Somatic Labs co-founder on cutting drug review from two years to four hours with AI — and the pancreatic cancer breakthrough at ASCO

Speaker 2: Pencil and paper. No computers at all. Anyway, first I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. And now we have Samuel from Stimatic Labs. He's the co founder and I'm very excited to have him join the show. How are doing? Hello.

Speaker 8: Good. How are you guys? Good to see you.

Speaker 2: We're good. So Jordy was making the claim that there is nothing good happening anywhere outside of artificial intelligence And I said we have the perfect guest to debunk that. So could you please introduce yourself first and then maybe take us through some of the exciting things that Whether happen there's a

Speaker 1: protein shortage, John, it's hard to be optimistic. It's hard to be optimistic.

Speaker 2: I'm to blast you with the air horn. Anyway, thank you so much for joining.

Speaker 8: No problem. Good to see you. Good to hear you talk about biotech as well. So, yeah, I'm a medical doctor, a scientist and, yeah, co founder at Stomatic Labs. Got it. And just fascinated really by the trying to figure out what's going on at the frontier of medicine, frontier of science, which is what I use Twitter for, what I use X for. And also what brought me to the conference the other day to Chicago to ASCO to the big cancer conference, where I was lucky enough to see the diracin rashid study Standing ovation. Presented life. Standing ovation? Yeah. I love it.

Speaker 1: Okay. Let's get right to it though. What does it take for a 100,000,000,000,000 since you since you brought up X, there was some there was some discussion among investors around we'll see the first 10,000,000,000,000.

Speaker 2: Thought you said a 100,000,000,000,000.

Speaker 1: And then a 100,000,000,000,000. So they're already I mean I mean it's I mean I mean hyperinflation a guy to say that a 100 bagger is impossible.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: It's always possible. How do we get there? And what is the kidding.

Speaker 8: So Lilly today is Lilly today is a $1,000,000,000,000 company. Right? And or just about.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: But I I think the issue really in biotech with getting to a 100,000,000,000,000 would be the patent cliff. Right? In, like, in big tech, Apple and so on, these guys don't have to deal with patent cliffs, but big pharma certainly do. So the the other day, for example, you guys had a guest on the show talking about AI versus biotech, and it's perfectly true.

Speaker 1: But just to be clear that like if companies could actually enforce patents where it's like no one else can create a login button. You cannot log in to an account Yeah. Of a software product.

Speaker 2: Pull to refresh is technically patented but uninformed.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So so there is patents but yeah, they just don't get Encouraged. Don't get enforced. And there's an argument that that's probably a great thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: Yeah. I guess I guess in in biotech and pharma, the so the the drugs can only be sold for for a big price at for about twenty years, at which point they go off patent and then the price drops by 95%. So if you have, like so the biggest drug in the world today is tizepatide, which did about $51,000,000,000 of sales already this year, which is insane. Right? More than the big AI labs. But as it goes off patent, then the generics come through and it will dwindle those revenues away for Lilly. And I think a 100,000,000,000,000 in pharma is gonna be very difficult.

Speaker 2: Is there any world where the CapEx required to actually compete with a $50,000,000,000 drug becomes a market dynamic like cost prohibitive? Any analogy there? Or will you just get a ton of small compounding firms and a ton of generics companies that underwrite smaller investments and just sort of like eat away? Because I've always heard about the patent cliff and you lose 95% of your gross profit on But day I've also heard that Eli Lilly and other Novo are actually struggling to stand up just the manufacturing equipment required because at a certain point when you're shipping $50,000,000,000 worth of a drug, you're talking about, you know, not just a little lab that's making like one rare cancer Yeah.

Speaker 1: It's not already exist. Getting a drug through trials.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And I guess like Tylenol is sold in by the billions of pills probably. I don't know. Is there anything there? Mean, so

Speaker 8: trials themselves are very expensive, right? To run a clinical trial, each patient in the trial costs about $50,000 and so the big trials cost over $100,000,000 So that is kind of a moat in itself. But, I'm not I'm not too sure about

Speaker 2: that. Is is that speeding up or slowing down? Like, we generally have, like, the ossification of governments. Governments are getting bigger. It feels like it takes longer to get things at the DMV and whatever. It feels like things are slowing down. We're certainly building less houses. Permitting reform is top of mind on the right and the left. And I'm wondering, but at the same time you have AI, you have all these tools that should speed up review. Do you have a feel for where we're going over the next couple of years?

Speaker 8: Sorry, I think it's still very slow, right? So from target identification to phase three takes about nine, ten years. And then even after phase three, it then takes a long time for it to get kind of adopt Yeah. Get, like, adopted in the clinic. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: But can AI speed these things up? Yeah. Absolutely. From from kind of every step I think AI can speed it up. Even like the some of the paperwork is very slow. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: What has what has China done on this this front? The chat is

Speaker 2: Steal everything.

Speaker 1: No. No. I mean, like a lot of the a lot of trials are are are happening

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1: There now and and just overall development because But of the cost I don't know about the speed advantage.

Speaker 8: Yes. So it's definitely it's definitely cheaper in China. So I I spent the last week of you guys in in this big conference, ASCO, at the cancer conference, and lots it's very interesting. Lots of the most innovative stuff is actually happening out of China. So they've got, for example, some fascinating bispecific antibodies, which is a kind of new cancer drug or new modes of action for these different cancer drugs. So they're doing not only are they doing fast following, which they they certainly are, but they're also doing some very innovative stuff as well. What people are kind of worried a little bit about in US biotech is the big farmers doing deals with Chinese biotech. But I I think if we have China and The US kind of competing with each with each other, if you're on the side of medicines, if you're on the side of patients, I would say more competition is better.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Tell us about your company. Tell us about what you're working on.

Speaker 8: So I'm, yeah, so I'm a medical doctor. But so we started a company called Stomatic Labs which is actually aiming to speed up this process of drug development and getting drugs to patients faster. So one of the reasons that drug development is so slow is because of so one of the essential steps in the regulatory process is something called a systematic review, which is basically a big boring literature review. It takes years currently. It's done manually. We used AI. We have a little team. We used AI to automate many of the steps and do it in more like four hours rather than like two years.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. I know a guy who does something similar. He gets around the whole systematic review. You just like you text him on like signal or telegram and he doesn't doesn't interface with the FDA at all. He'll just send you exactly the drug like whether or not it's approved. It works perfectly. I'm kidding. Joking. What has progress been like? How far are you in like the r and d phase? How are you scaling up? Like have you raised money? Give us the flavor of the business at this point.

Speaker 8: So it's early. It's early. Okay. So pre pre seed. Cool. So we have a product. It's on the market. Yeah. And it's being used by thousands of people. Okay. Cool. Working on working on raising a round. We have some customers in big pharma, in academia, in biotech as well. But it's early. It's early. We're still just kind of rolling it rolling it out and ramping it up.

Speaker 2: How like, is there a market to sell software to the FDA? Like because my dream might be like I'm excited about speeding up things for biotech and biopharma. Like I feel like they will figure that out and you'll be a piece of that. But what I really want is like an API from the FDA where you can submit something and then it like programmatically runs or automatically runs like as many of the tests that it can possibly delegate to just tell you, okay this is going to get flagged or like you have a typo here or you forgot to attach this document. And so you're getting like this red yellow green response from a robot and then at a certain point you say, okay, I'm passing all of the programmatic like computer based checks. Let's actually call in a scientist from the FDA who's in short supply and have them review it. I have no idea how you would actually go about getting that into the FDA. Neither do I. Yes, it's a good idea. One

Speaker 8: thing the FDA has said recently they're doing, they're going run these things called real time trials.

Speaker 2: Right? So at the moment, what

Speaker 8: we do when we run clinical trials, the data are kind of blinded and locked until the end, and then they open it up and have a look. Mhmm. But if you could run a real time trial, you can see if there's an efficacy signal or a safety signal early and then stop the trial if it's working or not and then get the drug either stopped or moved into patients faster. Yeah. So that's one of the kind of things that the FDA is doing. As for selling into the FDA, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2: Good luck. Hopefully you get there. I don't know. I feel like you should be speeding up both sides of the equation eventually. Yeah. But obviously it's early. Amazing traction though. Thank you so much for coming

Speaker 1: on Wait. We we didn't get to talk about the Please.

Speaker 2: Talk about whatever.

Speaker 1: Pancreatic drugs? Yes, Was that was that part of the impetus for

Speaker 2: Is it fair to say that pancreatic cancer Like is is that how far we can go or is this just because standing ovation, I have high expectations. I'm like, okay, It's cured.

Speaker 8: So standing ovation, definitely high expectations. It's not cured.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 8: So the the reason it's such a big deal

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: And the reason everyone was so quite so excited the other day and, you know, it's it's not an easy crowd to excite because everyone's kind

Speaker 2: of oncologists and scientists and so on. That's a good point.

Speaker 8: So the reason it's quite so important is really two reasons. So pancreatic cancer is a cancer with miserable survival rates. So five year survival is Steve Jobs famously. Yes. It's about three percent for metastatic disease and most diseases metastatic at diagnosis and that number hasn't progressed in decades. That's the first reason. The second reason is because mainly this disease pancreatic cancer is driven by this one protein called Ras and forever really this protein was considered undruggable, totally undruggable because it's this kind of small little compact protein you can't get a drug into. You can't design a drug to kind of fit in there, slot into a pocket. So what this company Revolution Medicines did is they used a very kind of innovative creative approach to drug the molecule using a molecular glue. And if you do that and you put it in pancreatic cancer patients, they were able to double the median overall survival versus the standard of care chemotherapy, as well as improve quality of life, as well as so the new drug has actually fewer serious adverse events than chemotherapy. So it's kind of creating a totally new

Speaker 1: drug double it, that's taking survival rate from three percent to six percent?

Speaker 8: So, yes. So in the trial, it is so it's the details are it's second line metastatic pancreatic cancer and the overall survival with the chemotherapy is about seven months and with the drug is about thirteen months.

Speaker 1: Significant. I'll

Speaker 2: take But those not odds and

Speaker 1: say

Speaker 2: cured. Not cured. But it unlocks a path to a cure that it's like the door was open to the mountain to the hike and now we're going on the hike amazing because before we weren't even on the trail.

Speaker 8: Right. And there was it's a good day to talk about this as well because there was a new kind of So update breakthrough this new drug is called daraxoraciclib. Yeah. It's going to kind of lay I think it's going to lay the kind of baseline of therapy in pancreatic cancer, and we're now going to be able to add new drugs on top of it in order to improve its benefit. And we saw exactly that today. So there's a new drug from a company called Tango Therapeutics, and they they added their drug on top of daroxamrozib and even improved the survival even further.

Speaker 2: Wow. So I

Speaker 8: think exactly we're going see that.

Speaker 2: Very very cool. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 1: Great to meet you, Sam.

Speaker 2: Great to meet you. Good luck with the round. Talk you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. I'm pulling for a cure for liver psoriasis because I'm trying to go hard this summer.

Speaker 1: Just kidding. That's your favorite.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We were in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about TBPN reacting to Leopold's 13 f. They put a screenshot of me and Jordy and a meme from the Truman Show and Leap Trader. If you're leap trader underscore on x you're in the Wall Street Journal today. Now as they needed to come up with some sort of excuse for putting us in the journal so they wrapped it in a profile of Leopold Aschenbrenner I guess. But no, it's an interesting article. The 24 year old AI whiz who counts Gain Street as an investor. You probably saw the highlight stats showing up on the timeline. Twenty four years old, 20,000,000,000 under management now, up 270% after fees this Standing ovations.

Speaker 1: Standing

Speaker 2: One of the best to ever do it. Investors now include Jane Street. Jane Street is an investment investment in situational awareness particularly notable because the firm rarely allocates capital to outside money managers. So Game recognized They put a quote from me in the journal. I said, we have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time and I agree with that. It was a fun fun thing. A little bit of backstory on the fund. Later that year Ossenbrenner launched his hedge fund firm which he described as a brain trust on AI with Karl Schulman, another AI intellectual who once worked at Peter Thiel's macro hedge fund, Thiel Macro. Early backers included Stripe co founders Patrick and John Collison. Good to see them getting a win. As well as Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. Good to seeing them getting a

Speaker 5: win. Dwarkesh also. Dwarkesh. That's an early backer.

Speaker 2: Who are both currently helping lead Meta's AI platform efforts. And so situational awareness, they actually lost money once in early twenty twenty five after deep seek but they've been on absolute run. They ended 2025 up about 200% when most hedge funds are like, we'd like to do 13%, 15%, 20% would be amazing. Yeah. 200% absolutely legendary.

Speaker 1: Impressive. Call it a shot.

Speaker 2: Very impressive. Yes. Well, we have our next guest here in the waiting room. Let's bring in David Kirtley. James Street should do