Bicoastal
Joined January 2011
I've met so many entrepreneurial rare disease parents over the years that I’ve lost count. They have moved or are moving medical mountains to save their kids and others like them. But rare parent founders get no love from institutional players. Those days are done. Science, talent and compute are no longer limiting. Priority Review Voucher alpha makes the economics work. The missing spark is access to cure capital. That's why I’m incredibly pumped to relaunch @1000cures with my cofounder @ryan_1000cures! Ryan and I teamed up to create a “YC for Rare” that unites our biotech houses with complementary expertises, experiences and networks. 1000 Cures is an accelerator for lean startups led by parents on mission to cure pediatric rare diseases. We ride at dawn. Let’s go!
14
6
2
117
193,732
the godfather of founder-mode medicine right here 👇
> T cells trigger severe gut lining damage > GLP agonists directly protect against intestinal destruction > I'm going to test this on myself
6
1,572
Thank you @AnthropicAI for granting @PerlaraPBC approval to the Life Sciences Verification Program!
3
2
1
29
2,803
Founder-mode medicine is the antidote to all diseases
People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X: 1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself. 2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund 3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now 4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine 5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents 6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through We're going to make it
1
1
10
1,257
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
attention all AI companies that raised a ton of money and are frantically pivoting from software to RL environments, give me a call! got some proprietary drug discovery/virtual cell data for you to train on..
2
1
9
2,074
PBCs are finally cool
Anthropic is committing 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund (pending stockholder approval), growing as the company grows. A public-benefit commitment written into ownership itself. anthropic.com/news/public-be…
3
798
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
We have a new look but our mission is the same. The new 1000cures.com explains how we back family-founded biotechs (FAMCOs), the parents building cures for their own children's ultra-rare diseases. Our model is simple. When a rare pediatric drug is approved, it can earn an FDA Priority Review Voucher, and selling that voucher funds the next family's program. Cures fund more cures. Our first FAMCO partnership will be announced this quarter! A family, a child, and a cure that's already in progress. Stay tuned. 👀
1
2
13
750
founder-mode medicine in action
We’ve just made public 125,091 DICOM radiology images from across my cancer journey (link below). The data is both longitudinal and multi-modal, dated and linked to my treatment timeline, so you can compare imaging across initial diagnosis, standard of care, first remission, “founder mode cancer care”, and second remission. It’s viewable in OHIF, the standard open-source viewer used in radiology research. Given the long history of applying deep learning to radiology, we’re hoping to see a variety of methods and models applied to my data. If you find something interesting, please reach out to [email protected], or if you know a researcher who should see this, tag them below. Thanks to Terra LaFerriere for organizing these images, and Kamil Slowikowski for building osteosarc.com into the resource it is.
1
8
1,590
Looking forward to working together at some point soon!
At @GamowLabs, we are committed to solving rare disease. This means understanding the clinical impact of >9B possible mutations in the human genome. Computational models like @GoogleDeepMind AlphaGenome, @arcinstitute Evo2, and @biohub ESM3 serve their purpose, but the only way to accomplish our mission is through large-scale collection of experimental data on variant effects. The only way to collect these data is through robotic labs like ours, which historically have required deep expertise in automation engineering to scale, limiting velocity. To solve this problem, we are building frameworks to enable AIs to drive our lab robots and just unveiled our first eval showing that we have some work to do!
7
770
attention all AI companies that raised a ton of money and are frantically pivoting from software to RL environments, give me a call! got some proprietary drug discovery/virtual cell data for you to train on..
2
1
9
2,074
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
Bingo. If we want to keep biotech in the US -- robotics is the way. Automate the lab bench or lose it.
It’s really simple. Our Robots and AI vs their Robots and AI. If we can catch up on robotics/software , and can stay ahead on AI, there is zero reason manufacturing won’t come back, or initiate here. At Cost Plus Drugs, the only thing holding us back from making generic drugs cheaper in Dallas than we can buy from Asia, are the fees we have to pay.
5
12
2
70
3,909
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
love getting emails from yc bio portco founders who are able to raise for therapeutics in this climate 👏
1
1
16
1,748
founder-mode medicine takeoff coming soon
We've been quietly fundraising and evaluating FAMCOs the past few months -- big announcements dropping soon..
22
1,495
looks who’s finally leaning into their PBC status 👀
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion. In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding. In the post below, we share more details about our new fund. anthropic.com/news/public-be…
7
967
love getting emails from yc bio portco founders who are able to raise for therapeutics in this climate 👏
1
1
16
1,748
Another RPDD granted!
1
5
805
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
PRVs are selling like hot cakes $200M price floor holding steady
Just a week later, Ultragenyx $RARE sell their second Priority Review Voucher for $203M
2
5
968
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
founder-mode medicine + AI will cure all diseases
Yes, AI is rapidly advancing mathematics (and theoretical physics problems that are essentially mathematical). Like Ramanujan’s notebooks, human mathematicians will spend months (years?) poring over the stream of papers that AI effortlessly generates, hoping to verify and understand them, probably until math itself (via Lean) becomes a branch of computer science like almost everything else. However, after math and physics, there is still a next scientific frontier: chemistry, and especially biology and medicine. I mean, it was already the frontier, but it’s the next one too. AI can crush deterministic math problems on the computer, but biomedicine is a highly empirical, noisy, multivariate, and yet often predictable domain. Thus, AI radically increases our ambitions in biomedicine. All the omics data, all the messy literature, it can all be synthesized and analyzed in a flash. This is what the labs mean when they talk about curing all diseases. The tooling is available to take cracks at biomedical problems previously thought impossible. Midjourney is doing this, Chan Zuckerberg is doing this, Anthropic is doing this, but there will be so much more.
1
4
1,086
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
Real life, baby
19,282
96,601
45,655
777,034
97,629,206
Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N retweeted
freeze ur T's -- as in T cells
To celebrate the launch, we’re preserving 100 people’s cells for free. Head to withreservoir.com, sign up for the list & follow the steps to enter. The best 100 answers will get free Reservoir. Entries close 48 hours after launch. Read our full story, via @Forbes: forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/…
2
1
11
1,248