to rebuild domestic fabs.
In biology, we are walking into the same trap: fabless biology, assuming the factory can live offshore while the innovation stays at home. Workforces take longer to train. If you have not been paying for your own factory floor, you do not have one sitting idle just in case.
To be clear, late-stage clinical execution and regulatory work is still largely run by Western global CROs, as semiconductor design sits in the West and is only manufactured in the East. The vulnerability sits upstream, and it rhymes on the CDMO side too: China has scale in standardized, high-volume work, but the differentiated edge is fragmented and hard to rebuild once you stop paying for it.
There is a reason Chinese providers dominate large parts of preclinical and early manufacturing throughput today. It is people. Highly skilled, deeply trained labor, scaled to industrial levels, at cost structures the West has not matched in decades. It is not primarily about cutting corners. It is about throughput.
But the ground may be shifting again. Robotics, automation and agentic AI workflows are advancing faster than most biotech boards are planning for. Work that used to be manual, linear, and low margin is becoming programmable, parallel, and scalable.
Lab automation is no longer a few pipetting arms. We are heading toward closed loop systems that can design experiments, optimize conditions, execute assays, interpret results, and propose the next hypothesis, over and over, without losing momentum.
If that trajectory holds, we will get a new kind of cloud lab. Not just shared infrastructure, but intelligent infrastructure. Agentic, increasingly autonomous, and easier to localize. The cost of spinning up a Western CRO could fall sharply. The value of doing AI augmented experimentation under your own roof could rise. And the moat moves again, toward the ability to iterate fast, reliably, and sovereignly, because in biology, the loop is the factory.
Here’s what I hope the JPM talking points become. Not another round of macro agreement where everyone nods about sovereignty and geopolitics and then goes back to optimizing cost.
The real question for founders and investors is much sharper.
Where is your actual IP?
Is it in the molecule, or in the factory that can reliably make and improve it?
Is it in the deck, or in the loop that designed the hypothesis, tested it, debugged reality, and iterated until it worked?
Startups love the phrase asset light. Too often it is code for capability light. If you outsource the work that teaches you, you are not building a company. You are running a spreadsheet with a lab receipt attached.
For investors, this forces a reset in what counts as defensible. The molecule is only part of the story. The loop, the lab, the process intuition, those are strategic assets. If they live in China, you do not own them. If they live inside a system you control, you do.
The best companies in this cycle will not just own patents. They will own the learning curve. As we approach an AI-centric world, the “10 years to clinic” metric collapses. The cycle of Design → Make → Test → Learn shrinks from months to days.
The “process IP” we talked about is no longer human know-how; it is model weights.
First, treat CRO strategy like cloud strategy. Design for portability. Dual source where it matters. Own your truth set. Keep local capacity for anything that teaches you. Outsource the repeatable work. Keep the compounding work close.
Second, invest in the bio industrial commons. No startup should build a full stack lab from scratch. But we can build shared platforms that many startups can plug into. Biofoundries. Medchem cores. Assay centers. It is the physical infrastructure equivalent of what cloud did for software.
Third, reward resilience in fundraising. Asset light does not have to mean sovereignty light. Investors should ask a simple question.
If China cut you off tomorrow, could you still run the company?
Fourth, be explicit about the trade. Speed matters. Price matters. But so do concentration risk, leakage, and geopolitical friction. Good strategy names the cost and pays it intentionally, instead of discovering it later as a crisis.
Because this was never just about cost.
Outsourcing helped finance a Chinese bio industrial base with the scale, capability, and learning velocity to become a competitor. WuXi alone targeting 100,000 litres of solid phase peptide reactor volume in 2025 was not just contract research. That’s sovereign capability.
The Apple and Tesla lesson was not ‘never build abroad’. It was simpler. If you build your business on top of someone else’s factory, do not be surprised when the factory becomes the business.
Biotech is there now.
It is time to own enough of the factory again.
Not everywhere. Not always. But enough to keep the loop tight, the learning local, and the innovation portable. Outsourcing should be a choice, not a dependency.
And then there is the final conclusion, which is not linear. It is orthogonal.
This is not only about plugging holes in the current system or rebuilding lost capacity. It is about asking the bigger question. What if the right answer is not ‘fix pharma’? What if the right answer is ‘build the first $3 trillion dollar biology company’?
The analogy is real. Google did not just crawl websites. It built infrastructure that made the internet usable. It sat between the user and the data. It turned distributed information into a loop. It monetized not the asset, but the search.
So what is the biological equivalent?
A system that closes the loop between data, models, wet lab execution, and patient outcomes. A sovereign engine. A full stack, AI native platform that does not just license molecules, but learns the entire process of making them better.
Not a CRO. Not a pharma company. Something new. Something foundational.
That is the orthogonal bet. Do not just fix the outsourcing mistake. Leapfrog it.
And that’s what I hope is talked about at the parties and dinners of JPM.
Editor’s Note: John Cassidy is a general partner with Kindred Capital in London. He is a member of the Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation team preparing to climb Kilimanjaro in February. A version of this article was first published on John’s SubStack.
Kate Haviland is today’s guest on The Long Run.
Kate is the former CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Blueprint Medicines.
Kate Haviland, fomer CEO, Blueprint Medicines
Blueprint was one of the big biotech success stories of 2025. The company was acquired by Sanofi for $9.1 billion in cash at closing, and potentially $9.5 billion if certain milestones are met.
The company started out with a vision for treating rare genetic forms of cancer. It found some success there, but that wasn’t the main reason Sanofi bought the company. Blueprint learned along the way that its drug for a rare type of gastrointestinal stromal tumors could also be used for a couple of related immune disorders – advanced systemic mastocytosis and indolent systemic mastocytosis.
The drug made a big difference for these patients. Once Blueprint realized it had the category to itself, it was off to the races.
You could say this is a story of following the science where it leads, strong execution in both R&D and sales and marketing functions, and a culture of teamwork that glued it all together for more than a decade.
Before we get started, a word from the sponsor of The Long Run.
Are you tired of inconsistent bioanalysis results and waiting months for data that should take days?
Dash is the only bioanalysis CRO built from the ground up with a tech-first approach, designed to deliver better, faster, and cheaper than anyone else.
With Dash, you get:
From preclinical to late-stage studies, Dash helps you move from assay development and validation to sample analysis with unmatched speed. Founded by industry veterans who’ve felt the pain of traditional CROs, Dash is the partner researchers and clinical leaders actually need: reliable, fast, and easy to work with.
So if slow bioanalysis CROs are costing you money and missed deadlines—put Dash to the test.
Visit www.dash.bio and see how fast bioanalysis can be.
Please enjoy this conversation with Kate Haviland on The Long Run.
Patrick Malone, partner, KdT Ventures
One question from 2025 has consistently frustrated me:
Why did AI and crypto become top strategic priorities in the first year of the Trump Administration while biotech was largely ignored?
Trump’s core issues over the last decade have been immigration, trade, energy dominance, border security, China, and re-shoring of US manufacturing. It was not obvious that “Artificial Intelligence” and “digital assets” would rise to the top of his domestic policy agenda. Crypto, in particular, is surprising: Trump publicly dismissed Bitcoin and crypto as volatile and “not money” in 2019.
And yet, by 2024–2025, AI and crypto had moved beyond being interesting technologies to become explicit strategic national priorities. During the post-election transition period in December 2024, Trump announced David Sacks as the White House “AI & Crypto Czar.”
This served to elevate the importance of AI and crypto inside the administration, and delegated significant responsibility to a capable and experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Within weeks, the administration issued executive orders that created real initiatives and deadlines: a new AI executive order directing an AI Action Plan, and a crypto executive order establishing the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets to coordinate agencies and deliver a formal policy blueprint.
The White House signaled its commitment through senior-level meetings, including a crypto summit, and followed through with landmark legislation. For example, Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, creating a federal framework for payment stablecoins.
Whatever you think of the substance of these policies, the lesson for biotech is that it needs to do a better job of competing for attention at the highest levels of the federal government, and it needs a strategy to better stand up for its interests. AI and crypto earned that attention because they built a political interface.
The AI and crypto business communities had people who could navigate the administration and speak its language, as well generate real political capital. In 2024, Trump was courted directly by tech and crypto operators who raised serious money and built political alliances and infrastructure.
