Inside Yosemite: How Reed Jobs’s VC Is Deploying $350 Million to Fight Cancer | Term Sheet

I started working in cancer when my dad got sick. After his father, Steve Jobs, passed from cancer, Reed Jobs embarked on a radical mission. Make cancer non-lethal, leading to the launch of VC fund Yosemite. The victory over death. That is what I want for cancer patients. This year, cancer is expected to kill about 1,700 Americans every day. But cancer drugs are one of the hardest bets in biotech. With only 1 in 50 drugs making it to market. Yosemite has a unique operating model. Alongside traditional venture capital, it gives philanthropic grants to early-stage scientific research. We can test new ideas really quickly and cheaply. Today, I'm sitting down with Reed Jobs to find out, can a venture firm really help discover the next cancer breakthrough? I'm Allie Garfinkel, and this is Term Sheet. Reed, thank you so much for being here. Allie, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. For our audience, what does Yosemite do? Yosemite is a venture capital group, and our mission is to make cancer non-lethal in our lifetimes. And we actually have a completely unique structure, and I kind of invented this, where we have a donor-advised fund underneath the main fund that creates companies with philanthropy. So what Yosemite does in a nutshell is we find the best science in the world in universities all over the world. I mean, mostly here in the U.S., but, you know, in Europe and in Australia and Japan and stuff. And we will then partner with researchers on their best ideas. We can give them a grant or we can just start coming with them right away. And we love to make companies and get them to people as quickly as possible. That's what we do. Reed, so tell us about your second fund. Well, Allie, thanks so much for asking. I'm really proud to say that we actually have an oversubscribed second fund. We're over our target of $350 million. And our first fund was, I was really proud that we were able to get anchored by a lot of institutions, MIT, MSK, Rockefeller from right here. All of those folks have continued on with us. And we've also added on some pension funds and really importantly, AbbVie and Amgen. Us, we're really deeply working with the partners who are going to be really important for us moving forward. Why is it so important that your LP base includes companies like AbbVie and Amgen? The pharmaceutical companies are usually places that we sell into. Now, those are going to be our partners as we get things into clinical trials or if we exit really to get things to market as quickly as possible. So working with a few pharmaceutical companies is really important for me. Certainly not one. you have to work with a couple, but they're really good people. And they actually have incredible strengths in many of the areas that we're moving into. Why is it so important to work with a couple? Diversity matters. What are the stakes here, Reid? Unfortunately, cancer rates in the United States and the world are going up. And mostly this is because we're getting older. We're living longer. We're not dying as young as we used to, which is great. But cancer is a disease of cells usually as they age. And it's pretty linearly related. So if we're going to be successful living longer as a society and as a world, we need to deal with this. You know, you launched an oncology fund in 2023, a very different environment. Biotech was, to say the least, out. What's changed in the last three years? Huge amounts changed in the last three years, Allie. First of all, goodness, you're right. It's gotten a lot better than it was in 2023. High interest rates, really tough market environment. I mean, biotech was in a really low place. And what happened since then was, of course, you know, the macro environment has gotten better, though now it's changing probably back again. But what actually changed much more fundamentally than that was what happened scientifically in the last three years. You know, you couldn't have told me four years ago that we'd be sitting here today and we would have the advancements in GLP-1s, in immunotherapy, in vaccines now, and against pancreatic cancer that we've achieved and those things have happened and have been titanic for the industry the biggest one i think has actually been the GLP-1 revolution by far because it's created just frankly the most profitable and best some of the best-selling and most impactful drugs that we've ever made and it's particularly important for right here in the United States and it's really important for cancer too so on a population level i think these are going to be some of the most important drugs we've ever actually seen come to market and they're finally addressing obesity, which had never really been properly looked at before as a market. You know, there are people, you know, dealt with diabetes, scammers, or a lot of scammers, but there wasn't any, you know, real therapeutic for obesity before, you know, there were some bariatric surgeries, of course, that are very invasive. And there's dietary regimens that are difficult to follow. But before that, there really wasn't anything smoking is a classic example of this where obviously it really increases your risk of lung cancer. But you know, it also about four your risk of bladder cancer if you're a smoker. And that's just because you're constantly getting these carcinogens in and it affects your whole body, not just your lungs. Luckily, and a great story, is in the last 40 years, American smoking rates have gone precipitously down, pretty linearly actually. It's something we should all be really proud of. This country has done a fantastic job in smoke mitigation, and it's really demonstrable. Unfortunately, at the same time, obesity has really risen and like smoking it's a pan uh you know disease risk uh because it's really this pro-inflammatory state that exists for you for a long period of time and in the same measure