The ven­ture crew at Mubadala are up­ping their biotech cre­ation game, tak­ing care­ful aim at a new fron­tier in drug de­vel­op­ment

It start­ed with a cup of cof­fee and a slow burn­ing de­sire to go ear­ly and long in the biotech cre­ation busi­ness.

Wrap­ping up a 15-year dis­cov­ery stint at Genen­tech back in the sum­mer of 2021, Ra­mi Han­noush was treat­ed to a caf­feine-fu­eled re­view of the lat­est work UCSF’s Jim Wells had been do­ing on pro­tein degra­da­tion — one of the hottest fields in drug de­vel­op­ment.

“Jim and I have known each oth­er for the past 15 years through Genen­tech col­lab­o­ra­tions. We met over cof­fee, and he was telling me about this con­cept of the com­pa­ny that he was think­ing of,” says Han­noush. “And I got im­me­di­ate­ly in­trigued by it be­cause I knew that this could open up a big space in terms of adding a new modal­i­ty in drug dis­cov­ery that is des­per­ate­ly need­ed in phar­ma.”

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