David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya hosted a San Francisco fundraiser that raised millions of dollars in one night, with senior figures from crypto and tech in the room. Trump used the setting to pitch himself as the “crypto president.”
At the same time, facing a hostile regulatory posture from the previous administration, the crypto industry moved aggressively into electoral politics. The Fairshake network of super PACs and its affiliates raised and deployed substantial resources in 2024 to support crypto-aligned candidates, making crypto policy consequential at the ballot box.
By 2025, AI began following the same model, with Silicon Valley backing a $100+ million pro-AI political spending effort designed to influence who gets elected—and, in turn, what policy gets made.
The AI and crypto industries didn’t just advocate from the outside. They embedded themselves in the electoral and policy-making process. They invested in operators, institutions, and political machinery capable of translating industry priorities into executive orders, interagency coordination, and legislation.
David Sacks is the clearest example. By naming him AI & Crypto Czar, Trump gave the AI and crypto agenda a single point of execution inside the administration, someone who could turn ideas into policy.
This is the part biotech misses. Policy is not persuasion alone. It isn’t memos, panels, or moral arguments. Policy is execution. Biotech has nobody in a position of influence in the Trump Administration with the know-how, the networks, and the capability to wield power.
What’s missing is the ability to turn ideas into influence and power: securing executive mandate, motivating agencies to act with urgency, and converting that work into law and funding. AI and crypto had operators who could run that playbook, and the legislative results speak for themselves. That’s why Sacks matters.
After his appointment, the administration stood up an internal machine by executive order, produced a formal policy blueprint, and translated it into concrete outcomes, including stablecoin legislation and an AI action plan.
Which brings us to the real gap in biotech. The industry doesn’t just need better arguments or louder advocates. It needs someone who can operate inside the government and actually execute—someone who can translate scientific progress into policy, align a fragmented ecosystem, and make the case for biotech as a strategic national priority rather than a niche technical field.
What has made the lack of progress in biotech policy in the new administration especially frustrating is that the rationale driving urgency in AI policy applies almost word-for-word to biotech: Competition with China. National security. Domestic manufacturing capacity. Strategic dependence on foreign supply chains.
You could literally replace “AI” or “rare earths” with “biotech” in many of the recent EOs, and the logic would still hold. These should be obvious, bipartisan reasons to invest in and accelerate the biotech ecosystem. The opportunity is there.
Biotech hasn’t built a capable political interface for two structural reasons. First, Washington still often conflates “biotech” with “big pharma,” which renders biotech politically invisible. It’s hard to make progress on innovation-driven policy when startups are treated as incumbents, and therefore dragged into debates on pricing, reimbursement, and market power rather than scientific advancement.
Another issue is fragmentation. AI and crypto accelerated because the community acted like a movement. There was a center of gravity pulling together founders, operators, investors, and policymakers.
Biotech, by contrast, is spread across academic labs, NIH, the FDA, startups, pharma, state governments, and a long tail of investors. Large pharma and small biotech sometimes have conflicting priorities and incentives. There is no unifying node that turns these pieces into a coherent whole.
Biotech needs more coordination, not innovation. We need someone who can align founders, investors, scientists, and patient communities around a coherent agenda, translate it into policy and legislative language, and make biotech a clear strategic priority in Washington.
So who could fill the role?
Maybe it’s one person. More likely, it’s a pairing: scientific legitimacy paired with political execution. Biotech has credibility in abundance. What it lacks is a unifying operator who can sit with regulators, legislators, and founders in the same week, and align them around a single agenda.
Here are some suggested candidates to get the conversation started:
Biotech will keep producing world-class science. The question is whether it will also build the political and institutional capacity to match its strategic importance, or whether it will continue to let other sectors define the national agenda.
Priorities in Washington are rarely set by abstractions or white papers. They are set by people, often one or two individuals inside the government who have the credibility and mandate to mobilize institutions.
AI and crypto found those people, but biotech has not. Until it does, biotech will remain insular, failing to make its importance known beyond its own ecosystem.
Luke Timmerman, founder & editor, Timmerman Report
The Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has done it again.
We have exceeded our team goal of raising $1 million for brilliant young cancer researchers around the US. We currently stand at $1,094,672.
This team isn’t done. The latest group of 22 biotech executives and investors have one month left before traveling to Tanzania, banding together in common cause, and climbing Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa at 19,341 feet / 5,895 meters.
This Timmerman Traverse campaign, like all others, has required sweat and sacrifice. The biotech industry has experienced several lean years. It took creativity and relentless drive to overcome obstacles.
Antonio LaPorte, postdoctoral researcher, Harvard University; Timmerman Traverse-Damon Runyon Fellow
We persisted because it’s important to uplift the next generation of outstanding cancer researchers.
Timmerman Traverse has now raised $3.1 million over four campaigns for the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation since fall 2023. Every dollar raised – 100 percent – goes directly into multi-year grants for the young scientists fortunate and talented enough to win a Damon Runyon award. There are currently five young scientists at institutions around the US supported by the Timmerman Traverse, with three more to be named in 2026.
One of these scientists will join the Kilimanjaro team in February. Antonio LaPorte, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, grew up in the Chicago area and got his PhD in chemistry at the University of Illinois. He’s a Timmerman Traverse-Damon Runyon Fellow who now has secure resources to pursue his dreams because of the biotech community’s support.
Not every young scientist has been so fortunate during a tumultuous year. Damon Runyon has heard from many scientists this year about how appreciative they are for philanthropic support.
Yung Lie, president and CEO, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation
“I’m absolutely thrilled and, at the same time, not at all surprised that this group of outstanding leaders reached this fundraising benchmark so soon. The Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon has been an incredible force multiplier in cancer research,” said Yung Lie, president and CEO of Damon Runyon. “We’re so grateful to everyone who has participated in or donated to one of our expeditions, past and present. We are excited to include a current Damon Runyon-Timmerman Traverse Fellow on the Kilimanjaro 2026 team to share with the group just how critical this funding is right now in this uncertain scientific climate.”
Thanks to the following sponsors for their generous support:
$25,000
$10,000
Browne Consulting
Cooley
Ryan Turner Specialty
Wolf Greenfield
Thanks to the peripatetic participants in this 2026 Timmerman Traverse of Kilimanjaro for Damon Runyon.
If you or your company would like to sponsor this team, there’s still time to get recognized on the banner we will carry to the top of Kilimanjaro and on team gear we will wear with pride. Contact Elyse Hoffmann, elyse.hoffmann@damonrunyon.org.
For me, this was the 14th consecutive successful season as team leader of the Timmerman Traverse. All of the campaigns for cancer research, fighting poverty and sickle cell disease (14 of 14, 100 percent) have exceeded the fundraising goals since my personal 2018 summit of Mt. Everest for Fred Hutch. These teams of biotech executives and investors – in up years and down years — have raised a combined $15.3 million to alleviate suffering from cancer, poverty, and sickle cell disease.
I look forward to seeing many readers in San Francisco next week at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Planning is underway for the next Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon in summer 2026. It will be a pair of hikes in the Evolution Range of California’s High Sierras. It’s a spectacular section of one of the great mountain ranges in North America.
Interested in how you or your company can get involved? Let’s talk. luke@timmermanreport.com.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Niels Plath, chief scientific officer, Muna Therapeutics
The Alzheimer’s research community has tried for decades to get rid of amyloid plaques in the brain, in hopes of slowing down or preventing the memory-robbing disease. But amyloid might not be an insurmountable enemy after all.
A remarkable group of people whose ability to resist the cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s was, until recently, completely invisible. These were individuals who lived long, cognitively healthy lives despite their brains harboring the very amyloid plaques we have long considered to be a death sentence.
Advances in our scientific toolkit made it possible to study postmortem brain tissue directly. And this wasn’t a rare fluke; the finding of plaques in healthy people appeared again and again. It was the first real evidence of a bona fide, innate mechanism of resilience in the brain–an ability to thrive despite what looks like a devastating tangled web of amyloid plaques.
This concept was powerfully reinforced by the astonishing finding that a rare genetic variant (the “Christchurch mutation”) can protect individuals from dementia, even when they carry a mutation in a different gene PSEN1 (presenilin 1) that would otherwise spell certain doom.
