The career begins with a television set. Aron Knickerbocker is young, watching Dan Rather describe the emerging business of biotechnology on the CBS Evening News. Recombinant proteins could be made in a laboratory and used for therapeutic purposes. The possibility lodged in his imagination. Science, and biology in particular, had always held his attention. Here was a glimpse of what it might become when the lab met the world.

Practicality briefly sent him toward chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Curiosity pulled harder. After one semester he switched to molecular biology, worked in a lab through college and graduated with honors in biology. He expected to pursue a doctorate and become a research scientist. Instead, he gave himself time to test the daily reality of that ambition.

He did malaria research at Washington University, then moved to Bristol Myers Squibb in Princeton for cardiovascular drug discovery. Nearly four post-college years at the bench taught him something more useful than either devotion or disillusionment. He liked the work. He also wanted to understand the larger machine around it - how a scientific idea becomes a program, a partnership, a company and, if the evidence holds, a medicine.

“Look for that Venn diagram of yourself versus what the opportunity is offering.”Aron Knickerbocker on choosing work

A scientist learns breadth

Knickerbocker traded the planned Ph.D. for an MBA at the University of Michigan. He has described the contrast neatly: science education rewards depth, while business education prizes breadth. His career would depend on both. He could follow a technical argument without pretending to be the expert in every room. He could also ask what a program needed commercially, organizationally and financially.

The career advantage was not leaving science behind. It was learning how to carry scientific judgment into rooms where capital, partnerships and priorities were decided.

At Amgen, he became one of the first two MBA hires in a new commercial rotation. The work moved across sales, market research and brand management, then toward licensing and acquisitions. Corporate development gave him a way to build without starting from scratch: find an external capability, understand the strategic fit, and construct a deal that lets both sides move.

After commercial development at ALZA, he joined Genentech in 2001. Over more than eight years, he rose to lead oncology business development. The company had mapped mechanisms and targets it wanted in its pipeline. When internal research did not provide one, his team looked outside.

One search led to a BCL-2 program at Abbott. Knickerbocker already understood another piece of the relationship: Abbott carried a royalty burden tied to antibody-production intellectual property and Humira. He proposed a trade - some royalty relief in exchange for an oncology partnership. The collaboration eventually contributed to Venclexta. Other work connected to Cotellic and Erivedge. The important unit was never a deal for its own sake. It was a scientific gap, a strategic opening and a transaction precise enough to close both.

8+years at Genentech
10years building Five Prime
1stfull-time employee at Aulos

The cold email and the year of cash

By 2009, Genentech was a place Knickerbocker enjoyed. Roche had completed its acquisition, and he had no grievance to propel him out. He had something more deliberate: a screen. If he moved, the company should have differentiated science, preferably biologics or antibodies, a Bay Area base and people he respected. It should also offer the chance to build a business and experience the path to a public offering or other liquidity event.

Five Prime Therapeutics passed the screen. It did not have a head of business development. Knickerbocker cold-emailed chairman Rusty Williams and CEO Julia Gregory, told them he knew the role was empty and asked to talk. The company had about a year of cash, the financing market was battered, and his mandate was plain: do deals that could keep the platform and pipeline moving.

That pressure created focus. Partnerships brought in research funding and preserved participation in programs that advanced. Five Prime went public in 2013. Knickerbocker moved from business development to chief business officer, chief operating officer and eventually president and CEO.

His employers became smaller as his decisions became more direct. The science stayed close; the distance between judgment and consequence narrowed.

A conference poster helped surface bemarituzumab, an antibody aimed at FGFR2b, then owned by a small Bay Area company. Five Prime licensed it and made it a priority. Knickerbocker kept following the signal even when others questioned continued investment. The company advanced the program into randomized development, where positive results helped make Five Prime an acquisition target for Amgen.

There is a pattern in these stories. The BCL-2 opportunity emerged from scientific work noticed at a conference. So did bemarituzumab. Knickerbocker pays attention to posters, but the distinguishing move comes after noticing: connect a result to a portfolio need, find the people who can test it, and build a transaction around a shared reason to act.

“Follow the information that's actually coming out of the lab or out of the clinic.”Aron Knickerbocker on portfolio decisions

Small rooms, consequential choices

After Five Prime, Knickerbocker co-founded RayzeBio with scientist Deborah Charych and investor Aaron Kantoff. They developed the early radiopharmaceutical thesis during the pandemic, working without pay from a spare-bedroom home office before raising a Series A and building the company in San Diego. Knickerbocker handed management to a new team, remained an adviser and investor, and looked for another startup. RayzeBio later went public and was acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb.

The next call came from Apple Tree Partners. With Biolojic Design, the firm had formed Aulos Bioscience around a computationally designed antibody and needed someone to lead it. Knickerbocker did his own diligence, speaking with friends whose immunology knowledge exceeded his. He was drawn to the mechanism and joined in March 2021 as CEO, board member and Aulos's first full-time employee.

Aulos was designed as a collaboration rather than a conventional self-contained startup. Biolojic contributed antibody design and preclinical work. Apple Tree Partners supplied company formation and capital. Aulos assembled the development organization. Knickerbocker called it a triumvirate model. Its strength depended on the same quality his deals had required: complementary parties with a clear division of labor and a reason to trust the handoff.

AI after the slogan

Aulos's lead candidate, now called imneskibart, gives Knickerbocker an unusually concrete place in the AI debate. Biolojic's machine-learning platform helped design the antibody. His description of that contribution is restrained. AI can process many data points and recognize patterns efficiently. It is not the answer to every problem, he has said, but it appeared to be an answer to this one.

That qualification matters. In biotechnology, computation can propose a design; biology and clinical evidence determine what the proposal is worth. Imneskibart moved into human testing and then Phase 2 development. At ASCO in May 2026, Aulos reported a 33 percent objective response rate and 67 percent disease control rate among 12 evaluable patients in one melanoma triplet cohort. Enrollment continued, and the company said it planned regulatory discussions while additional data matured.

The model can accelerate a design. Each later stage asks a harder question. Knickerbocker's operating style reserves the final word for evidence.

The numbers are a current chapter, not a conclusion. That suits the way Knickerbocker talks about his work. He is less interested in the romance of prediction than in the discipline of choosing what to do next. At the bench, experiments led down dark alleys and demanded patience. In business development, a target map organized the search. At a small company, a clinical signal determines where scarce attention and capital go.

The screen stays

Knickerbocker's career can look like a sequence of transformations: engineer to biologist, scientist to MBA, large-company executive to startup builder, dealmaker to CEO. The continuity is more revealing. He likes science. He likes building businesses. He looks for the place where those motivations overlap and where his experience can change the outcome.

His advice to younger people is to identify where intrinsic motivation produces energy and inquiry, then compare it with what an opportunity really offers. Picture the work you want to be doing in a few years, not merely the title you want to hold. The result is a career strategy with enough direction to guide a cold email and enough flexibility to survive new evidence.

That is the practical value of a screen. It does not predict which poster will matter, which startup will find financing or which candidate will produce a meaningful result. It tells you what deserves a closer look. Then the harder work begins: ask better-informed people, construct the test, watch the evidence and be willing to move. Across three decades, Knickerbocker has changed roles often enough to prove that a method can stay constant even when the job does not.

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