Medicine reimagined: Philip Jeng, Co-Founder and COO, Think Bioscience
Innovation Endeavors was founded on the thesis of the Super Evolution: that a proliferation of data, computational capacity, and advanced engineering would converge and translate into significant, fast changes for the world. We’ve seen this firsthand.
But it’s people who make this era of innovation possible: changemakers working to revolutionize computing infrastructure, engineering biology, climate, intelligent software, and the physical economy. This interview series highlights the stories of the standout founders and entrepreneurs bringing the Super Evolution to life and gives you a firsthand look at what lessons they’ve learned along the way and how they hope to change our world.
We hope their candid insights are helpful for anyone tackling meaningful problems.
What initially attracted you to entrepreneurship?
As a third culture kid, I’ve always lived at the intersection of different worlds — a sometimes challenging but always exhilarating experience. Looking back, I realize I’ve always chased this feeling that led me to the entrepreneurial journey today.
I chose to major in bioengineering and was often described as a “jack of all trades” because I enjoyed all subjects of science. On top of that, I always knew I wanted to build a career that combines science and business — despite not knowing exactly what this meant. After finishing college, I was fortunate to start my career in a rotational program at Genentech and saw how all the different fields of science come together to make a drug. But I also saw that science alone wasn’t enough to create a drug and run an organization to support it. Eager to learn about the industry's business side, I became a management consultant, where I had to learn a new way of thinking from my training as an engineer. I then pursued an MBA at Harvard Business School, where I was exposed to venture capital, startups, and the entrepreneurial spirit of Kendall Square. After HBS, to the surprise of my peers, I created a role at biotech startup in China because I was obsessed with learning about the biotech ecosystem there. There was plenty of culture shock, to say the least.
With each of these experiences, I got to see a new facet of building a company and inched closer to putting it all together. Whether cultural or technical, I’ve also enjoyed bridging very different ways of thinking. I realized entrepreneurship was the perfect way to operate at the nexus of many different fields.
What inspired you to co-found Think Bioscience?
To be honest, serendipity. During COVID, I was introduced to Jerome Fox, a professor at CU Boulder. Remarkably, it was through six degrees of separation. At the time, I was part of the Harvard Business School Blavatnik Fellowship, a program that supported alumni in life science entrepreneurship. In his academic lab, Jerome was working on an idea he had conceived dating back to his post-doc, an elegant process of letting nature solve our toughest drug design challenges. After all, nature has evolved powerful machinery to access diverse and bioactive molecules to solve its own ecological challenges. The science was innovative, to say the least.
From my internships in VC, I saw how important it was to have the right team to give innovative science the best shot as a life science business. Our backgrounds complemented, and our workstyles matched well — it was the perfect opportunity.
What’s the big problem you’re hoping to solve at Think Bioscience?
We’re working to develop small molecule drugs for challenging targets such as protein tyrosine phosphatases, which have no FDA approved drugs. In short, we solve two major small molecule discovery challenges.
Accessing novel chemical matter. Historical libraries are biased toward historical drug targets and associated active sites. Furthermore, they only cover a small fraction of the bioactive chemical space. And while natural products constitute many FDA-approved small molecules, they were first designed by nature for ecological solutions and can experience synthesis challenges.
Discovering functional binding sites. Proteins are complex. They operate in signaling networks and exhibit dynamic motion. Despite significant advances in computational approaches, identifying novel functional binding sites is incredibly challenging.
Think Bioscience’s platform addresses both challenges by leveraging Nature’s machinery. We encode a therapeutic objective into a microbe and instruct it to “find a way to inhibit this target or die.” The target is expressed in a cellular environment where more complex binding behaviors can be captured (not just simulated). Instead of telling the platform how to solve the problem, we simply define the functional activity desired. In parallel, we endow the population of microbes with unique biosynthetic pathways that encode for natural product scaffolds and let natural selection run its course. Those that survive reveal both a bioactive starting point and a functional pocket to begin new drug discovery campaigns.
What excites you the most about biotechnology?
The combination of intellectual stimulation and greater purpose. It’s a complex and captivating industry that blends cutting-edge science, multi-disciplinary teams, and careful capital allocation. There’s always so much to learn. It’s exciting to work in an industry where the ultimate goal is to help patients, and scientific advancements become the foundation for future work to be built upon. Working daily with people who share these values is icing on the cake.
The biotech space is rapidly accelerating. What breakthroughs do you think will be developed in the next ten years?
Not a scientific breakthrough per se… I’m excited about new company formation models, particularly in new geographic hubs. Using NSF funding as a proxy for scientific innovation, the substrate of innovative science is relatively democratic across the country. Yet, funding is vastly disproportionately allocated to the coasts — for both understandable historical reasons and habitual pattern following. To me, there is an immense opportunity to catalyze these regions with the right teams and capital. I’ve seen this first-hand in the Colorado biotech community. Array Biopharma (acquired by Pfizer in 2019) has created fertile ground for the next generation of startups. Think Bioscience wouldn’t be where we are today without the expertise from ex-Array veterans and the tight-knit biotech community here. From my vantage point, an important rate-limiting step in biotech is coordinating the complex orchestra of science, people, processes, and capital. In the next ten years, I believe more innovation can be industrialized by continued advancements in enabling technologies, flexible work models, founder training, and more evenly distributed investment regions.
Do you have any takeaways from the fundraising process?
If you had asked me prior to Think Bioscience, I would have described fundraising along the lines of a discrete evaluation of a polished deck after a long period of being heads-down. Now, I see it as a more collaborative and continuous process. Conversations with investors have helped us refine our company strategy based on their own portfolio companies’ experiences and network with other investors/pharma. Perhaps even more surprising is how human the process is. There are a lot of calls/messages sharing ideas, questions, and feedback — which works best on a foundation of trust.
Lastly, what piece of advice do you have for entrepreneurs looking to break into engineering biology?
Build a support system for other founders going through the same journey. While there is a lot of written material online, there are still countless details about getting off the ground and operating. I’m incredibly grateful to all the folks who’ve been a great sounding board (and sometimes therapeutic session).