That discovery was made in a single individual back in 1987, but the significance wasn’t fully appreciated by the scientific community until more evidence buttressed the finding in 2019 and 2024. The question began to shift from ‘How do we clear the plaques?’ to the far more profound ‘How do these brains successfully fight back?’
The idea of being resilient to disease is common in immunology, where we credit a ‘stronger immune system’ for protecting our bodies from the invasion and spread of bugs. This concept is more nuanced in areas like oncology and neurodegeneration. What does resilience mean in an Alzheimer’s context?
A recent landmark study published in Nature provides a credible blueprint for what this resilience looks like at a molecular level. It was a signpost, providing concrete, human-derived data that proves that we can, in fact, identify biological pathways that protect the brain.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School analyzed human brains with single-cell RNA-seq resolution, and discovered that, of 27 different metals measured in brain cells, the brain’s innate level of lithium was the one most relevant to Alzheimer’s. Lithium levels were significantly reduced in individuals with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer’s. The study revealed that amyloid plaques act like sponges, sequestering the brain’s natural lithium and reducing its bioavailability.
Further experiments in mouse models confirmed this link: reducing lithium levels by about half markedly accelerated the deposit of amyloid and tau, activated inflammation and sped up cognitive decline. Aging-related decline in learning and memory was largely reversed by treatment with lithium. In normally aging humans, the study showed that higher natural lithium levels were positively correlated with better scores on cognitive tests, offering a direct molecular link to cognitive resilience.
This is not a lifestyle fad; it is rigorous molecular biology revealing key pathways that offer actionable therapeutic targets. Lithium orotate, a salt with reduced amyloid binding, could be given as a replacement therapy. This insight – that we can perturb brains to overcome what looks like a disease pathology — stems directly from our new technological tools that have made it possible to ask and answer questions at an unprecedented speed and volume.
The tools that enable us to study these mechanisms are only just becoming widely available to neuroscientists. Single-cell RNA-seq, and spatial transcriptomics are a couple examples.
This is the most auspicious time to be studying the basic pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. Progress in Alzheimer’s has been stymied by the lack of critical tools to interrogate cells and molecular mechanisms in the human brain itself. We have been forced to translate our findings across from mouse models, where these animals do not even experience Alzheimer’s disease.
To build on this newfound momentum, we must wage a collective campaign to amass, harmonize, and share our data.
The alternative is to let it sit idle and unconnected to today’s fervent research efforts. Brilliant research, including the discovery of the Christchurch mutation, the recent lithium study, and the continued characterization of key brain cells in neurodegeneration, has opened a door.
But to walk through it, we must confront the critical bottleneck: the scarcity and siloing of brain tissue samples and the rich clinical metadata from the individuals who donated them. Without large-scale data sharing and analysis, we will be stuck looking at samples that might represent a few anecdotes. We might miss the larger patterns that could point to promising therapeutic targets.
For decades, our goal was to wage a defensive war against damage. Now, we have a more profound and promising path forward: harnessing the body’s innate, protective mechanisms leading to resilience. The future of Alzheimer’s therapy may not be a drug that simply fights the disease, but one that empowers the brain to protect itself.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Emily Conley is today’s guest on The Long Run.
She is the CEO of Berkeley, Calif.-based Renasant Bio.
Emily Conley, CEO, Renasant Bio
The big idea at Renasant is to develop oral small molecule drugs to treat patients with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, known as ADPKD. Patients with this disease develop cysts on their kidneys that sometimes cause the kidney to balloon in size and grow into 30-pound dysfunctional, painful and swollen organs.
Scientists think there’s a way to stop it. Renasant is developing small molecule correctors and potentiators that target the polycystin protein abnormalities that drive the disease. If the drugs work as conceived, they would enable people to avoid the grim fate of kidney dialysis or transplant. An estimated 300,000 patients in the US and Europe have the disease, which technically makes it rare, but not that rare.
Emily came to this startup a couple of years ago when it was in stealth mode, and just started talking about it a few months ago. She’s a neuroscientist by training and had a formative early biotech career experience at 23andMe, the consumer genetics pioneer. The opportunity to make a convenient small molecule drug, or a complementary combination of small molecules, that act on the underlying disease biology were a big part of what compelled her to join this startup.
The Long Run is sponsored by:
Are you tired of inconsistent bioanalysis results and waiting months for data that should take days?
Dash is the only bioanalysis CRO built from the ground up with a tech-first approach, designed to deliver better, faster, and cheaper than anyone else.
With Dash, you get:
From preclinical to late-stage studies, Dash helps you move from assay development and validation to sample analysis with unmatched speed. Founded by industry veterans who’ve felt the pain of traditional CROs, Dash is the partner researchers and clinical leaders actually need: reliable, fast, and easy to work with.
So if slow bioanalysis CROs are costing you money and missed deadlines—put Dash to the test.
Visit www.dash.bio and see how fast bioanalysis can be.
Now, please enjoy this conversation with Emily Conley on The Long Run.
John Flavin, founder and CEO, Portal Innovations
When we started our first biotech company, MediChem Life Sciences in the early 1990s in Chicago, there was nothing resembling a “biotech ecosystem” nearby.
We had to build our own labs, figure out how to raise money and how to recruit a team of scientists and professionals. The universities in the Chicago area were more focused on basic science. The culture frowned on connections between faculty and industry.
The scene has changed dramatically.
Pat Flavin, president, Portal Innovations
Although still early in development, the Chicago biotech ecosystem is thriving. A similar story is playing out around the U.S. and internationally.
Academic research has undergone a shift over the past decade, driven by the need for practical application in the life sciences. Federal funding for research has flattened, and universities have sought new ways to attract and retain talent. One way to attract bright young scientists is by fostering an environment conducive to translational research and embracing the sort of relationships with industry that were once frowned upon.
The result is that life science entrepreneurship and new product development is flourishing outside traditional coastal epicenters, creating a dynamic and distributed map of regional hubs across the United States. This article explores the impact of the emergence of these life sciences innovation hubs around the world, examining how these ecosystems are reshaping the future of biomedical innovation.
Historically, research universities relied on federal grants to fund cutting-edge research aimed at discovering new drugs, devices, and diagnostics. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget, for instance, peaked in real purchasing terms at approximately $41.7 billion in 2022, but projections show a stagnation or slight decline because of federal budget cuts and inflation eating away at the purchasing power of NIH-funded scientists.
This reduction in basic science activity, exacerbated by the current U.S. administration’s threats to slash more dramatically, has prompted research institutions to rethink their business models.
Today, there is a growing emphasis on translational research—research that aims to transform scientific discoveries into practical applications that benefit society. The market is huge and growing. The global biotechnology market is expected to reach $2.4 trillion by 2028, according to a report by the Milken Institute.
The Covid-19 pandemic acted as a global shock to the life sciences innovation system, accelerating pre-existing trends and forcing a rapid re-evaluation of how and where innovation happens.
Before the pandemic, innovation was firmly concentrated in established hubs like Boston/Cambridge and the San Francisco Bay Area. The pandemic didn’t kill these centers of innovation; it further established their importance as hubs with spokes that are delivering new energy to the nodes in the network.
Figure 1. Capital growth shift in venture ecosystems. Percentage change in total invested capital comparing the post-COVID era (2022–2025) to the COVID-era baseline (2018–2021) for companies receiving a 1st Round deal between $2–15M. Emerging Hubs (150%) experienced higher relative capital growth than Established Hubs (46%) during this period transition.
Figure 2. Deal volume shift in venture ecosystems. Percentage change in the total number of deals comparing the post-COVID era (2022–2025) to the COVID-era baseline (2018–2021) for companies receiving a 1st Round deal between $2–15M. Deal volume contracted by 20.5% in Established Hubs but grew by 6% in Emerging Hubs, highlighting a structural shift in deal flow.
The post-COVID era (2022–2025) was compared to the COVID-era baseline (2018–2021) for companies on Pitchbook raising a 1st Round deal between $2–15M. Established hubs are defined as companies in MA and CA. Emerging hubs encompass companies in GA, IL, NJ, RI, and TX.
Regional biotech hubs must attract and retain innovative faculty and researchers to be competitive. Younger academics are prioritizing the impact of their work beyond traditional publishing in peer-reviewed journals. A survey by the American Association of Universities found more than 70% of new faculty members now consider industry partnerships and translational research opportunities when choosing an institution.