you know it really increases your risk of colon cancer but also being obese really increases your risk of brain cancer and even though these things are not really related it's about it being a pan risk so these drugs now finally being able to address that like massively for the first time is not only going to help people who are obese and struggling with that, but with cancer, with cardiovascular disease, with a lot of things. Well, and it's interesting that you jumped to GLP-1s because I was actually expecting you to be like, a lot's gone on in the last few weeks. The last two weeks have been incredible, Allie. It's been a great time to be an oncologist. You seem really excited. Tell our audience what you're so excited about. There's two big breakthroughs and both of them are really, really monumental. One is a phase three approval and data from a company called Revolution medicines on pancreatic cancer, which deeply matters to me. And one is from Merck and Moderna. And both of these are huge transformative advancements. So let's take them one at a time. Let's do the Merck-Moderna one first, actually, because that's kind of somehow the more surprising one. So I assume Moderna is a company you're pretty familiar with. Of course. mRNA vaccine pioneer, COVID hero, I would say. I took an mRNA vaccine at one point, probably most of us here in this country did and since then though they haven't really you know if you look at their stock if you look at their strategy that covid was a huge triumph for them and they did a great job for the whole world but since then they've been actually working a lot on cancer vaccines very quietly and at the same time BioNTech which is the other you know main vaccine company for covid has also been working on cancer vaccines and quietly Moderna and BioNTech have been in a bit of a race and to a few weeks ago, we found out some of the earlier results and it looks like in minimal residual disease for melanoma, applying a vaccine actually gives you a long-term effect to prevent that cancer. Now let's just start with how your immune system works and why, why is this a good idea? Why has this not been done before? And why, why does this matter? Right, Allie? Uh, so the idea of a cancer vaccine is certainly not new because you're immune. It sounds like a dream. It sounds like a dream, but people have had this dream since the 1960s. And there's a reason why people have never, you know, people have still been asleep and haven't woken up yet to that reality. And the reason is that cancer is very, very similar to you. You know, if you get infected with a virus, it's making viral protein that is super different from you. It's really easy to find for your immune system from a signal perspective, right? Like it's not like anything else in your body. And those cells look profoundly different. And obviously, if you could get inoculated with those antigens before even getting infected, you know, that's what a vaccine does. Your immune system is going to be way smarter and you're probably not going to die from that infection, which is great. Which is why you're so excited about it, in part. That's the dream for cancer, is for it to be a prophylactic vaccine. But that's not what we're dealing with now. And I still think that's going to be a decent way away. And the reason for that is cancer, despite having a lot of mutations, is still very, very similar to you. It will have some driver mutations, and we'll talk about pancreatic cancer. It's a good place to start. Pancreatic cancer is like a perfect storm. It only has maybe a dozen mutations. In billions of genes, having a dozen things different is really, really small. And it's very difficult for your body to actually see that. And think about where Merck and Moderna started. They started melanoma. melanoma is by far the most mutated of all cancers because it's constantly getting bombarded right by uv radiation so instead of a few dozen mutations it might have millions and it's going to look really different from the rest of you which makes it a great place for this to start and them seeing a signal here is a big deal because it means that finally we can make your immune system see cancer specifically and now we need to make sure that translates into other cancers as well that are that will be harder so we're talking at an especially optimistic moment but you know when you started this it was it was a different time right in certain ways um you've been at emerson for years working on health why start your own thing at all and why focus on this well i'd always been focused on this i actually you did i did read that you uh got a master's degree in nuclear weapons policy so so so you have definitely you have mostly been focused on this but i am curious about that detour I'm not gonna lie I imagine there's a through line the honest answer is I you know I'm a little ashamed of that to be honest with you I started working in cancer when my dad got sick and a lot of people are motivated by a family reason I worked in cancer labs for a long time in high school and when I was at Stanford and when my dad died I was a sophomore and I actually needed a little time away from cancer I I wish that that wasn't the case but it ended up being the case uh and international security was a fun uh little distraction for a couple years and that's what i needed at the time but no then i i never stopped seeing this as what i always was meant to do so did you always know this was your life's work yeah of course it was since i was a kid do you remember a moment i know i wish it was that poignant. But it's a lot simpler than that. I was just a kid. And when you're a kid, you kind of see things really clearly. So was Venture always what you thought would be the right vehicle? Did you ever think about being a doctor? I always thought about being a doctor. I was pre-med at Stanford. My plan was to be a doctor. But then I had to take a little time away. And I thought