Jennifer Cygan

The Dealmaker at the Protein Frontier

Most protein degradation drugs work inside cells. EpiBiologics is doing something different - targeting proteins that live outside them, on the cell surface, where conventional degraders can't reach. That distinction matters enormously in oncology and autoimmune disease, where the most dangerous proteins often sit right there on the membrane, exposed and abundant, and yet functionally immune to current therapies.

Jennifer Cygan signed on as Chief Business Officer to help translate that scientific insight into a company. In January 2026, EpiBiologics closed a $107 million Series B - co-led by GV (Google Ventures) and Johnson & Johnson Innovation's JJDC - bringing the company's total funding to $280 million. Cygan's fingerprints are on the strategy that made that raise possible.

The scientific founder is Jim Wells, a UCSF biochemist whose career is built on reimagining what antibodies can do. The CEO is Ann Lee-Karlon, Ph.D. And the Chief Business Officer is Jennifer Cygan - a Harvard-trained scientist who has spent two decades making sure the science actually goes somewhere.

Cygan brings something specific to a company at this stage: she has done this before, repeatedly, across a string of emerging biotechs that needed someone who understood both the biology and the boardroom. She doesn't just negotiate deals - she builds the scaffolding that lets deals happen.

From Harvard Licensing to Nine-Figure Raises

Jennifer Cygan started her career exactly where you'd expect a Harvard Ph.D. in the sciences to start: doing licensing work at Harvard itself, learning the unglamorous mechanics of turning research into IP. It wasn't a strategic mistake. It was a foundation. Understanding what makes a technology licensable - what it takes for someone to write a check for something that doesn't exist yet - turns out to be the core competency of biotech business development.

From there, she moved to the University of California as a Senior Licensing Officer, then to Genencor International, where she executed strategic out-licensing of clinical-stage candidates in oncology and infectious disease. Each role deepened the same skill: translating scientific potential into structured agreements with pharma partners who needed to believe.

Genentech was the step that put her in a different league. As Associate Director and then Head Director of Platform Technologies Business Development, she was part of Genentech's Partnering Group - responsible for identifying, assessing, and negotiating strategic technology licensing and collaboration opportunities. That's where you learn what world-class looks like, what the best pharma companies require from a partner, and how to run an alliance once the deal is signed.

Calico Life Sciences took her skills into a different context entirely. Funded by Google and focused on the biology of aging, Calico was (and remains) one of the more unusual life sciences experiments - lavishly funded, deeply secretive, and scientifically ambitious beyond conventional drug timelines. Cygan served as Head Vice President of the Project Team Leader Group, running program leadership and managing what became a $2.5 billion collaboration with AbbVie. That number deserves a pause: $2.5 billion is not a standard alliance. It is the kind of strategic commitment that requires someone to have run the entire playbook - strategy, negotiation, governance, execution - and still be standing at the end.

Five Companies, One Pattern

After Calico, Cygan did something that most executives don't do: she ran multiple startups at once. Not serially. Concurrently. Between 2020 and 2023, she served as founding or interim CBO at Eikon Therapeutics, GenEdit, Plexium, and Broadwing Bio - each at a different stage, each in a different therapeutic area, each needing someone who could establish business infrastructure from scratch while the scientists got to work.

The pattern is consistent: Cygan gravitates toward companies with genuinely new biology, at the moment when they need to transition from scientific project to funded, partnered enterprise. She appears to have a particular comfort with pre-clinical and early-stage strategy - the moment before most investors can see what the science will become.

Broadwing Bio occupies a special place in that portfolio. As co-founder, she wasn't advising from outside the company - she was building it. The company's focus on antibody therapies for vision loss put her in the rare position of creating both the business model and the scientific roadmap from inception.

Why Extracellular Degradation Changes Everything

The premise of EpiBiologics is simple to state and difficult to execute. Most protein degradation drugs - the PROTACs, the molecular glues, the degrader wave that has swept the industry - work by routing intracellular proteins into the proteasome or lysosome. They require getting inside the cell. They have no mechanism for targeting proteins that live outside it.

EpiBiologics' EPITAC platform uses bispecific antibodies that stay outside the cell. They bind a target protein - say, a cancer-driving receptor - on one arm, and on the other arm they engage a degradation receptor that is naturally expressed on specific tissues. That receptor pulls the whole complex into the cell and routes it to the lysosome, where it's degraded. The target is gone. The cell keeps working.

The tissue selectivity piece is what makes this genuinely different. By choosing degradation receptors that are enriched in particular tissues, EpiBiologics can potentially target proteins in cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue alone - the fundamental challenge that has defined oncology for 50 years.

The lead program is a c-Met degrading bispecific in non-small cell lung cancer - one of the most common and difficult-to-treat cancers. c-Met is a receptor tyrosine kinase with a long history of failed drug development; the selectivity challenge has been brutal. EpiBiologics is betting that degrading it entirely, rather than blocking it, changes the calculus.

Google Ventures and Johnson & Johnson Innovation backed that bet with $107 million in January 2026. The fact that GV - a technology-focused venture firm - chose to co-lead a Series B for a pre-clinical biologics company says something about the novelty of the platform and the strength of the business case. That business case is Jennifer Cygan's work.

The Art of the Interim

Something unusual shows up in Cygan's career that's worth naming: she ran interim CBO roles at multiple early-stage biotechs simultaneously. That is not a typical executive career path. It's closer to what a venture partner does - parachuting into nascent organizations, establishing the business function, making the key hires and the first deals, then handing off when the company is ready for a full-time executive.

It requires a specific kind of discipline. You have to resist becoming indispensable to any single company. You have to build systems and culture that survive your departure. You have to manage multiple boards, multiple scientific founders, multiple partnership conversations at once - without letting the complexity collapse into confusion.

The fact that Cygan has now taken a full-time CBO role at EpiBiologics suggests she sees something here that warranted the commitment. The platform is novel enough. The funding is substantial enough. The science is early enough that the business-building work is genuinely generative - not just executing on a playbook, but writing a new one.

Her career began at Harvard, doing licensing. Her career is now structured around the same fundamental question she learned there: what does it take for someone to believe in something that doesn't exist yet, and write a check? Two decades later, the checks are larger and the science is stranger. The question is the same.

Two Decades, One Thread

Where She Operates