A Bay Area up­start with leg­endary god­fa­thers breaks cov­er, tout­ing claims of a cu­ra­tive tech, uni­corn sta­tus and a $300M plan to shoot for an ap­proval

Back in the ‘90s, San­doz — lat­er No­var­tis — forged some big plans around an Irv Weiss­man start­up called SyS­temix. Iso­lat­ing and pu­ri­fy­ing cells, the leg­endary Stan­ford re­searcher was af­ter a new way to re­boot a pa­tient’s blood-form­ing sys­tems — a po­ten­tial life­saver for can­cer pa­tients who of­ten end up in need of a bone mar­row trans­plant fol­low­ing chemo.

No­var­tis end­ed up buy­ing the whole com­pa­ny, on­ly to scrap it af­ter be­ing con­front­ed by the in­vest­ment of time and mon­ey need­ed — along­side chal­lenges in scal­ing up the process to com­mer­cial lev­els. Weiss­man wasn’t hap­py about it, but even­tu­al­ly the IP made its way home to San Fran­cis­co.

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.

SIGN UP LOG IN BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER