🧬 ISSUE No. 9 – Sep 25, 2024

💰 George Church's Startup GC Therapeutics Raises $75M for Revolutionary iPSC Platform | 🧑‍💼 Founder & CEO can never be the same person.

Author

Anthony Ao
September 25, 2024

ISSUE No. 9 – Sep 25, 2024

Hey there,

🏮Happy Mid-Autumn Festival🏮

Did you have mooncakes 🥮 and get amazed by the full round moon🌕 ?

In this issue, we will talk about George Church's Startup GC Therapeutics, which just raised $75M on Sep 19, 2024, and why Founder & CEO can never be the same person.

Mid Autumn Festival 中秋 GIF by miluegg

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Not sure what this newsletter is about? Read the very first post here.

I. What changes - news to watch this week

GC Therapeutics Raises $75M for Revolutionary iPSC Platform to Accelerate Cell Therapy

Cambridge, MA – GC Therapeutics (GCTx), one of the 16 startups that spun out of George Church lab in 2019, has officially launched with a mission to unlock the next generation of cell therapies through its breakthrough platform, TFome™. This “plug-and-play” iPSC programming system, recently featured in Nature Biotechnology and Harvard Medical School, promises to speed up the development of off-the-shelf cell therapies by up to 100 times faster than current methods.

GC Therapeutics was co-founded by George Church, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Craig Barritt / Stringer via Getty Images

Co-founded by top-tier scientists including George Church, Ph.D., GCTx has raised $75 million from leading life sciences investors such as a16z Bio + Health and Mubadala Capital. The platform’s ability to streamline cell differentiation into any cell type in a single-step process could revolutionize treatments in gastrointestinal, neurological, and immunological diseases.

At GCTx, we’re transforming how cell therapies are made. Our platform improves not only speed but potency, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, making cell therapy accessible to more patients.

Parastoo Khoshakhlagh, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder at GCTx

Redefining Cell Programming

Developed from the lab of George Church, TFome taps into cutting-edge synthetic biology, gene editing, and machine learning to optimize iPSC-derived cell therapies. With TFome, GCTx can create first-in-class SuperCells™ tailored to specific diseases—something that no conventional method has achieved at this scale.

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TFome has the potential to surpass nature by creating cells that are more effective and versatile than what we see in natural processes.

George Church

Read more about the exit strategy of biotech companies here and the whole press release here.

II. What never changes - timeless wisdom

🧑‍💼 Founder & CEO can never be the same person.

Here’s why.

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A 9-to-5 job maintaining the ship’s course was the jail I broke out of when I started my company.

I could not imagine what I did as an entrepreneur was building my own cage and trapping myself in it.

Anthony Ao

We all give ourselves the title “Founder & CEO” once we start a company and begin hiring the first employee, simply because there are no other titles to choose from, albeit the innate contradiction in these titles. After all, the job of the Founder contradicts the CEO’s position, as one injects risks to the business while the other one mitigates risks to ensure successful execution, respectively, as pointed out in Jason Fred’s latest blog post.

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However inaccurate the title Founder & CEO is, it will likely remain the default title for many who make their first step in entrepreneurship, as you will probably be the only person in the company signing documents and doing early business activities. Nonetheless, picking between the side of a risky-craving Founder and the side of an Execution-focus CEO should not be a dilemma for entrepreneurs because either you are one or the other, and there is no reason to be both. At the end of the day, if you are going to build something great, you need a team. Therefore, knowing your strength and what you are not only helps you in the hiring process.

Continue reading here…

Germany Monday GIF by Dritan Alsela Coffee

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Let’s have a break…

Bruce Levin is the scientist behind YESCARTA, the first FDA-approved CAR-T Cell Therapy product in 2017. If you have him on the scientific advisory board (SAB) of your biotech startup, you will surely raise millions of dollars.

To praise and glorify him, let’s see one of his posts on X this week.

If you are an AI enthusiast, you better know the father of it, Yann LeCun.

III. Book Quotes

Here are some book quotes for you to ponder over the weekend.

Thanks for reading,

— Anthony

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