Regions that effectively create and promote an environment conducive to innovation are reaping the benefits. Cities like Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego have become magnets for scientific and entrepreneurial talent because of their established biotech ecosystems. For example, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council reported that Massachusetts is home to over 1,000 biotech companies, employing more than 60,000 people and generating over $5 billion in annual revenue.
Until recently, talented researchers who got their training outside of the leading biotech clusters were exported along with adjacent intellectual property to the established biotech hubs. The top hubs are like suns – they have a strong gravitational pull. This made sense because these researchers and their ideas needed to be plugged into a rich environment full of local investors, CEOs, CMOs, pharma companies, and other partners.
This export phenomenon is changing. Most top-tier research institutions and the regions they anchor are actively investing in the environment to retain the talent they have attracted. This investible talent migration is making it possible to start and scale companies in new geographies.
For example:
Nathan Gianneschi, professor, Northwestern University; co-founder, Grove Biopharma
Sarah Hein, co-founder and CEO, March Biosciences
The pandemic was a significant contributing factor. It accelerated the remote work revolution. The experience proved that not every part of R&D needs to be in a physical hub. The geographic location of life sciences innovation has become more fluid and [we believe] the future of life sciences innovation will be less about a single best location and more about the strength of the network connecting diverse and specialized geographic nodes.
Different regions have different advantages. For example, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is renowned for its concentration of biotech firms and research institutions. The proximity of prestigious universities, such as Harvard and MIT, creates a vibrant ecosystem that attracts talent and investment. According to a report by CB Insights, over $8.1 billion was invested in Boston-area biotech companies in 2020 alone.
Similarly, states like Texas, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, and North Carolina are investing heavily in infrastructure and workforce development programs. For example, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, home to more than 300 biotech companies, has generated more than $4.9 billion in revenue and supports over 60,000 jobs. Texas taxpayers approved and renewed the Cancer Research and Prevention Institute (CPRIT) $6 billion that invests directly in biotech companies in the Lone Star State.
Texas built on the CPRIT success by investing in a new $3 billion fund this year focused on neurodegenerative diseases. It’s called the Dementia Research and Prevention Institute of Texas (DPRIT).
David Baker, professor of biochemistry, University of Washington; director, Institute for Protein Design
Washington state hasn’t directed state resources on the same level, but its community is playing to its own strengths. Nobel laureate David Baker, a Seattle native, has attracted brilliant colleagues at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. This core group of scientists, in turn, is supported by a network of local investors and entrepreneurs, including the Gates Foundation.
Great science attracts investors, corporate partners, graduate students and young faculty. All of this activity builds momentum and critical mass for the local biotech ecosystem.
The University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, in our home region, exemplifies how academic institutions are adapting to the changing landscape. After years of building the center, it has become a pivotal player in fostering entrepreneurship within the university. The center has facilitated the launch of more than 160 startups since its inception, attracting more than $1.3 billion in funding.
The center’s transparent approach to innovation has led to successful partnerships with industry, allowing researchers to access funding and resources necessary to bring their ideas to market. Hyde Park Labs, Harper Court Ventures, GS Innovation Fund and the Polsky Center focus on providing faculty with tools to start ventures with market-worthy platforms. This model serves as a blueprint for other universities aiming to establish their own biotech hubs.
These activities have spawned biomedical spinoffs including:
Tom Gajewski, professor, University of Chicago
Providing an option for innovators to start their ventures locally increases talent and company retention. It’s not enough for a university to support translational research and entrepreneurial support to spin out a company. These early-stage ventures need access to a broader market of investors and partners. Without a local market, these companies migrate to established hubs.
By facilitating collaborations between researchers and entrepreneurs, our platform at Portal provides a local market in young biotech ecosystems by providing seed capital, lab space and talent to build and scale locally.
Prior to Portal’s launch in 2020, local seed capital and commercial lab space did not exist. Scientific cofounder Ryan Clark returned home from working at Sana in Boston along with University of Illinois Professor Brad Merrill. They wanted to build their company in Chicago to access strong synthetic biology talent. Syntax Bio, a CRISPR-based cell therapy startup spun out of UIC launched in 2021 at Portal, received funding from Portal and DCVC Bio, and recently partnered with Astellas, Illumina and Draper for their Series A round.
Young ecosystems can’t survive sustainably over time in isolation. Connected innovation hubs are crucial for the success of the local markets. Kendall Square thrives with transparency and momentum since all the dots are connected. Simulating this environment across a wider geography is possible by connecting all the nodes. These hubs facilitate talent flow, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and resource exchange among various stakeholders, including researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers. The concept of “three currencies”—economic, intellectual, and social capital—underscores the importance of building robust networks within these ecosystems.
As biotech hubs continue to grow, they pave the way for new opportunities. The ability to connect researchers with industry leaders and provide access to resources is vital for driving innovation and addressing global health challenges.
Chicago has a cluster of talent and infrastructure around high performance computing and quantum fueled by Argonne National Laboratory. Ecosystems with research groups and start-ups around the world working on data intensive biology efforts such as RNA applications access these resources through collaborations.
The rise of biotech hubs is not confined to the United States. There are several interconnected factors have powered the rise of hubs outside the US.
Seeing the success of the US life sciences industry, foreign governments have highlighted biotech as a strategic priority for economic growth. Forward-looking governments are applying successful incentive programs including grants and R&D tax credits. In addition, a growing spirit of collaboration between regulatory agencies has improved the streamlining of regulatory pathways to accelerate drug approvals.
Instead of trying to replicate the broad model of Boston, new hubs have achieved success by applying a specific niche strategy of focusing on the regional strengths. Some key examples of this niche strategy: Switzerland excels in biologics and large molecule therapeutics. Ireland and Israel are leaders in medical devices and the UK is a world leader in genomics and AI-driven drug discovery.
Around the globe, countries such as China, Japan, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Australia are emerging as leaders in biotech innovation. Saudi Arabia, UAE and Greece are picking up the pace. For instance, China’s biotech market is projected to reach $173 billion by 2025, driven by substantial government investments and a rapidly growing demand for healthcare.
Similarly, the UK’s focus on collaboration between universities and industry has resulted in a thriving biotech sector, with the UK biotech industry contributing £84 billion to the economy in 2021 and supporting over 280,000 jobs.
The rise of biotech hubs represents a significant shift in the landscape of academic research and innovation. As universities adapt to changing funding dynamics and prioritize translational research, the potential for impactful discoveries is greater than ever. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, attracting innovative talent, and investing in infrastructure, regions around the world are seeking to capture some of the benefits of the biotech revolution. New ecosystems open possibilities for new types of innovation and novel business models leveraging the endogenous strengths of the local market. Fusing tech platforms such as quantum, AI, and advanced batteries in to life sciences may be more likely in new places with different people than the established centers.
Some of the biggest ideas of the future may come from places off the beaten path. New ecosystems tend to attract more risk takers since the price of failure is higher. But the rewards to innovators, investors and patients can be substantial. Over time, as these ecosystems scale, the risk factor decreases.
Federal Funding Trends:
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Budget:
National Institutes of Health. (2022). NIH Budget Fact Sheet. Retrieved from NIH https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/category/1
Global Biotechnology Market Growth:
Milken Institute. (2021). The Global Biotechnology Market: A $2.4 Trillion Opportunity. Retrieved from Milken Institute
University Faculty Trends:
American Association of Universities. (2021). New Faculty Survey: Trends in Research and Industry Partnerships. Retrieved from AAU
Massachusetts Biotech Employment:
Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. (2020). 2020 Massachusetts Life Sciences Industry Report. Retrieved from MassBio
Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration:
Nature Biotechnology. (2018). The Importance of Interdisciplinary Research. Retrieved from Nature
University of California San Diego Infrastructure Investment:
University of California San Diego. (2021). UC San Diego Invests $1 Billion in Research Facilities. Retrieved from UCSD News Center
Boston Biotech Investment:
CB Insights. (2021). 2020 Boston Biotech Report: Funding Trends and Insights. Retrieved from CB Insights
North Carolina Research Triangle Park:
North Carolina Biotechnology Center. (2021). The Economic Impact of the North Carolina Biotechnology Industry. Retrieved from NC Biotech Center
University of Chicago Polsky Center:
University of Chicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. (2022). Impact Report. Retrieved from Polsky Center
Global Biotech Startup Funding:
PitchBook. (2021). 2021 Global State of Venture Capital Report. Retrieved from PitchBook
China’s Biotech Market Growth Projection:
China National Pharmaceutical Industry Information Center. (2021). China’s Biotech Market Report (in Chinese). Retrieved from CNPIC
UK Biotech Industry Economic Contribution:
BioIndustry Association. (2021). The UK Bioeconomy: A £84 billion Opportunity. Retrieved from BIA
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
David Shaywitz
Agency — the conviction I can shape my future — is a vital driver of human health and human potential.
