🧬 Staying Focused During Biotech Funding Ups & Downs | Roy Maute (Part 4/4)

What It Covers

Roy Maute, CEO of Feast Therapeutics, details cofounding the 34-person clinical-stage immunotherapy company in 2021 with Irving Weissman and Amira Barkal, pursuing CD24 as a macrophage checkpoint target, navigating post-COVID biotech funding cycles, and advancing PHST001 through monotherapy dose escalation trials.

Key Questions Answered

• •Fundraising timing: When raising a Series A at the tail end of a boom cycle, pitch a conservative, focused capital ask tied to specific milestones rather than a broad platform vision. Feast secured funding by requesting only what was needed to reach the next stage, avoiding the overextended pitches common six months earlier that later collapsed.
• •Team size discipline: Deliberately cap headcount to match capital efficiency — Feast reached clinical stage with only 34 people by outsourcing finance, legal, regulatory, and quality functions to consultants and external experts. Bring functions in-house incrementally as data milestones justify it, rather than building a full internal infrastructure ahead of clinical proof points.
• •Clinical-stage organizational structure: Separate scientific and clinical development teams create dangerous silos. Feast structures translational biologists to move between lab and clinic, taking observations from patient samples back into bench experiments. This bidirectional flow improves biomarker strategy and helps identify which combination therapies to prioritize in dose expansion cohorts.
• •Partnership sequencing: Pursue large pharma collaborations only after generating clinical activity data, not before. Feast engaged potential partners early to understand what data would trigger serious interest, then focused resources on generating exactly that data. For earlier pipeline programs lacking resources, consider platform-level collaborations with large companies to co-develop novel immune regulators as ADCs.
• •Investor selection criteria: Prioritize investors with large enough funds to follow on through every development stage, deep scientific orientation, and a long-term value creation mindset over those optimizing for the fastest acquisition or IPO exit. Misaligned investors focused on short-term inflection points create pressure that conflicts with decisions that maximize patient outcomes and program value.