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0Jake Becraft is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies.
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Timestamps:
- 00:00:00 Start.
- 00:06:07 What Strand does.
- 00:08:19 The Boston dinner.
- 00:11:05 The image of a body riddled with cancer.
- 00:15:05 What stuck for the muggles in the pitch deck.
- 00:17:14 A good drug vs. a good product.
- 00:19:40 Tricking cancer into snitching on itself.
- 00:27:38 The abscopal effect.
- 00:34:04 Potency, specificity, and delivery.
- 00:35:46 First principles thinking.
- 00:36:38 The precipice of a revolution.
- 00:41:14 The thousand people in the room.
- 00:48:38 Psychedelic medicine as a cautionary tale.
- 00:51:17 What actually catches a policymaker’s attention.
- 00:53:42 Breakthrough vs. incremental.
- 00:54:55 What’s in it for the policymakers?
- 00:58:08 The 80/20 wish list.
- 01:01:31 Australia’s CTN system.
- 01:03:51 Sheep, psychedelics, and red-tape arbitrage.
- 01:05:22 China’s clinical-trial flywheel vs. slow-motion American loss.
- 01:06:53 The bicoastal biotech ethos.
- 01:08:10 Can the FDA actually pull this off?
- 01:12:12 The Sophie’s Choice of pharma development.
- 01:14:16 Lost arts of founder mode.
- 01:15:23 Rockets for tumors, T-cells, and beyond.
- 01:19:16 Viral in policy circles.
- 01:23:09 The Washington Post headline and the PickFu split test.
- 01:27:56 Solution-first storytelling.
- 01:33:54 RNA medicine and platform therapeutics.
- 01:39:17 Moderna’s 62 days.
- 01:40:33 Uber Eats and the de-risked launch.
- 01:44:17 CEO blockers.
- 01:45:52 Where’s biotech’s SpaceX moment?
- 01:46:53 Elon Musk betting black on the wheel.
- 01:51:55 AWS and the post-conviction / pre-consensus window.
- 01:58:47 COVID politicization.
- 01:59:46 Insulin, growth hormone, and the original platform story.
- 02:01:35 Biotech as pharma’s little brother.
- 02:03:29 More recent role models, Apple edition.
- 02:04:50 Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, and the biotech-tech crossover.
- 02:06:25 The iPhone as a delivery platform.
- 02:08:25 Spotify’s problem and the future of bespoke medicine.
- 02:10:07 Baby KJ and the limits of liver-only solutions.
- 02:11:19 Parting thoughts.
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