Interview with Richard Yu, PhD, Co-Founder & CEO, Abalone Bio

Interview with Richard Yu, PhD, Co-Founder & CEO, Abalone Bio.
Originally published in Life Sciences Insights Magazine, September 2024

Please introduce us to your company.

Abalone Bio is a preclinical stage drug discovery company that creates antibodies that go beyond the existing capabilities of antibody drugs to activate challenging drug targets to access promising disease-treating biology. Antibodies are molecules originally used by our immune system to shut stuff down — kill invading bacteria and viruses — but what we want to do is fulfill the full drug-like potential of these wonderful molecules. Many targets that need to be activated to treat diseases haven’t been addressable by other drug types, and we can create antibodies to twiddle those receptor “control knobs” on the surfaces of our cells, like G-protein coupled receptors, to access therapeutic biological activities. We’re developing one anti-inflammatory drug for neuropathic pain, and we also have a discovery stage pipeline focusing primarily on metabolic disorders but also on cancer and inflammation. What they share is a focus on targets that we believe are best — or perhaps only — activated by an antibody drug.

The technical core of our company is our platform, also named FAST (Functional Antibody Selection Technology), which not only discovers rare activating antibodies but also generates data that we can uniquely leverage with AI tools to learn how to create them. This isn’t just an idea — we’ve experimentally validated antibody activators for some of the most challenging targets for ourselves and our partners.

Our 14-person team operates at our labs in Emeryville, CA in the former foley art (sound effect) studio of Pixar that we converted into lab and office space.

Tell us about yourself and your team.

I’m a scientist by training. I started with Legos and working on cars with my dad as a kid, and found my way to a Berkeley undergrad in the late 80s–early 90s in physics and computer science and then biophysics, a year off doing neural network prediction of protein second structure prediction at LBL, a structural biology degree at Yale. After grad school, I hopped off of the traditional academic track and did a research fellowship at Sydney Brenner’s and Roger Brent’s Molecular Sciences Institute, which exposed me to a lot of -ologies: systems biology, synthetic biology, cell biology, and genetics. I also had another founder experience as CSO of an algae biofuel company in the late 2000s. Pack into this a lot of other life skills from home maintenance, motorcycle wrangling, an endless to-do list of repairs — and it’s surprising how many elements of my past experiences have translated into essential skills to build Abalone Bio.

Our team initially grew quite a bit through personal connections. The UCSF and Bay Area scientific network was and remains key. Monica Schwartz, our VP of Antibody Discovery, knew my friend and co-founder Gustavo Pesce back as postdocs. Our VP of Data and AI, Sameer Soi, was made through our mutual friend and former director of the Nikon Facility. Advisors have turned into executive team members; for example our VP of Preclinical Development, Lauren Schwimmer; Toshi Takeuchi, who was one of our first antibody drug development advisors, joined to take over as CSO after Gustavo Pesce passed away in an accident a few years ago. His death of course was a huge loss to the company and to me personally, but we’ve been able to continue and keep his part of the dream growing. I’m very grateful for our solid team of folks who cover the technical requirements but, more importantly, are kind and non-pathologically ambitious. A shout-out to them all: Adnan, Carlos, Jingjing, Miguel, Miles, Raghu, Sophie, Swastik, and our interns Arianna, Lily, and Xixi.

Can you tell us about how you heard about CLS and your experience working with us?

I was fairly tapped into the UCSF community through a previous position and that’s where I initially heard about FAST. Gustavo knew someone who personally recommended it as well.

The FAST program was fantastic; we had a large group — at least 8 advisors, which is a lot! — and I still talk with some. We’d bring empanadas to our in-person meetings — maybe that had something to do with it! That’s a lot of time in aggregate generously committed by experienced people. The program forced us to present and defend our ideas, think more carefully about our business plan and who we’re hiring, and how to be nimble and competitive. Having an independent, external mirror during company development is so helpful.

Another thing — since we started, there’s been a boom of resources for entrepreneurs, with accelerators, podcasts, reading resources, fellow entrepreneurs to talk with, and more. It can be hard to determine who to listen to and who to ignore, or how to translate experience into something useful for your situation. With the FAST program, it was great to have live people to talk with about their experiences with some nuance rather than the usual platitudes of Startup School 101 and internet article information.

What goals are you looking to accomplish in the next few years?

You know, so much of this journey is challenging and stressful. But we have the best reason and motivation in the world for doing what we’re doing — we get to use our skills to reduce human suffering. So in the next four years I would like to see one of our molecules get through phase 1 clinical trials. That will be awesome — to see a positive efficacy signal in some fellow humans. It also would be great to expand our impact by continuing to help partners discover drugs and get their help to develop some of our non-core programs.

Any advice to first-time founders and academic entrepreneurs?

Before running a company, I put a strong premium on “doing it all yourself.” The most important thing that I’ve learned about is the social element — working in teams and leaning on people. So many have been so incredibly generous with their valuable time and resources — FAST advisors being a great example. Another is that most of the money we’ve raised has been from connections made by founders. But even more importantly, I found the biggest key to being a more effective CEO was to know myself better and learning the tools to live a more examined life. Coaching and meditation have done wonders for me. It’s so important to clearly look at and improve on your weaknesses and acknowledge your strengths. My improved ability to build and nurture positive, kind human relationships — including with myself — has not just helped me be more effective in my job, but also to simply live better.

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