Hello Tri-I Community!

Happy holiday season Tri-I community! We will not be holding a general body meeting this month! Instead, we are having a happy hour Friday, December 16 at 5:30 pm at Treadwell Park (1125 1st Ave., New York, NY 10065). We are purchasing light bites at the beginning of the night. If you are interested in learning more about the club, opportunities around NYC, or just looking to have a fun, relaxing night, we hope to see you there!

The next SVG general body meeting will be held in person Wednesday, January 25 at 5:30 pm at the Bioventure eLab (1157 York Ave). As always, food and drink will be supplied. At our general body meeting, we will be discussing our plans for the semester. Since our last newsletter, we partnered with MSK's Thalyana Stathis to host a panel centered on careers for PhDs in startups, and attended multiple NYC events bringing together startups, VCs, angel investors, industry representatives, and more. If this sounds exciting to you, please join us for more information about upcoming events. 

We are always looking for more entrepreneurship opportunities to participate in and share with our community. If you want to be involved further with the Startup Venture Group (and we would love to have you), please fill out this survey to subscribe to our newsletter, join our Slack channel, or offer help here! You can also find us on Twitter (@StartupWCM) and at our website, https://svg.bio.

Sincerely,

Nick Bartelo
President, Startup Venture Group
PhD Candidate
Weill Cornell Medicine

Faculty Feature: Dr. Jan Krumsiek 

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, Yanyang Chen (SVG Newsletter Editor), Nick Bartelo (SVG President), and Annalise Schweickart (previous SVG President) had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Jan Krumsiek, Assistant Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Assistant Professor of Computational Genomics in Computational Biomedicine in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine. Dr. Krumsiek specializes in the development and application of novel methods for the analysis of metabolomics and multi-omics data. He is a graduate of Technical University of Munich and was a group leader at Helmholtz Munich for more than 5 years before joining Weill Cornell Medicine. He became an assistant professor in 2018. He is a co-founder of iollo with Stanford scientists Dr. Daniel Gomari and Dr. Michael Snyder, and Brent LaRue from Y-combinator. The company strives to empower users with information and data about their blood metabolome and to provide evidence-based recommendations towards personal lifestyle choices.  

SVG: You recently co-founded iollo. Can you describe the mission of this company? What unmet need do you see in human health and diseases that iollo aims to address?

Dr. Krumsiek: We now know that circulating metabolites can inform you about various states of health, from diabetes, certain risk factors for mental health, cancer, etc. The goal of iollo is to be able to run a mass spectrometry grade metabolic profiling on the blood sample that was taken at home. New technology for blood taking and stabilization makes it fit to be sent in the mail to a location where it can be analyzed to give general and specific health recommendations. A lot of insights from metabolomics go beyond what the regular blood tests do.

For our competitors, you still have to go to a doctor for the blood draw. The fear of needles is big and real. There are a large number of people who will stay away from the blood measurement because it involves needles. With iollo’s device you won’t even see the needle or feel the blood draw, which makes blood measurement easier and painless.

SVG: How did you enter the entrepreneurship arena as a PI? Is it always something you wanted to do? Did coming to the US have any influence on your ability to create a company?

Dr. Krumsiek: So the answer is no to everything. I’m much more academically driven and naturally not a very entrepreneurial person. I thought of the idea of spinning-out and knew my colleagues had done that, but never acted on it. A few years ago, Daniel Gomari, my previous PhD student, came up with the idea of starting a company around metabolomics, and I had a lot of early discussions with him. After graduation, he focused on this idea and applied at YCombinator. He then approached me to be one of the scientific advisors and join the team. It wasn't a very complicated decision for me as the opportunity presented itself.

I try to apply my approach to science in the company, and at the same time adapt to the faster speed of the startup world. So for me, the academic research and startup work hand in hand. 

SVG: Do you see metabolomic screens like those provided by iollo becoming an essential addition to everyday healthcare? How do you see that integration happening?

Dr. Krumsiek: In terms of every day integration there's definitely a lot of opportunities. There's a lot of things you can measure just no one else can see. For example, indoxyl sulfate is a very interesting metabolite that is likely causally related to brain health problems that no one else can see since there is no existing lab test. This is a marketing angle for iollo. 

Convincing anyone that they need your test is a huge challenge. The hurdle is making it clear the consumer will get an added value beyond traditional lab tests from a doctor’s office. To do this, a startup has to assure its customers that what it is offering is novel without drowning them in the science.

SVG: What are the advantages of bridging your academic research to market? 

Dr. Krumsiek: One very clear simple advantage is that we have been developing the expertise needed to really digest these biomarker lists for over a decade now. What's really fun is the direct translation of our core expertise into the industry. It's not just some side product or scientific advisory. I have to be careful not to mix lab and company, especially when it comes to confidential knowledge. 