It is also the factor overlooked by most digital health platforms.
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who has spent decades studying this, says agency boils down to the belief “I can make a positive difference in the world.” People with high agency believe there is something they can do next that might help – and then they actually try.
As Seligman emphasizes, the moments when we “try hard…persist against the odds…[and] make new, creative departures” are precisely when agency is at work. That extra effort and sustained determination — not just the mindset — shows up as improved performance, greater achievement, and enhanced health. It also manifests as resilience, enabling us not only to recover from adversity but (ideally) to bounce back as an even better version of ourselves.
GLP-1s highlight the power and promise of newfound agency. For many living with obesity, past attempts at weight loss reinforced a “cycle of despair” – trying harder mostly meant failing again. With the advent of GLP-1 medicines, many found that their weight would come down — and stay down. Oprah Winfrey called the feeling “a relief, like redemption, like a gift.”
The deeper change is psychological: for the first time in years, effort feels rewarded. GLP-1s unlock an agentic dividend: the motivational boost that comes from finally being able to take control of your health. That surplus sense of possibility can be channeled into the familiar health basics — moving more and sleeping better — but also, often more importantly, into how we show up in our relationships and communities, in the enthusiasm we bring to our hobbies and pursuits, into the totality of experiences that make life so meaningful.
Agency is the motivational currency of health, the ATP of behavior change – it lets success in one domain drive progress in others.
Connected fitness platforms have a similar opportunity. Each discrete achievement — finishing a class, riding three times in a week, noticing that the stairs feel easier or the back hurts less — is a small proof of “I can do this.”
In fixating narrowly on performance metrics, platforms like WHOOP, Oura, Peloton, and Tonal are leaving agency on the table. The opportunity here is to help people recognize, name, and bank their achievements, compounding the agentic boost that comes from each small win and making it easier to translate that confidence into the rest of life.
There are techniques that seem to support agency – cognitive reframing, elements of motivational interviewing, healthy conversation skills that help people generate their own plans, positive-psychology exercises that increase a sense of control and possibility.
But there isn’t a well-validated playbook. The 2021 Duckworth–Milkman exercise megastudy and a 2022 review by Feig and colleagues both point in the same direction: many thoughtfully crafted interventions, when rigorously evaluated, have disappointingly yielded only modest, generally short-lived changes in behavior; in the case of the megastudy, the effects observed were on average nearly ten times smaller than expert forecasts. Cracking this nut remains one of the biggest opportunities in health and technology.
Moreover, as public-health thinkers like Michael Kelly and Mary Barker, and Angela Duckworth in her emphasis on “situational agency” remind us, behavior is always embedded in social practices and daily routines, not floating in individual headspace. Kevin Hall’s work on obesity underscores the same point from a metabolic angle: in environments saturated with ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, calorie-dense foods, many people will overeat and gain weight. Our environmental defaults can make it much harder for individual agency to gain traction.
Powerful emerging technologies — from AI to connected devices and “health OS” platforms — now give us a new lever on this problem, but only if we use them thoughtfully. So far, most effort has focused on treating people as objects to be managed, with platforms competing to instrument every moment and compress our lives into ever more granular scores and rankings.
The real white space, I’d argue, is a platform that can reliably cultivate agency at scale. Building something like that would mean putting our most sophisticated AI and connected-health tools in the service of scaffolding human agency — helping people see real options, notch early wins, recover from lapses, and let small successes accumulate into a lived identity of capability.
None of this — from GLP-1s to digital health platforms — makes behavior change easy, but it does make sustained, structured support more possible than before, for patients, for consumers, and for employees trying to stay well while they work.
While we don’t have all the answers, designing for agency will likely emphasize:
By focusing technology on enhancing our intrinsic potential rather than just crunching our extruded numbers, we can strengthen our agency and with it, our capacity to live healthier, more fully realized lives.
In a year when tech-forward health platforms are vying to incorporate the most agentic AI, our greatest challenge, and most important opportunity, may be figuring out how to leverage these ever-more powerful emerging technologies — with wisdom, humility, and humanity — to nourish the development of the most agentic people.
For more on health and agency see KindWellHealth.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
David Shaywitz
In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I review Off the Scales, a fascinating new book by Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan about the discovery and development of GLP-1 agonists and their impact on medicine, culture, and society.
The review, aimed at a generalist audience, focuses mostly on the societal and cultural implications, but TR readers may be especially interested in the book’s extensive discussion of the science that led to semaglutide. This agent is now marketed by Novo Nordisk as Ozempic (injection for type two diabetes), Wegovy (injection for obesity), and Rybelsus (pill for type 2 diabetes).
Donnellan describes the early work at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), subsequent product development at Novo Nordisk, and even some of the commercial decisions and leaders. One example: the brash American marketing executive, Jeremy Shepler, who came up with the earworm Oh-Oh-Oh Ozempic jingle, based on Pilot’s “Magic,” that contributed to the category’s success.
Pioneering GLP-1 chemist Svetlana Mojsov
In relating the discovery of GLP-1, Donnellan is particularly attuned to contribution of peptide chemist Svetlana Mojsov, who played a critical role in identifying and purifying the active form of GLP-1 while she was at MGH, serving as an Instructor of Medicine in the Endocrine Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the Howard Hughes peptide-synthesis core facility.
Mosjsov was initially not included on key GLP-1 patents; these initially were awarded to MGH physician-scientist Joel Habener alone. She subsequently spent more than a decade in an exhausting, ultimately successful legal battle to be added as an inventor. Today, Mojsov is Lulu Chow Wang and Robin Chemers Neustein Research Associate Professor at New York’s Rockefeller University, the institution where she originally trained.
Donnellan writes that Mojsov’s story “reveals the ruthless nature of science,” and “is yet another example of how women are often sidelined.” From her disheartening account it is hard to discern how much of the patent snub involved gender, and how much was the result of factors such as seniority, training (Ph.D. rather than M.D.), and function (tool-builder vs. orchestrator).
Massachusetts General Hospital — characterized as “all hierarchy” in Aimee Donnellan’s new book that recounts the contested history of GLP-1’s scientific discovery.
Also not included on the patent: Dr. Daniel Drucker, at the time an early-career physician-scientist at MGH working on the biology of GLP-1 as a member of the Habener lab. Drucker collaborated with Mojsov on critical early GLP-1 research, but did not join her in contesting the patents, as Donnellan discusses. Drucker is now at the University of Toronto, where he is University Professor in the Department of Medicine’s Division of Endocrinology, Chair in Incretin Biology, and a Senior Investigator at Sinai Health’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute.
Readers can get a sense of how recognition for Mojsov has evolved by starting with the 2021 historical review in Cell of GLP-1’s development penned by distinguished endocrinologist Stephen O’Rahilly. The article was written on the occasion of the 2021 Canada Gairdner International Award bestowed upon Habener, Drucker, and University of Copenhagen physician-scientist Jens Juul Holst for the trio’s early work on the chemistry and biology of GLP-1. O’Rahilly subsequently wrote a correction once he was more fully apprised of Mojsov’s substantial role.
Those interested in learning more may also want to look at Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s 2023 Science feature on Mojsov, entitled “Sidelined,” as well as Couzin-Frankel’s 2024 piece on Mojsov’s “yearlong journey out of obscurity.”
Also notable: Mojsov’s selection in 2024 as a co-recipient (along with Habener and Novo Nordisk drug developer Lotte Bjerre Knudsen) of the Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, which honored the development of GLP-1–based therapies for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Inevitably, perhaps, this award omitted other key researchers who might reasonably have been included (Holst, Drucker, and Novo’s Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen come to mind).