about it a lot. And, you know, doctors I have the most respect for, but you get, you only, you really work one patient at a time. And I am a little more ambitious than that. But I also just, I don't need it to be about me. I need to solve this problem. And a doctor alone is probably not going to do that. I don't think a company alone is going to make cancer non-lethal. I think it's going to be a consortium of things. I think it's going to be a really long push, probably cancer by cancer more likely than not. And there's going to be a lot of companies that could work pan-cancer, whether they're vaccine companies or things going after big risk factors. But there's not, in my view, going to be one company that cures cancer. I don't think that that's realistic. I think it's going to be a lot over a long period of time. And if that's the case, then I think the career of being a company creator is a smart one. And when you think about the role venture can play in that process, where does venture unequivocally belong in the process of making cancer non-lethal. Strangely, it's really important actually, which I never would have thought. But the funding to get things from idea into people is so crucial because the failure rates are so high. The risk of science is so great that very few people actually have the financial wherewithal and the scientific acumen to really do this well. And luckily in America right now, there's you know, two dozen great biotech venture capital groups who I am fortunate enough to work with a lot and who've taught me so much about this field. And we have a great robust ecosystem here. And that is something that really no other country in the world has. And it actually makes this not only, you know, a tool that we can really replicate, but it has created an ecosystem that allows me to just plug in and fund things really early and have partners down the road who are willing to then meet me when things are successful. How early are you going? And how are, how do you actually, what does it mean to source a deal for you? Because I actually don't intuitively know what that would be. We go the earliest, Allie. The earliest, how early? We go to labs in universities before the companies are even created. We help researchers actually fund their research philanthropically. We give them grants, no strings attached, no royalty, no IP, no nothing. We will fund a scientific project because we think it is meritorious. And if it's successful, we will then work with that researcher to make a new co, to create a syndicate, to recruit the management that's necessary, and to then get into clinical trials. And we can repeatedly do this all over the world now. And that foundational model of starting from a grant, building the team, and then creating the venture around it is really what Yosemite is all about. Walk us through what the model of Yosemite is because it's unique. I've never seen anything quite like it. The model is that we actually, have a donor advised fund, uh, which is a, it's just a philanthropic pile that is funded pretty uniquely by some of the funds AUM every year. And we actually took a lot of inspiration from Deerfield, which is a wonderful firm that's here in New York. That's a life science firm. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Yeah. And they take a percentage of their carry and they put it into a nonprofit. Uh, and a few other people do that and they fund a lot of research that then feeds their companies, which is awesome. It's a great structure. Um, but the thing with that is obviously, the money for the science funding will only come in at the end of the fund after it returns, of course. And I sort of wanted to do the opposite. I want to fund science at the beginning and then make companies in that same fund. And it wouldn't really work to wait to the end to endow that. You kind of need to do that proactively. So I decided to create a new structure that enabled us to do that. And that's where a donor advised fund came in. I took inspiration there from Emerson, from Chan Zuckerberg. A lot of big family offices use this. And it's just real ease of use across the academic space. But the other big reason is that, Ali, I work in one of the more complicated industries in biotech. So I have to keep the rest of my life pretty simple. And I needed to keep the structure of Yosemite really simple. So every investment we do, we obviously underwrite to return the whole fund, right? Like we're a venture capital group. We do rigorous financial analyses. We do incredibly deep scientific analyses. And when we make an investment, we're underwriting it with that level of rigor. However, we would never invest in something that's not yet a company. Conversely, when we do a grant, it must be to an academic lab. It has to be no strings attached. It has to be a pure gift, but we could never give a grant to a company, right? That would be a violation of that. It has to be really even. It has to be really pure so we disaggregate them and we keep them uh really in their own minds how do you know when the science is ready to be a company that's one of the easier parts of my job because we can just set up uh really easy scientific milestones is this hitting you know a drug candidate is this hitting are you getting ready for it and you know an IND study these are things that are really easy to elucidate out in a grant uh the more difficult thing is like can the scientists make it work can you get a drug compound? Can you get something to bind? Can you get a hit? That's a much more difficult thing. But with philanthropy, we can fail really cheaply. And that's sort of the real wisdom behind this is one of the difficult and in my view, you know suboptimal things about my industry is how slow it is. And look, that's really important from a regulatory standpoint, but it also means that you can waste a lot of money in things that aren't going to work, which is obviously really bad and what we've learned