🧬 Quitting Physics to Treat Biology Like an Engineering Problem | Richard Yu (Part 1/4)

This episode is brought to you by Xcedar. Xcedar provides life science startups with equipment leases on founder friendly terms to accelerate r and d and commercialization. Lease the equipment you need with Xcedar. Extend your runway, hit your milestones, raise your next round at a favorable valuation, and achieve a blockbuster exit while minimizing dilution. Additionally, as a podcast listener, you can redeem exclusive discounts with a growing list of biotech vendors and get $500 off your first equipment lease by using promo code t b s p on exceda.com/partners. Welcome to the biotech startups podcast by Xceda. Join us as we speak with first time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre seed to IPO with your host, John Chi. Our guest today is Richard Yu, cofounder and CEO of Abalone Bio, a therapeutics company developing functionally active antibody drugs for challenging membrane protein targets like GPCRs. Before founding Abalone Bio, Richard served as scientific and operations director at QB3's life sciences incubator in San Francisco, cofounded Green Pacific Biologicals focused on algae biofuels, and was research fellow at the Molecular Sciences Institute studying cellular information processing. At Abalone Bio, Richard leads development of the FAST platform functional antibody selection technology, which uses engineered yeast cells to screen a 100,000,000 antibodies simultaneously for functional activity rather than just binding affinity, integrating synthetic biology with machine learning to discover GCPR agonist antibodies. With a research collaboration with Pfizer, breakthrough CB2 agonist antibodies showing efficacy in models of liver fibrosis and diabetic neuropathy, and a background spanning structural biology at Yale, computational protein engineering, and serial entrepreneurship. Richard's journey demonstrates how interdisciplinary experience can unlock previously undruggable targets, making this a conversation you won't want to miss. Over the next four episodes, Richard shares how growing up in Ohio as the son of Chinese immigrants shaped his values. Discovering biophysics at Berkeley transformed biology from operational science to engineering discipline and transitioning through Yale structural biology to systems biology and synthetic biology work. Today, we'll hear about Richard's early days in Ohio and New Jersey, how his parents' experience taught him to figure things out, and discovering bio physics at Berkeley through a friend who promised proteins that eat dirt so you'll never need a vacuum cleaner. We'll hear about Yale's structural biology program working on membrane fusion proteins and learning the cultural differences between East Coast academic rigor and West Coast entrepreneurial energy. Lastly, we'll hear about the transition from computational modeling to more applied work, the formative experiences that shaped his path from physics to biology to entrepreneurship. Without further ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Richard Yu. Rich, so good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, man. Good to see you. Yeah. It's been a while, and I, you know, been really looking forward to this conversation. I just I mean, it's been months, …