Reimagining Biotech with Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics — Tim’s Founder Kitchen
In a Nutshell
Strand Therapeutics is building programmable mRNA medicines that reprogram tumors or immune cells in vivo to trigger immune responses, moving beyond liver-only delivery and direct tumor injection toward systemic, plug-and-play treatment. The core bottleneck is not discovering therapeutic proteins but solving potency, specificity, and delivery to make these therapies scalable products that fit existing infusion infrastructure rather than bespoke, ultra-expensive manufacturing. Jake Becraft argues the US is losing ground to China’s fast clinical trial system and must reform its IND process—shifting initial oversight to certified hospital IRBs like Australia’s CTN model—to cut costs, speed first-in-human testing, and keep biomedical innovation and capital from flowing overseas.
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The United States is massively losing to China in clinical trial infrastructure. China has built an industrialized version of clinical trial infrastructure for first-in-human trials that is so efficient and massively quick that they are able to go faster and cheaper into the thing that matters most, which is first-in-human trials. What started as a place for American companies to come run clinical trials to get data and then take it to the FDA and then do larger trials in the United States has now created a flywheel structure within China where now just Chinese companies run their clinical trials faster than the American companies and then bring their Chinese discovered drugs to the United States. The capital flow and risk capital then says these companies are more efficient and will fund these sorts of aspects.
Strand designs what are called next generation genetic medicines. You have DNA inside of your cells. The DNA makes RNA copies of itself and then that RNA makes proteins. Life is all proteins. Your skin, your hair, your organs, every cell is basically just proteins stacked together. That is everything that we are. You do not really see the DNA and the RNA. It is very small. The protein is what we think of as like our being. The way to actually intervene in disease and get to its core is to create the correct proteins. If you have a deficiency, everything from an enzyme problem to a rare disease to cystic fibrosis, it is usually a problem with a protein that is being incorrectly made by a cell. Over decades, what has gone wrong with that protein and what would need to go right to fix that protein or how you would replace that protein correctly has been figured out. What has not been figured out is how to make the cells do that because it is a very complicated problem to tell certain cells in the body to do various different things.
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