From cel­list to syn­thet­ic cell-ist: Jef­frey Kim scores $23M to reimag­ine blood tests, cell ther­a­py

It wasn’t al­ways Jef­frey Kim’s am­bi­tion to launch a biotech. In fact, af­ter grad­u­at­ing with his bach­e­lor’s de­gree in mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­o­gy from Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, the young cel­list set out to be­come a pro­fes­sion­al mu­si­cian in New York.

Kim was strug­gling to get by on a mu­si­cian’s bud­get, record­ing for var­i­ous stu­dios while teach­ing gui­tar and do­ing any­thing else mu­sic-re­lat­ed he could. He al­so be­gan work­ing in a cou­ple labs part-time, where he dis­cov­ered that, like mu­sic, sci­en­tif­ic re­search de­mands an in­cred­i­ble amount of cre­ativ­i­ty.

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