Also, the venture capitalists are extremely knowledgeable and can ask pointed questions on how they see the market and the field. Sometimes it takes an expert to answer their questions, so coming from academia allows for discussion and progression towards a successful venture.

Upcoming Events

Fellowships/Internships/Programs

Career Opportunities

Job Postings
Many great opportunities are available using IndieBio Talent Network. 
Also check out a variety of job posting with startups at BioLabs. 

Aclid Bio - Founding Engineer
APPLY HERE
Aclid Bio is a biological security and safety platform co-founded by Professor Harris Wang from Columbia University. They are building the infrastructure to safeguard the SynBio community from misuse, enabling responsible research, keeping scientists safe, and protecting national security. They work with some of the leading gene synthesis providers, foundries, and governments in safety, surveillance, and compliance. Their screening service detects and analyzes pathogenic or toxic elements in DNA sequences, helping biotech manufacturers and service providers comply with guidelines and regulations to protect their liability. 

Cellarity - Many job postings
APPLY HERE
As part of the Computation and Data Science department, you will be part of a ~20-person team of computational experts who collaborate with the biology, chemistry, and genomics teams throughout the company. They are generating massive amounts of data, mostly single-cell, across a number of diverse therapeutic areas. These positions run the gamut from blue-sky research projects, to applied ML modelling, to driving specific drug programs.

Nautilus Biotechnology - Senior Staff Scientist, Biophysical Characterization
APPLY HERE
Nautilus's goal is to improve the health of millions by unleashing the potential of the proteome to accelerate drug development and enable a new world of precision and personalized medicine. This position will be tasked with managing a team of researchers, developing methods to characterize our affinity reagents, and collaborating cross-functionally to incorporate these reagents in the Nautilus platform. You will work closely with colleagues upstream in the probe development process and downstream in platform integration. It is a hands-on leadership role, working closely with the researchers on the team to design, execute, and analyze experiments. This position will report to the Vice President, Affinity Reagent Development, within the R&D organization and is located in San Carlos, CA.

LifeSci NYC
Look at opportunities HERE
The LifeSci NYC Internship Program has just launched for 2022-2023. Both academic year internships and full-time job opportunities posted. Summer internship opportunities will be posted in the next couple of months. All types of positions will continue to be posted on a rolling basis, as host companies are ready to begin their hiring process. At present, there are 64 roles listed at 38 different companies. Once a student creates an application, they may view job descriptions for all of these roles in our job portal, and may submit cover letters for those that interest them. Students who have not yet applied for our program may view all of our academic year and full-time roles at http://bit.ly/altopps, and may then submit a program application in order to apply for listed roles. Summer internships will only be shared with students who have submitted a program application, so students will need to apply in order to access those listings.

New York Stem Cell Foundation 
NYSCF Research Institute is a non-profit accelerator looking to develop cures for the major diseases of our time through stem cell research and they have a few open positions. 

Satellite Bio - Scientist/Senior Scientist
APPLY HERE
Located in Cambridge, MA, Satellite Bio is pioneering the development of a proprietary, groundbreaking technology that can turn cells into an engineered, implantable tissue therapeutic, thereby providing a transformative option for patients with serious disease. Building on 25 years of work in award-winning labs at top academic institutions, the platform is supported by a strong IP portfolio and is backed by a top tier syndicate, led by Polaris Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, and aMoon. In this role you will contribute to the company’s platform technology of engineered satellite tissues. Specifically, you will work in the preclinical team as the biomarkers lead to support in vitro and in vivo proof-of-concept and IND-enabling studies. You will be responsible for designing, developing, and executing molecular and other biologically relevant assays to support development efforts across our highly multidisciplinary organization.

What We're Listening To (or Reading!)

Getting Life Science Startups Started Faster
What if life science startups could get launched out of universities even faster, with less time and money wasted on lengthy negotiations? After more than 2 years of work from a great group of universities (Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Stanford, University of Indiana, University of Michigan, University of Kentucky, University of Pennsylvania, Yale), venture capitalists (5AM, Atlas, Omega Funds, OUP, Polaris, RA Capital, Venrock), and law firms (Cooley, Goodwin, and Wilson Sonsini), a largely-negotiated template term sheet was created for life science startups, with reasonable versions of most of the clauses, that should be usable in the vast majority of situations. Read the blogpost about this template term sheet here.

Once a Scientist Podcast
The Once a Scientist podcast was launched in April 2020 by Nick Edwards, a neuroscience PhD who works at a San Diego-based biotech company. His goals for the show are simple: 1) Provide a resource for young scientists to learn about different careers; 2) Speak with scientists from a broad spectrum of backgrounds; 3) Make science cool again; 4) Have honest conversations. The latest episode is with Tari Suprapto, PhD, who is the Director of Search and Evaluation at Novo Nordisk and Board Chair at the San Diego Innovation Council. A super connector and opportunity scout, Tari talked about running toward things that drive you. Listen Here

Startup/Entrepreneurship resources in the Tri-I community: