Jack
Milwid

Jack Milwid's title at Lila Sciences is three words long: Office of the CEO. The mission behind it is not small. Lila is a Flagship Pioneering venture with a phrase for a north star - "scientific superintelligence" - and a plan to get there by letting artificial intelligence generate hypotheses, then design and run the experiments to test them, in labs that lean on automation rather than a bench full of postdocs. Milwid landed in the middle of that idea after roughly fifteen years of doing the human version of the job: taking new science and giving it somewhere to live.

That is the honest description of his career. Not a discovery, not a single molecule, but a pattern. Find work that is early and fragile, wrap it in a company, staff the R&D, set the strategy, and let it grow up. He has done it enough times that the companies now read like a syllabus of modern biotech: engineered cells, cancer vaccines, gene therapy, the microbiome. Different modalities, same instinct.

He arrived at biology sideways. His first degree, an Sc.B. from the Colorado School of Mines, was in metallurgical and materials engineering - the study of metals and how they behave. From there he went to MIT for a master's in materials science, and then kept going, earning a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, one of the more demanding cross-disciplinary programs in the country. Metallurgy to medicine is not the usual pipeline. For Milwid it was a straight line: understand how things are built, then build them.

The venture-studio model shaped him. In American biotech there is a specific kind of firm - Third Rock Ventures, Flagship Pioneering - that does not just write checks but conjures companies out of nothing, hiring founders to run ideas the firm invents. Milwid became fluent in that world. At Third Rock he was an entrepreneur who co-founded Neon Therapeutics, an early bet on personalized cancer neoantigen vaccines - the notion that you could train a patient's own immune system against the specific mutations in their tumor. It was ambitious, it was of-the-moment, and it was the kind of science that needs a company built around it before it can prove anything.

Then came Flagship, where the pace only picked up. As a Principal there he was a co-founder of Sana Biotechnology, a company built on engineered cells as medicine that would go on to a high-profile public listing. He was the founder and R&D leader of Cobalt Biomedicine, a targeted gene therapy company. And he was the founding head of strategy for Kaleido Biosciences, working the microbiome - the idea that the trillions of microbes living in the gut are themselves a therapeutic target. Three companies, three entirely different corners of biology, one person setting them in motion.

Around 2020 he turned the lens outward. He co-founded Related Sciences and took the roles of Partner and President - moving from building companies to backing them, from the bench to the cap table. The firm's own description of him keeps the resume tight and the ambition loud: a scientist, entrepreneur, and investor who, "as a founder of biotech companies worth billions, has led R&D teams, invented platform technologies, and set strategy to create the next generation of life-saving medicines for patients."

Which brings the story to Lila. If Related Sciences was about choosing which science to fund, Lila is about changing how science gets done at all. The company argues that discovery has a speed limit set by human hands and human hours, and that AI plus automated laboratories can lift it. In September 2025 Lila announced a $235 million Series A, co-led by Braidwell and Collective Global, to expand its autonomous research labs and open hubs in Boston, San Francisco and London. Weeks later it added a $350 million extension, pushing total capital toward $550 million. Milwid works in the Office of the CEO as that scale-up happens - the operator's seat, close to the center, for a company trying to industrialize the scientific method.

There is a neat symmetry to it. He started by studying how metals are made, then spent a career figuring out how companies get made, and has now joined a company whose entire thesis is how discovery itself gets made. The tools change - a furnace, a term sheet, a robot arm running an assay at 3 a.m. The question underneath stays the same: how do you build the thing that builds the next thing?

He is not the public face of any of this. There are no viral talks, no manifesto, no ghostwritten thread. What there is, instead, is a trail of companies that exist because someone did the unglamorous work of turning a paper into a payroll. That someone, more than once, was Jack Milwid.