It remains entirely unclear who (if anyone) will ultimately receive a Nobel for GLP-1, given the Prize’s cap of three awardees. My guess: Habener, Holst, Mojsov, and Drucker will all be in contention for their work on the foundational science, and recipients may be determined by survival as much as by merit (since the Nobel cannot be awarded posthumously).
I’ve been captivated by the endocrinology of metabolism since I was a medical resident at MGH. I discussed the biology of ghrelin, known as the “hunger hormone,” in my second year talk. Later, as an endocrinology trainee at MGH (where I recall almost no personal interaction with Habener) I provocatively gave a Fellow talk on the question, “Is type 2 diabetes a surgical disease?” I emphasized the remarkable efficacy of bariatric surgery for this condition, and the unexpectedly rapid endocrine effects associated with the procedure.
As TR readers appreciate, I’ve remained fascinated by the topic, and written quite a bit about GLP-1, weight, weight management, and type 2 diabetes management over the ensuing years. Those who’d like to explore more may find the following selected pieces useful; they are grouped thematically.
Rosie Rodriguez, senior vice president of growth, Relation Therapeutics
London has always been multicultural, multidisciplinary, and in constant motion. It is a global mosaic where academia, entrepreneurship, finance, policy, and creative arts intersect with ease.
That character was evident during London Life Sciences Week, which has grown far beyond its origins around the Jefferies London Healthcare Conference.
What began as a finance event has become something broader and more meaningful: a week in which scientific, entrepreneurial and investment communities come together across the city with a shared sense of purpose.
This evolution has happened both organically and with intention. While London Life Sciences Week (LLSW) emerged from the longstanding cluster of activity surrounding Jefferies, it is now also formally supported and jointly hosted by the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA), MedCity, London & Partners, the Mayor of London, and the UK Government. Their combined support has created something coordinated and substantial, an effort to amplify London’s strengths and reinforce its position as a global centre for life sciences.
Patrick Vallance
Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, and Lord Patrick Vallance, Minister for Science, Innovation and Nuclear, started off the week with a simple and confident message: London is open for innovation, and everyone building the future of science is welcome here.
While some large pharma companies have recently paused major UK investments, the conversations across the week suggested that this pullback may be out of step with what is happening on the ground. London has real momentum. Especially when scientific expertise is being challenged in some parts of the world and anti-immigrant policies are on the rise, London’s stance was reassuring to the many immigrants in the city and a shrewd countermove in the global competition for scientific talent.
London’s life sciences community has reasons for optimism. The city attracted £1.6 billion of venture investment into life sciences over the past year, more than Paris, Stockholm and Berlin combined and leads continental Europe by over a billion pounds. During the typically gray and chilly third week of November, LLSW attracted more than 70 events, 1,300+ investors, and 2,400 participating companies.
Conversations from coffee meetings in King’s Cross to evenings in Soho had a grounded optimism. JPM now has real competition, people often remarked while taking in the scene.
London is not replacing San Francisco, but the value of being here, the density of science and talent, the productivity of meetings, the sense of community, is no longer in question. People spoke not about hype but about substance: good science, strong teams, and collaboration that feels natural rather than forced.
The deals and company updates around Jefferies were extensively covered, BiotechTV tracked and covered them fantastically in real time. The part that sits between the headlines, and what I wanted to capture here, was the atmosphere across London: the people, the conversations, and the sense of community that defined the week.
Emma Tinsley, CEO, Weatherden
London Bio stood out among the many great events of the week for how clearly it reflected the spirit running through LLSW and offered a moment that quietly captured the sector’s resilience. Led by Emma Tinsley (Weatherden, Elevara), Yasmin Siraj, BACKED VC, and Jack O’Meara (Aerska), it had a relaxed but purposeful atmosphere.
Emma opened by noting that between the three organizers their ventures had collectively raised almost £200 million in the past year, BACKED VC’s £100 million seed fund, Elevara’s £70 million round, and Aerska’s £21 million raise. It was not shared as a boast, but as a reminder that thoughtful, science-led companies continue to be backed, even in a year often described as difficult.
Their guests brought that same tone to the room. As he steps down as CEO of Recursion, Chris Gibson reflected on the past, present and future, thoughtful and candid, with light moments of humour, including his plan to climb Kilimanjaro with Luke in February.
When Sir Jonathan Symonds, GSK Chairman, spoke about the importance of building partnerships rather than transactions, I realized I was nodding more vigorously than intended. Reader, if you permit, a small and shameless plug follows: at Relation, where I have the privilege of helping shape and grow the organization, our collaborations with GSK reflect exactly that spirit.
Jack O’Meara, CEO, Aerska
Throughout the rest of the week, what stood out was how naturally people interacted. Researchers, investors, engineers, founders and industry leaders moved fluidly between discussions. There was a sense of community, not aspirational, but real, built slowly and deliberately over time.
People were focused not only on their own companies but on strengthening the wider ecosystem and making London an even better place to do impactful science. The city’s strength lies in its people: biologists, chemists, machine learning scientists, experimentalists, engineers, and computational scientists who choose to build here.
Without this talent, innovation is not possible, and London continues to attract and cultivate exceptional people.
As a dual European-British national and as a Londoner, I felt pride throughout the week. The pride came from seeing how far the ecosystem has come, how collaborative and open it feels, and how committed people are to building something of long-term value. London Life Sciences Week showed that London is not aspiring to become a global center for life sciences; it is already operating as one.
What feels most exciting is that its future is being shaped not by any single institution, but by a collective, a community choosing, together, to build something meaningful for the patients that are waiting.
David Shaywitz
It’s time for my annual feature: recommended podcasts (and a few books) for TR readers to consider. As usual, these suggestions generally steer clear of politics; they also aren’t the only podcasts I listen to, but they’re the ones I’m least likely to skip.
Of course, everyone in biotech should listen to Luke’s interview series, The Long Run – that’s always been a given.
For regular updates on the state of the industry, my quirky favorite is BioCentury This Week – it’s unpretentious, well-informed, and has a distinct personality.
I also appreciate the quality of the conversations Dr. Eric Topol has on his Ground Truths podcast; his insights offer a reliable window into the part of the biomedical establishment that is rigorous and cautious yet still forward-leaning and innovation-curious, and how it makes sense of our rapidly evolving landscape.
Perhaps my favorite health podcast is Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum’s Not Otherwise Specified (from the NEJM), driven entirely by the strength of Rosenbaum’s insights, the candor of her questions, and the capacity of her heart. This season she focuses on the challenges of primary care, and every episode has been brilliant.
Also worthwhile, engaging and from the NEJM: the monthly NEJM-AI Grand Rounds podcast, hosted by Raj Manrai and Andrew Beam, addressing issues at the intersection of AI innovation and clinical medicine.
Two other podcasts in this category you should know about: first is Carl Zimmer’s limited-run, characteristically thoughtful series about aging. Second is an upcoming series I’m excited about from journalist and writer Thomas Goetz, called Drug Story – preview here.
My favorite daily business podcast, for a long time, has been The Journal, from (wait for it) The Wall Street Journal, and featuring a close, accessible look at a major business story in the news.
Another must is the less frequent and far longer podcast Acquired, described by the WSJ as the show “the smartest people in the room are all listening to.” It offers a detailed look at the evolution of a prominent company; TR readers should check out the April episode on Epic.
I continue to enjoy episodes of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best and Harry Stebbings’s Twenty Minute VC. Regrettably, I’ve largely stopped listening to podcasts from a16z once it started to feel as if they’d adopted a “flood the zone” approach to content domination.
In contrast, I’ve really enjoyed the first few episodes I’ve heard of the recently launched Business History podcast (clearly inspired by Acquired, but fun-sized rather than family-sized).
I love learning about history. While most of my listening here has been through audiobooks, I’ve also been really enjoying The Rest Is History, with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, and Breaking History, with Eli Lake. Both offer context and narrative verve in an engaging and appealing manner.
There’s no shortage of podcasts focused on psychology and behavioral health; over the past year I’ve especially enjoyed (and frequently cited) excellence, actually, hosted by Steve Magness, Brad Stulberg, and Clay Skipper.
The Glue Guys podcast has also offered some quality content here, exploring the overlap between sports, leadership, and “the subtle art of making other people better.”
