“What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine.” — Jake Becraft
Jake Becraft is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies. He has guided the company from its founding vision through platform development and into clinical translation, positioning Strand at the forefront of next generation RNA therapeutics.
Beyond his role at Strand, Dr. Becraft is an influential voice in the national biotechnology landscape. He engages and advises policymakers, defense leaders, and industry stakeholders on biosecurity, innovation strategy, and strengthening American competitiveness in advanced biotechnology. Trained as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he operates at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and policy, focused on building both the companies and the institutional frameworks required to secure the future of programmable medicine.
He received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT. He serves on the board of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio).
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“Our goal at Strand, and our challenge, is building drugs today that impact patients’ lives. We’re not a research institute. Our goal is not to do really cool research on mice and join the ranks of people who have cured mice of cancer. There’s millions of them. There could be a Nobel Prize every five minutes for someone who’s cured a mouse of cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being diseases, and do so in a safe, effective, scalable way that impacts a person’s life as little as possible. And that is what we’re building.”
— Jacob Becraft
“What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine.”
— Jacob Becraft
“Everyone wants to cure cancer. I don’t need a story behind curing cancer. I just need a story about how we’re going to get there and how curing cancer is actually going to be one step on the road to solving disease writ large.”
— Jacob Becraft
“What we are in the midst of right now is the United States massively losing to China. China has built an industrialized version of clinical trial infrastructure for first-in-human trials that is so efficient and massively quick that they’re just able to go faster and cheaper into the thing that matters most, which is first-in-human trials. So the United States is actually in the process of very rapidly, as a country, falling behind China because what started as a place for American companies to come run clinical trials to get data and then take it to the FDA and then do larger trials in the United States has now created a flywheel structure within China where now just Chinese companies run their clinical trials faster than the American companies and then bring their Chinese-discovered drugs to the United States.”
— Jacob Becraft
“No one will learn until they care.”
— Jacob Becraft
“The biotechnology industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or it will be built up in a new way from new players.”
— Jacob Becraft
“If some bullshit hype filters into this, it’s worth it in order to take the correct swings at the truly big ideas, because one out of 10 transformations is better than seven out of 10 logical steps forward.”
— Jacob Becraft
“In low odds games, games where there’s a very low odds of success statistically, if you don’t go 100 percent all in, the odds will be zero.”
— Jacob Becraft
“When I look at some of those great investors who have made these high-conviction bets, it seems like they’re able to identify this moment in time for companies that is post-conviction, pre-consensus. The ones who know we’re post-conviction, we’re no longer saying, ‘Can we do this?’ We’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to work.’ But it’s pre-consensus because not everyone has caught on yet or not everyone is convinced.”
— Jacob Becraft
Want to hear another episode with a physician-founder building a new class of medicine? Listen to my conversation with Dr. Kevin Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, in which we discussed the birth of bioelectronic medicine, stimulating the vagus nerve to tame inflammation, the inflammatory reflex, treating rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, SetPoint Medical’s FDA approval journey, alleviating depression and autoimmune disorders, building devices that replace drugs, and much more.
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