is that we can just test new ideas really quickly and cheaply in universities with grants and before we you know waste a lot of money time and resources we can kind of flip over that first card and that has enabled us to be a lot more intelligent in our design can you tell a story about a time where you flipped over the first card and you knew immediately it wasn't working honestly ali it's a lot more binary than that like usually you'll fund let's say you're what you're saying is it's actually at a certain point it's just science the science works or it doesn't exactly yes well you're fine you're doing a lab let's say you know you're a you're a lung cancer researcher and you're looking at a new type of immunotherapy that's going to go inside your body and we're going to try to have it go after this particular lung cancer target and you know you think that if we do this it'll be better than the standard of care right now and you know we have a thesis around that we review that we think okay gosh you know ali's got a really good idea here and i could you know we we know what the standard of we could see how this could also hit that there could be a therapeutic index if successful so let's fund her and let's see if she can first of all do this in a cell model uh and then you know if successful we'll make a company we'll see if this could work in animals and it's a pretty linear path actually unfortunately it's riddled with failure you know the odds that you're going to make something that work are pretty low actually um the odds that then we make a company that works in monkeys that's pretty low so we know in every step if the odds of success get lower and lower and lower. Every time a drug enters the market, it actually is a miracle. It's incredibly difficult to do, and everyone is different. you know aspects of it will be de-risked in different stages, but the path is pretty clear. And we just need to be really obviously sensible about when we're making those investments. And we also just need to be honest about, look, if this is not going to work, we can't graduate to a company, we can't graduate to the next step, and we have to just be very honest. Earlier this year, I wrote our cover story about Demis Hassabis and Isomorphic. So I spent a lot of time thinking about AI drug discovery. The stat I learned in that process was that there are more biological compounds in the universe than stars in the sky. And the sort of enormity of that I was floored by, but also kind of in awe that anyone had ever found a drug to begin with, right? The incredible physical act of over and over again, trying and trying. When you think about the possibilities of drug discovery, I know you're an investor in Chai, for example. Where can AI help the drug discovery process and facilitate some of this being faster? And where do you think it just isn't going to make a difference? AI is still such an emergent technology. People don't talk about it like that anymore. Actually, do they? It's debatable. We were both in early days, and it feels like we talk about it a lot, I guess. I think we talk about it a lot, but I live in San Francisco. So, you know, the conversations I hear are still mostly tinged with possibility. And for drug development, drug discovery, I think there's two branches that you need to look at, drug development and then drug discovery. For drug development, Chai is one of the best companies in the world doing this. And there's a few others, you know, that are probably in the mix. And these companies are doing phenomenal jobs modeling chemistry, modeling to unbelievable specificity and really replacing a lot of the time and grunt work that is done by chemists at pharmaceutical companies, at biotechnology companies, finding drugs and finding targets. And this isn't work that was new, like this would be work that would be being done, but it is now something that you can automate and have done at a fraction of the cost and critically in maybe a 10th of the time. And for pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies, the savings and just the acceleration there is so useful and it's widely, widely applicable from all types of antibodies to really new types of chemistry that we're kind of discovering right now. AI companies are right alongside us building models to do that and to actually help us be faster chemists. That is immediate and that is an incredible use of AI. And frankly, you know, it's alongside us as we're creating new bits of medicine. What is more emergent, I'd say, and less obvious to me from a timeline is discovery of drugs. Can it come up with new ideas? Could it give me a new experiment to run that no one has ever conceived of? That hasn't happened yet. And that's a new level of AI that is creative in biotech that just, we are really interested in trying to help develop, but we don't see yet on the horizon. You know, one of the things that's striking, Yosemite's mission is not curing cancer. It is making cancer non-lethal. Yeah. Why draw that distinction? Well, there's two reasons, Ali. The first reason is just intellectual. I don't think that you will cure cancer because, you know, we're human. Any human cell could become cancerous, right? And we're not going to stop having human cells. So the idea that none of them could ever become cancerous is preposterous. That risk is never going away. So I don't think that that's the right way to look at it. I also don't think that in the history of medicine that that's actually that instructive because most diseases don't go away. You know, the cancer vaccine is a tantalizing idea because you want to, you know, it worked for a lot of infectious disease and I want it to work for cancer. Well, that's really satisfying, but that may not be the reality. It might be closer to cardiovascular disease or AIDS, I think is a really good example too. Serious disease and AIDS is an infectious disease as well. And there's no vaccine for it, unfortunately. I'd