He spent a quarter century deciding which companies were worth the money. Then he joined one and made it his job to prove the science could pay for itself.
Andrew DeSomma runs the business side of K2bio, a Houston contract research organization built on a simple, almost rude idea: a young biotech should not have to build a laboratory before it can do an experiment. K2bio already has the equipment, the vivarium, the analytical scientists, and the manufacturing benches. A founder walks in with a molecule and a budget. K2bio supplies the rest.
His title is Chief Business Officer, which is a tidy way of saying he is the person who turns the lab's science into deals - pricing the studies, courting the clients, and keeping a 16-person operation punching at the weight of a much larger one. It is an unusual seat for someone who spent most of his career on the other side of the table, writing checks rather than chasing them.
The arc is the interesting part. DeSomma did not grow up in a vivarium. He grew up in capital markets - sell-side research desks, crossover hedge funds, a firm of his own. He has been an investor in technology, biotech, consumer, and retail for more than two decades. When K2 BioLabs launched in 2021, he came in as money and a board seat. Somewhere along the way he stopped being the outside investor and became the inside operator.
That migration - from the spreadsheet to the petri dish, from picking companies to running one - is the whole story. It is also a useful reminder that the best people in any field are often the ones who arrived from somewhere else.
Big company resources that accommodate small company budgets.K2 BioLabs' founding promise - the business DeSomma now sells
Sectors: technology, biotech, consumer, retail. Figures per company filings and public records.
K2bio calls itself a hybrid CRO, and the hybrid is the whole pitch. A client gets to choose how much of the work it wants to keep. DeSomma's job is to make either choice feel obvious.
Rent the wet labs, offices, and equipment inside a state-of-the-art bio-accelerator. Run your own studies. Skip the years and millions it takes to build a facility.
Hand the work to K2bio's scientists - process and analytical development, in vivo studies, an AAALAC-accredited vivarium, small-scale manufacturing support.
The genius of it is the symmetry. A crossover hedge-fund analyst - the kind that moves between private and public bets - now runs a crossover lab that moves between landlord and contractor. The career rhymes with the business model.
Worked as a sell-side analyst in San Francisco and New York, learning to value companies the hard way - one earnings model at a time.
Analyst at two SEC-registered crossover hedge funds in the San Francisco Bay Area, where private and public bets sit in the same portfolio.
Founded and still manages Resolute Investments, placing capital across technology, biotech, consumer, and retail markets.
Houston gets a new biotechnology research accelerator near the Texas Medical Center. DeSomma joins the founding board as an investor.
He crosses from backer to builder, taking on the Chief Business Officer role and the day-to-day work of growing the company.
Runs business development for K2bio - from Santa Fe, New Mexico, a long way from the Houston vivarium he is pitching.
Most CBOs come up through sales or science. DeSomma came up through investing. He knows what a backer wants to hear because for 25 years he was the backer.
He put money into K2 and took a board seat before there was a job to take. The operating role is an investor doubling down on his own thesis.
The labs and animals are in Texas. DeSomma works the deals from New Mexico - proof the value he adds is judgment and relationships, not proximity.
He invested in K2 BioLabs before he worked there. Board seat first, business card second.
His two careers rhyme: a crossover hedge-fund analyst now runs a crossover CRO that lets clients rent the bench or hire the scientists.
K2bio sits in a former Bellicum Pharmaceuticals facility on Reed Road, near Houston's Texas Medical Center.
He is a Georgetown graduate who runs business development for a Texas lab from a desk in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Make world-class research infrastructure - the vivarium, the analytical development, the manufacturing support - cheap enough that a small biotech can afford it. Every facility a startup does not have to build is a therapy that reaches a patient sooner. DeSomma's wager is that the company doing the un-glamorous plumbing of drug development can be just as good a bet as the drugs themselves.