Not surprisingly, some of my favorite shows from previous years have remained regular parts of my line-up. These include 99% Invisible, with Roman Mars; Across the Movie Aisle, with Sonny Bunch, Peter Suderman, and Alyssa Rosenberg; and The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood, hosted by Sonny Bunch.
Finally, while perhaps politics-adjacent, I continue to love The Focus Group podcast hosted by Sarah Longwell, which each week features extended clips from voters representing a range of demographics.
I’ve been unusually fortunate this year in having the opportunity to review a number of books, and enjoyed aspects of many of them. Particular recommendations include the Bill Gates autobiography Source Code and Sam Arbesman’s charming The Magic of Code.
Related to my interest in health and flourishing, I’d suggest Super Agers by Eric Topol, Why Brains Need Friends by Ben Rein, and Food Intelligence by Kevin Hall and Julia Belluz.
For readers keen to explore more on health and flourishing, this resource page at KindWellHealth might be of interest.
Happy Thanksgiving!
David Shaywitz
Our current system of delivering care is awful from the perspective of seemingly every stakeholder. It frustrates, enrages, saddens, and depletes patients and physicians alike. No one designed it this way. It evolved through a series of choices and contingencies that perhaps made sense at the time but now seem to have led us down an evolutionary dead end.
While there’s no shortage of examples, I was especially struck by an anecdote I heard in Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum’s brilliant “Not Otherwise Specified” podcast series for the New England Journal of Medicine. Her focus this season is primary care, and in one episode she speaks with a Denver family physician named Larry Green.
“I practiced in the oldest family practice in Denver, for years,” Green explains. “I was the chair of that department, I directed that residency, and I’m now a patient in that practice. I cannot call it. It’s impossible. Because when I call the practice, I get diverted to a call center…”
From the perspective of what he calls the “medical-industrial complex,” he says, longitudinal relationships are “totally unimportant in healthcare.”
Yet these relationships – developed with care over time – tend to be what many patients crave and what effective doctoring typically requires.
Green’s experience won’t surprise anyone who has tried to get care lately. In November 2023, Mass General Brigham announced it would not be accepting new primary care patients. At hospitals everywhere, it’s not unusual for patients to spend hours on gurneys in emergency-department hallways, waiting for an inpatient bed.
I don’t know many physicians who haven’t struggled to get care for themselves or a loved one – often at the very institutions where they trained and to which they’ve devoted years of their lives. If even insiders can’t reliably access timely, compassionate care, what chance does anyone else have?
The miserableness of the system has been well documented, and physician burnout has sadly become a dog-bites-man story.
What’s perhaps more surprising is how many people are still desperate to enter the system and become physicians, fueling an application process that, as Drs. Rochelle and Loren Walensky have documented in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), has become increasingly competitive, expensive, and time-consuming. Premed students routinely take an extra year (or more) to tick all the expected boxes and jump through the hoops that are perceived as mandatory.
This highlights something that’s easy to forget: the ideal of medicine remains deeply attractive. I wrote about this almost thirty years ago in a New York Times op-ed, and it’s still true today.
The notion of doctoring – of being trusted at the intersection of science and human stories – retains a powerful hold on young people. If only the actual experience could live up to the hope of these applicants, the well-worn quotes from Osler and Peabody, the promise of the profession, and the expectations of patients.
The idea that there must be a better alternative is at once familiar and evergreen.
If you’re a cynic, you channel Homer Simpson and conclude, “We tried our best and failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.”
I see it differently.
The persistence of attempts to build something better – despite repeated disappointment – captures both how entrenched the current flawed system is and how deeply people yearn for something appreciably better.
At this point, I don’t know many people who seriously expect incumbents – whether health systems or their core technology vendors – to deliver radical change. Most are too busy trying to squeeze more juice from the existing machinery to welcome disruption.
Without a meaningful incentive, you wouldn’t expect organizations exquisitely tuned to the current equilibrium to dismantle or restructure it.
Even so, some of the most committed innovators I know are doubling down inside health systems, trying heroically — like George C. Scott’s beleaguered chief of medicine in The Hospital — to wrestle these institutions back toward the care they were meant to provide.
Others are exploring promising paths outside.
In the absence of an established alternative, many patients – and many doctors – are trying to assemble at least components of a better system. For a lot of people, that begins with focusing on an aspect our existing system overlooks and undervalues: preemptive care – sustaining our health rather than simply caring for our illness.
Longevity Panel-HBS Healthcare Alumni Conference at the Treehouse in Boston, MA November 6, 2025. From L to R: Anant Vinjamoori, MD, MBA, David Shaywitz, MD, PhD, Rich Joseph, MD, MBA, Sooah Cho, MPP, MBA (moderator & partner at SignalFire VC), Matt Vail, MS, and Julia Klim, MBA
As I recently discussed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and at a Harvard Business School panel on healthy aging, the current fascination with “longevity” sits on top of something more interesting than recovery pods and rejuvenation Olympics. It’s easy, and appropriate, to roll your eyes at anti-aging drips and supplement stacks.
Underneath the spectacle, though, I’ve been struck by a quieter shift. More people seem to believe that the deterioration they’ve observed in older relatives, friends, and cherished mentors isn’t inevitable, and they’re organizing their lives accordingly — an effort, in Bart Giamatti’s phrase (riffing on Milton), to fend off “the ruin of our grandparents.”
Science has helped here. Geroscience has moved from backwater to frontier, and the message it carries is surprisingly simple: movement, sleep, decent food, and warm human connection are not lifestyle accessories, they’re central levers of healthy aging. GLP-1 medicines, as I described in STAT this summer, have added an unexpected assist, giving many people who’d been defeated by years of yo-yo dieting a first experience of real traction.
At the same time, advances in measurement have made the body feel newly legible. Population-scale data have given rise to ideas like “biological age” – an assessment approach not yet validated for clinical use in individuals, but powerful in the story they tell.
Concepts like “biological age” invite people to see aging as at least partially malleable, as something you can potentially inflect.
Even some of the more dubious offerings – supplement rituals, for example – often function less as biochemistry and more as daily expressions of intent.
In the op-ed, I argued that this is the real through-line: a refusal to retreat passively into decline, and a growing appetite for preemptive moves that might tilt the odds, even a little, in our favor.
Not surprisingly, this perceived opportunity has attracted several categories of companies into the “health” space. You can roughly sort them into three overlapping buckets:
All of these companies are working feverishly on AI-enabled data plays and promise some version of personalized recommendation. Many are led by serious people who genuinely want to help.
Yet taken as a group, they also reveal the limits of an engineering mindset applied to human flourishing. As I argued in a recent STAT column, we’ve become very good at harvesting data and building dashboards, and much less good at building platforms that support the experience of living a fuller, more agentic life.
Today’s digital health tools, as I discussed in the Boston Globe this summer, tend to optimize what’s easy to count and, in the process, miss what most of us actually value: connection, purpose, and the sense that our choices are beginning to add up.
Image source: Wikipedia
The fitness and metric-heavy companies also illustrate a classic analytic trap (“survivorship bias”) that has been on my mind a lot lately – the “airplane problem.”
During World War II, analysts studying bombers returning from missions noticed that certain parts of the planes were riddled with bullet holes, and proposed adding armor to those areas. Statistician Abraham Wald pointed out the mistake: the bullet holes marked the places a plane could be hit and still make it home. The planes that didn’t return had likely been hit elsewhere. That’s where the armor was needed.
Most fitness and wearable companies are obsessed with retaining the people who already sign up – generally highly engaged, data-hungry users who enjoy tracking their VO₂ max, heart-rate variability, and step counts. These are the planes that make it back.
What these companies don’t see are the people who try once or twice, feel judged or overwhelmed or bored, and bounce off – people like New York Times op-ed contributor Rachel Feintzeig, who memorably describes her exercise experience:
“I get on my Peloton and am confronted with a veritable dashboard of my inadequacies: cadence (sluggish), resistance level (embarrassing), output (am I even alive?). There is my prior, surely eternal, personal record, highlighted so that I never forget exactly how much better I was three years ago. Suddenly I’m grappling with the passage of time, in my basement, as an Instagram influencer in a coordinating spandex set beseeches me to pedal faster.”
People like Feintzeig – and those who never even bother with platforms like Peloton –are the missing planes, as well as the untapped opportunity.
Early on, I was drawn to the idea of starting with movement as the foundation for a broader vision of flourishing, in part because it’s so concrete, palpable, and obviously useful for health on its own terms, even before it connects to anything deeper.It reminds me of the famous exchange from Woody Allen’s 1975 film Love and Death:
Sonja (Diane Keaton): “Sex without love is an empty experience.”
Boris (Allen): “Yes, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.”
Movement without any larger sense of meaning can feel a bit like that. Even if it doesn’t yet connect to purpose, agency, or community, it’s still one of the healthier “empty experiences” we have – especially for those who aren’t exercising at all, since the health benefits of going from nothing to something can be as significant as going from something to a lot more.
I still think movement is a great place to start.
Unfortunately, I don’t see much (any) evidence that today’s fitness platforms view longevity as more than a marketing gloss, or that they are preparing seriously to serve the far larger group of people who want to lead richer lives, not dominate reductive leaderboards.
At the end of the day, it seems, fitness companies are gonna fitness. The longevity branding is kosher-style at best, and often closer to a BLT on a bagel.
The comprehensive testing companies raise a different set of concerns. Large panels of lab tests and imaging sound appealing – who wouldn’t want to “know everything” and catch problems early?
In practice, as Dr. Eric Topol has critically reviewed at Ground Truths, the risks of false positives and incidentalomas are substantial, especially when testing is decoupled from clear, evidence-based action plans.
I’ve spent years following the arc from genetics to “personalized” to “precision” medicine and since high school have been deeply engaged in the science. I have a real appreciation for the promise, as well as for the practical limitations.
I recognize that the opportunities for truly precise, individualized interventions tend to be wildly overstated – even the ones that don’t come bundled with the hard sell of supplements.
The same goes for metabolomic and nutritional profiling. As Kevin Hall and others have pointed out, much of what’s been sold as precision nutrition turns out to be better marketing than science.
So where are the rays of hope? Mostly, they center around talent as much as vision.
When Function Health announced its recent fundraise, most of the attention focused on the celebrity investors and marketing sizzle.
What caught my eye was something else entirely: the decision by Dr. Daniel Sodickson –- a serious scientist and imaging innovator, long a leader in MRI at NYU, and recently an author –- to join as Chief Medical Scientist.
Dr. Daniel Sodickson
Dan, also a medical school classmate and friend, is the opposite of a hype merchant. He is thoughtful, technically deep, and obsessed with context and longitudinal understanding. His move signaled to me that Function was serious about building an engine for interpreting multimodal, longitudinal data in a way that could, over time, support genuinely more precise, personalized recommendations.
Professor Nathan Price
This aligns closely with ideas the exceptionally innovative medical scientists Lee Hood and Nathan Price have been articulating for years (including in their visionary 2023 book, The Age of Scientific Wellness), and that efforts like Arivale tried to operationalize. I’m excited about this direction and have been working with Dan and Nathan on some of these concepts – stay tuned.
A second source of energy and inspiration for me, also connected to talent, has been the caliber of physicians and physician–scientists who’ve reached out to me as I’ve been developing and championing the concept of agency as the “motivational currency of behavior change,” ideas provisionally, and loosely, organized at KindWellHealth.
In just the last few weeks, I’ve heard from clinicians, informatics leaders, former regulators, and population-health experts who said some version of: “Your focus on agency is exactly what I’ve been circling; I’m trying to build my next chapter around something like this.”
These are not people chasing the latest wellness fad. They are serious medical innovators who care deeply about science and patients and are trying to find a way to enhance health that feels truer to both, supported by rigorous, credible evidence.
One direction this naturally leads is towards a health system built around a data-empowered person who becomes the central locus of both control and information. In this vision, you would control your data the way you control your money. You might have accounts at many institutions, but you see everything in one place and can direct it where you want.
This idea has been around for a while, but it has acquired new urgency as patients are increasingly handed more responsibility without real visibility.
A personal “health data cloud” (Nathan Price has been using the more expansive phrase, “personal, dense, dynamic data cloud”) isn’t a cure-all, but it feels like it could be a vital first step towards a more enlightened, informed, person-centric, and humane health future.
It’s important to emphasize that “person-centric” doesn’t mean a series of dispassionate transactions with healthcare providers, which arguably is already the status quo. Nor does it mean dumping a stack of options and PDFs on patients and congratulating ourselves for “empowering” them.
As Atul Gawande has described so eloquently, in appropriately pushing back against medical paternalism, the pendulum in some settings has swung too far the other way.
Some physicians, trying to be sensitive, have misunderstood the assignment. They present a neutral menu and maintain distance at moments when some patients are desperate for a clinician to share the decision-making burden – to listen carefully, offer a considered recommendation, and shoulder some of the responsibility.
As Gawande wrote in 1999, with his usual magnificence,
“The new orthodoxy about patient autonomy has a hard time acknowledging an awkward truth: patients frequently don’t want the freedom that we’ve given them. That is, they’re glad to have their autonomy respected, but the exercise of that autonomy means being able to relinquish it.”
While we might substitute the term “agency” for “autonomy,” Gawande’s point is essential and should be reflected in any future vision of an improved health system.
A third promising area involves focusing explicitly on agency itself – which is how I view the efforts of companies like Lore (where I serve as an advisor), SlingshotAI, and others. These groups (who often have attracted exceptional talent) start from the psychology of behavior change. They ask how we might help people feel more able to influence their future for the better, and how we might compound that sense of agency over time.
My own conviction is that maximal impact will require integrating this agency focus with two other elements I’ve been writing about: the quantitative side of biometrics and the qualitative, often neglected sphere of connection and meaning.
Source: D. Shaywitz
As I see it (see diagram), our shared goal is flourishing health, supported by three mutually reinforcing domains: physical function, meaningful connection, and personal agency. A few companies touch pieces of this map. Almost no one designs against the whole thing.
To me, the combination of a strong sense of conviction that this is what the future of health needs to encompass, together with a sense of uncertainty about how we’ll get there, is what’s so exciting, particularly given the remarkable amount of talent that seems to be drawn in this direction. Certainly, this pursuit feels more satisfying than developing innovations aimed at maximizing billing, or escalating the AI battle between health systems seeking reimbursement and payors seeking to deny it.
Patients – and those who are eager to avoid becoming patients – are (as usual) leading the way.
We owe it to them to meet them where they are and — with technology as an aid, evidence as our guide, and compassion as our soul — build an approach to health and healing worthy of the ideals that drew, and continues to draw, so many of us into medicine.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Neil Kumar is today’s guest on The Long Run.
Neil is the founder and CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based BridgeBio Pharma.
Neil Kumar, CEO, BridgeBio
BridgeBio got started a little more than 10 years ago with an idea of creating what it calls a “hub and spoke” business model for rare disease drug development. The hope was to find opportunities that were biologically compelling, but didn’t neatly fit into one of the existing platform technology companies of the time. Neil and colleagues hoped to package them together in a portfolio to improve the risk/reward ratio for investors.
It’s worked out. The company has an FDA-approved product on the market that’s generating blockbuster sales — $108 million in revenue in its third quarter on the market. The drug is acoramidis (brand name Attruby) for transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, sometimes called cardiac amyloidosis.
That drug has quite a story on its own. But BridgeBio isn’t turning out to be a one-hit wonder. A couple of positive clinical trial readouts this year show it has a chance to become a truly unusual creature – a truly diversified, independent biotech company with multiple cash-flow generating FDA approved products.
Neil has thought long and hard about how to mitigate risk, and how to create value for investors in this most challenging of scientific businesses.
Before we get started, a word from the sponsor of The Long Run.
Are you tired of inconsistent bioanalysis results and waiting months for data that should take days?
Dash is the only bioanalysis CRO built from the ground up with a tech-first approach, designed to deliver better, faster, and cheaper than anyone else.
With Dash, you get:
From preclinical to late-stage studies, Dash helps you move from assay development and validation to sample analysis with unmatched speed. Founded by industry veterans who’ve felt the pain of traditional CROs, Dash is the partner researchers and clinical leaders actually need: reliable, fast, and easy to work with.
So if slow bioanalysis CROs are costing you money and missed deadlines—put Dash to the test.
Visit www.dash.bio and see how fast bioanalysis can be.
Please enjoy this conversation with Neil Kumar on The Long Run.
