Billion-Dollar Founder: One Gene Edit Could Replace A Lifetime Of Pills!
Janice Chen was a PhD student in Jennifer Doudna's lab at Berkeley when CRISPR was changing biology. The default path was a postdoc and an academic job. Instead, she co-founded Mammoth Biosciences in 2018 with Doudna, Lucas Harrington and Trevor Martin, and by 2021 it was valued at over a billion dollars.
Dr. Janice Chen is a co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences and co-invented DETECTR, which uses CRISPR to detect DNA. On Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw talks with her about the science of CRISPR, the vision of a one-time gene editing therapy, why entrepreneurship is a type of experimentation, and walking into chess tournaments as often the only female player in the room.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
- How Cas9 made it possible to reprogram a molecule to target any DNA sequence
- Growing up around her dad's molecular biology lab in Salt Lake City
- The Build a Genome course that showed her biology can be engineered
- How DETECTR turned CRISPR from an editing tool into a way to detect DNA
- Why she left the default path of postdoc and academia: "there was just nothing to lose"
- What she underestimated: the time and capital it takes to bring human therapeutics forward
- The APOC3 program: a one-time gene editing therapy to durably lower very high triglycerides
- Why entrepreneurship is a type of experimentation, and why it's the first time for everyone
- Chess, assumptions about women, and leaning into being underestimated
- Mentoring women founders, being a mom of two, and leaving your titles at the door
CHAPTERS
0:00 Trailer
0:30 Introduction
1:29 Mammoth, Jennifer Doudna and the discovery of Cas9
2:26 What CRISPR does: programmable DNA targeting
4:21 Growing up in her dad's lab in Salt Lake City
4:48 Build a Genome: biology can be engineered
5:47 Pam Silver's lab and first hearing about CRISPR
9:16 Frontier technologies: AI, gene editing and one-time cures
11:01 Inventing DETECTR
13:13 Why start a company instead of a postdoc?
15:40 What building a company taught her: time and capital
17:00 Biotech is not tech: patients are the end customer
17:58 What human therapeutics can do
19:16 APOC3: a one-time therapy for high triglycerides
21:33 A mile deep and an inch wide
22:28 Entrepreneurship is a type of experimentation
23:26 The great equalizer: it's the first time for all of us
24:14 Who she wants to be as a leader
26:00 Great colleagues, bad fits and parting ways
26:47 Her job: cultivating everyone's special gifts
27:47 Women in biotech and the chess board
29:31 Mom of two and mentor to women founders
30:29 Carve out time for creativity, leave your titles at the door
31:48 What's next: frontier AI and gene editing
33:15 Dissecting hype from reality
33:43 Every day counts for patients waiting for a cure
34:36 Closing
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. Janice Chen is a co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences, a biotechnology company building a next-generation CRISPR platform for in vivo gene editing. She co-founded it in 2018 with Jennifer Doudna, Lucas Harrington and Trevor Martin after her PhD in Doudna's lab at UC Berkeley, where she co-invented DETECTR, a CRISPR method for detecting DNA. Before Berkeley she worked in Pam Silver's synthetic biology lab at Harvard Medical School. She mentors women scientific entrepreneurs and is a mom of two.
ABOUT THE SHOW
Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw features conversations with women leaders in health, technology and business.
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