love for there to be. But in the absence of that, it is actually a far less scary disease now in the United States because it's not lethal. Because with a cocktail of drugs, you can actually prevent mortality. And in many ways, I think that is a massive, massive victory. And in some ways, the most essential victory, because it's the victory over death. And that is what I want for cancer patients. And I think that that's more achievable and more realistic. When you think about exits from the venture side, I actually was reading about how oncology M&A, for example, is ripping right now. What does an exit mean? How do you think about returns? What does that mean for you? Because it sounds like you think about it from a financial perspective too. Of course. We only would want to exit things if we're really confident that the partner who we're going to be doing this with is going to see it through in the way that we want to see it through. But look, Ali, we'll be honest with you. I am a venture capitalist. I am very clear about how much capital we have to return. And the way that we structure things at Yosemite is when we incubate companies in the way that I described, we take a large percentage of ownership. And we have big funds now, so we can keep following it up, and we want to retain that. And when things exit, we want to have a high percentage of ownership. That is our entire model. and that's been very successful for us. Now tell me, I know you have some news that you'd like to share. It sounds, speaking of having capital to return, it sounds like you have more capital. Well, thank you for teeing me up, Allie. We do. I'm really excited to say that our second fund, which we targeted at 350 million, is now fully oversubscribed, which has been a really great achievement for us at Yosemite. And I think more importantly, it's a validation of our model it's a real buy-in to funding science super early and you know i and the thing i'm the most proud of is actually the team that i've built uh and the incredible people who we brought from academia uh from industry from you know from consulting from even out of undergrad and we have an incredible group of people at yosemite and it is on their strength that this really happened why is it called yosemite my parents got married there oh uh it's very californian and it's enduring. And I thought that that was a good fit. Also, I have to add, miraculously, it was available. You sound shocked even now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if I'm honest, I was also surprised because it seems like the natural thing to follow after, say, given the love of trees. Yeah, look, sometimes life works out that way. If you think about sort of the GLP-1 revolution, what do you think the ultimate biggest change is bringing about when it comes to cancer? The biggest change by far is limiting the area under the disease curve, which is the whole game, Allie. What does that mean? Smoking is the other good example here. Smoking and obesity, if you think about the risk, it's an area under the curve risk, which means that the more time you spend being obese, the greater your odds of getting an obesity-related disease are. It's really that simple. The longer you smoke, the more damage that's going to do, right? The earlier you quit, the more you can recover, and actually the better your long-term outcomes are, right? Same thing with obesity. And what GLP-1s are going to do is they're a fantastic way for obese people to basically stop being obese very quickly. And they're not perfect drugs at all, by the way. This is the first generation of this class. There are muscle wasting issues that need to be optimized. It's not perfect. But again, it's the first drug of its whole class. And what it's really going to be able to do is to prevent people from being extremely obese very quickly, more so than anything at scale that we've ever developed yet. And that is going to save them and the medical system and their families huge amounts of misery and worry because it will absolutely statistically decrease the amount of long-term illnesses we have 20 30 years down the road it seems like you're thinking about the future of improving cancer treatment improving outcomes as being one that's fundamentally not only just about treatments but it's about sort of sociological changes and drugs that can help that process. Of course. What are some other sort of big sweeping societal changes that you think need to happen for cancer to be non-lethal? Another big area that I've worked on my whole life, and it is a part of Yosemite, it's about 10% of what we do, it's a little more variable, is diagnostics. And for every cancer that exists with a diagnostic, there's a better outcome. So the earlier you can catch something, very simply, the less advanced it is, right? And the easier it is to treat. So you want to be able to get things early. So where that exists, colonoscopies, PSA tests, mammograms, we have much better mortality statistics. We want to make better diagnostics for the whole world. It's really difficult to do. We've looked at liquid biopsies in the blood. It's really tough to get a good signal there because again, cancer is so similar to you and you don't want to get a lot of false positives, that doing this really at a population scale is very difficult. And we have not yet cracked that. But diagnostics on a population level will be, it must be a huge part of this. If your father was looking at your life now, what advice do you think he'd give you? I think he'd say stay on the path. Because something we have in common is we're really good long-term builders, I think. And Yosemite is not going to be as, you know, it reach its zenith of success in the next year or two. This is a long-term play that is going to take my whole life. The science investments that we're making in labs and companies take years to come to patients. I'm working to make it real fast, Ali, but that's the truth. It