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My great-great uncle Meyer Jacobstein en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Jac… was a 3-term Congressman from Rochester & opposed the Immigration Act of 1924
en.wikipedia.org Meyer Jacobstein - Wikipedia Mark Jacobstein
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GP @SPC, Pres Jimini, former CBO Immunai, CUEO @GuardantHealth, CEO iSkoot, EVP loopt, Pres DChoc, SVP iXL, founder/CEO Small World Sports/Software
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What if you could take a GLP-1 by the nose? This is @zebird0’s answer to a world surrounded by cheap, delicious food.
Nothing in our evolutionary history prepared us for the availability and abundance around us.
Nothing in our evolutionary history prepared us for the availability and abundance around us.
0:51
With apologies to The Graduate, I’ve got one word for you, kid: peptides.
Today we’re announcing that @SPC led the $6M pre-seed round in LionBio, a consumer biotech company building the next generation of peptide medicines. Congrats to founding CEO @zebird0, scientific co-founder Kam Leong, and the whole team.
When people talk about the magic of modern medicine, they talk about the molecule: the drug that hits the target, melts the tumor, or fixes a broken pathway.
Almost nobody talks about how the drug gets where it’s going. Does the stomach destroy it first? Can it reach the brain? Does it last six hours or a week? Does it make you nauseous?
Hitting the right target isn’t enough. GLP-1s prove it. The molecule boosts insulin and quiets appetite, and it’s reshaping medicine. It also comes as a weekly injection, and many patients quit because of the nausea.
Drug delivery is the problem Robin founded LionBio to solve.
Robin is commercializing Kam’s foundational biomaterials work at Columbia: a novel nanoparticle wrapper that lets large peptides cross the lining of the nose. (Just don't call it Nosempic).
Is it critical to deliver a drug through your nose? Yes, as it turns out. No needle, for one thing. Taking a weekly shot sucks. And who loves disposing of their sharps?
The (daily, or even real-time) ease of intranasal delivery means doses can be (much) lower, and the nose is a side door to the brain, connecting directly via the olfactory and trigeminal nerves and partly bypassing the blood-brain barrier.
These advantages should reduce side effects, a real problem for many GLP-1s.
More importantly, the connection to the brain may be critical for many neuroactive peptides. There is, for example, early but promising data regarding the ability of peptides to act on addictions of all sorts, from nicotine to alcohol and beyond.
These advantages allow LionBio to build a nanoparticle platform for neuropeptide delivery.
Robin is uniquely qualified to lead this business, as LionBio requires frontier materials science, preclinical translation, clinical development, manufacturing, and consumer marketing.
Special thanks to Sahil Sud for the introduction.
At SPC, we love working with founders like Robin and Kam who take on massive technical risk to solve fundamental human problems.
Today we’re announcing that @SPC led the $6M pre-seed round in LionBio, a consumer biotech company building the next generation of peptide medicines. Congrats to founding CEO @zebird0, scientific co-founder Kam Leong, and the whole team.
When people talk about the magic of modern medicine, they talk about the molecule: the drug that hits the target, melts the tumor, or fixes a broken pathway.
Almost nobody talks about how the drug gets where it’s going. Does the stomach destroy it first? Can it reach the brain? Does it last six hours or a week? Does it make you nauseous?
Hitting the right target isn’t enough. GLP-1s prove it. The molecule boosts insulin and quiets appetite, and it’s reshaping medicine. It also comes as a weekly injection, and many patients quit because of the nausea.
Drug delivery is the problem Robin founded LionBio to solve.
Robin is commercializing Kam’s foundational biomaterials work at Columbia: a novel nanoparticle wrapper that lets large peptides cross the lining of the nose. (Just don't call it Nosempic).
Is it critical to deliver a drug through your nose? Yes, as it turns out. No needle, for one thing. Taking a weekly shot sucks. And who loves disposing of their sharps?
The (daily, or even real-time) ease of intranasal delivery means doses can be (much) lower, and the nose is a side door to the brain, connecting directly via the olfactory and trigeminal nerves and partly bypassing the blood-brain barrier.
These advantages should reduce side effects, a real problem for many GLP-1s.
More importantly, the connection to the brain may be critical for many neuroactive peptides. There is, for example, early but promising data regarding the ability of peptides to act on addictions of all sorts, from nicotine to alcohol and beyond.
These advantages allow LionBio to build a nanoparticle platform for neuropeptide delivery.
Robin is uniquely qualified to lead this business, as LionBio requires frontier materials science, preclinical translation, clinical development, manufacturing, and consumer marketing.
Special thanks to Sahil Sud for the introduction.
At SPC, we love working with founders like Robin and Kam who take on massive technical risk to solve fundamental human problems.
1:48
I love this metaphor. Like, this needs to go down in the annals like when @aileenlee coined "unicorn"
Jensen’s five-layer cake (energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications) is an efficient way to describe the intelligence stack, but it’s flawed as a metaphor in my opinion.
Most cakes are uniform all the way across. They have a fixed circumference. The application layer ends up looking like a thin layer of frosting sitting on top of everything else. Its construction and ingredients are known.
What’s happening feels more like a banyan tree growing in time lapse.
1. The canopy keeps branching outward, creating new branches and more leafy area across science, industrials, healthcare, enterprise and consumer. Many of these applications are still impossible to imagine.
2. The different parts of the tree continually change one another. The roots and trunk enable the canopy, but demand and energy from the canopy also flow back down and determine how the system below develops.
3. And most interesting...a banyan’s branches send new roots back into the ground. Those roots become new trunks, which support still more branches.
That last part of the metaphor strikes me as most interesting. The most consequential applications won’t just sit on top of the existing AI stack. They’ll create demand for their own specialized models, infra, compute stack. At some point, an application is no longer just a leaf on a generic stack. It puts down roots and becomes a new stack.
The cake describes the layers. The banyan does a better job describing how this new age of intelligence will evolve.View quoted post on X
It is an extraordinary time for the maximally ambitious: for those who would fundamentally rethink nuclear, space, solar, chips, algorithms, bio, security, or our relationship with the (extremely jagged) intelligent frontier. Better yet, build something so new we don’t yet have a category for it.
At @spc, we like to say, “we can just do things.” So we’re trying an experiment.
We’re investing $200K, uncapped, in a handful of “first they call you crazy” ideas, led by profoundly talented founders.
Our community is built to catalyze ambitious people and ideas. We’re experimenting with funding for the same reason.
Bring us your biggest idea. If this sounds like you, let me know below.
At @spc, we like to say, “we can just do things.” So we’re trying an experiment.
We’re investing $200K, uncapped, in a handful of “first they call you crazy” ideas, led by profoundly talented founders.
Our community is built to catalyze ambitious people and ideas. We’re experimenting with funding for the same reason.
Bring us your biggest idea. If this sounds like you, let me know below.
