Dr. Tony Kulesa is the co-founder of Petri, an organization that both invests in early-stage biotech startups and works 1-on-1 with founders (many of whom are starting their first businesses) for at least one year. Petri is co-founded and funded by Pillar VC.
Previously, Tony was the founding Director of the MIT BioMakerspace, a community biology laboratory and incubator space, and an Instructor at the MIT Department of Biological Engineering. He holds a PhD from MIT, where his inventions of new platforms for drug discovery and microbial therapeutics were highlighted in Science Editor’s Choice and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. While at MIT, he was a founding officer of MIT Biotech Group and co-founded and directed 3 courses on biotech and entrepreneurship, including BiomedStartup, a course that coaches 10+ teams per year on research commercialization projects.
Tony, can you tell a bit about your passion for biotech and what inspired you to embrace a venture capitalist role in this space, rather than staying in science?
Many of the greatest challenges we face have roots in biology. In healthcare, the risk-adjusted cost of bringing drugs to market is doubling every nine years. We are already spending ~20% of GDP on healthcare, and our population, on average, continues to get older. We also must learn to live sustainably, but at the same time raise the quality of life of everyone on our planet. We will need to reverse some of the damage we have done as well, for example by removing carbon from our atmosphere.
At their root, all of these problems, and many more, come down to biology. So, we have to ask what is rate limiting to developing solutions?
In my view, it’s not a lack of market opportunities. It’s not a lack of technology, or a lack of availability of capital. Instead, the main challenge I see right now is a bottleneck around entrepreneurial talent. With our work at Petri, our goals are to discover and alleviate the bottlenecks to cultivating entrepreneurial talent in the life sciences, and therefore unlock the creation of many new companies.
In your thought-provoking blog post “” you are discussing that biotech is dominated by a model where venture capital firms create companies themselves, in partnership with academics, following a model that was adopted by a pioneer in the biotech industry -- Genentech. So the industry may be lacking more independent founders -- unlike, for instance, in other technological industries. In its turn, it may be a reason for a smaller number of new companies founded per year than we would maybe like to see.
Can you elaborate more on this and explain why this may be happening in the first place?
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