will take years to come to people. And that is the reality of doing this well and doing this safely. And I'm an impatient guy. I was going to say, are you naturally a patient person or not? No, it's difficult for me. But the discipline is knowing that that is what this really takes, and you need to keep this path. So let's imagine the world 15 years in the future, maybe. What do you think will be definitively true about what cancer treatment looks like then? Much like, we didn't get to talk about it as much, but Revolution Medicines, for instance, a few weeks ago, drug KRAS and pancreatic tumors for the first time. That's never been done before. We've known about KRAS for a long time, but we only invented the chemistry to do this a couple of years ago. And we're now working as hard as we can to bring that kind of technology to as many oncogenes as we can, a lot of people. I think what it really will look like is we're going to be able to stop a lot of the bad actors we've known about for a long time. KRAS, MYC, beta-catenin, these oncogenes we've been unsuccessful for many years are now looking much more tractable. And I think we're actually going be able to successfully treat a lot of the biggest cancers, lung, breast, colon, and there will be outliers. You know, brain cancer is going to remain really difficult for a lot of physiological and genetic reasons. But for common cancers, I think the picture is going to look a lot different. Most people watching this, I myself have, you know, family that's had cancer, died of cancer. What do you think everyone, including like my parents in Florida, are the most beloved watchers of the show, perhaps. What do you think my parents need to understand? What do you think sort of the average viewer needs to understand? What do you think everyone needs to understand about what the future could look like in terms of cancer treatment? Because it seems like a lot is possible. I think they need to trust the path. You know, it has taken us a long time to truly understand just the basic truths about our bodies. You know, we did not know until merely 30 years ago how your immune system worked at all, how it looked at things, how it reacted to things. We didn't know that. Think about how foundational that is. We've only sequenced the human genome 25 years ago in my lifetime. It's not that long ago. It's really not. We only made mRNA vaccines six, seven years ago. It's really not that long. The path that we're on might seem long, but if you look in just our lifetimes alone, Allie, it has been transformative. So I'd say look at this path that we're on and look at where we're going, because I think we've got to trust that. When you think about the role government can play here, what should be funded by the government and what should be private capital? It's a great question, Allie. And I really love funding cancer companies, but none of that can exist if we don't have basic research. And if you look at the most profitable drugs in the world right now uh number one is uh the GLP-1s and number two is uh Keytruda right and uh Keytruda came from a checkpoint inhibitor it's the best selling cancer drug in the world and GLP-1s came actually from zoology that Americans did studying the Gila monster in the 1980s what is the Gila monster oh really yeah no i don't know oh it's uh it's this poisonous lizard in Arizona and northern Mexico never seen it's kind of it's kind of beady looking oh cool it sounds kind of alarming and kind of like a mini dinosaur yeah totally mini dinosaur okay that has these enzymes in its i think it's salivary glands that are these GLP-1 analogs and you have the same thing or humans have the same thing uh and in humans they degrade in like a short amount of time and that's what gives you the feeling of satiety right a feeling full. But in the Gila monster, it degrades far slower. And that is the compound that was basically the IP that this is all built on. And obviously, no one had any idea when they were studying these random lizards that this would turn into the most profitable drug in the world. Of course, this was basic research funding. This is why that matters. CRISPR, which I'm sure you've heard of, which is one of the most revolutionary technologies ever created, you know where that came from? pond scum i'm not kidding truly uh it was the uh immune system of archaeobacteria and it was like why in this really efficient tiny bacteria which has this tiny genome and all has to be really important right why does it have these repeating areas like that doesn't make sense and so we studied that and it turned out that it was this flexible way of gene editing it was kind of like this accordion in their genome that could act as sort of like a vaccine actually where if they got infected and somehow survive. They could keep the viral genome in this kind of genetic accordion that they had. And the way that they did this was by editing their own genes. And it turns out that that works in you too. And that's how CRISPR came about. So none of these giant advancements ever had any hope of commercialization. They had to be funded by, frankly, someone like the federal government, which has a long-term focus and which can fund basic science. And that is how we've yielded some of the best breakthroughs in my generation. So what I would say is we should have incredibly more robust scientific funding at the federal level. Right now, the NIH budget is about $48 billion. I think it should be $100 billion, if not more. We should absolutely be investing in cutting-edge science to not only keep America's edge, but so that we can continue to, frankly, create new wondrous things because that is always where discoveries happen. AI is going to continue to be a big part of this and will probably accelerate it, but we should absolutely be investing in this because look at the yields. Great jobs. Thank you so much. Thanks, Allie. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.