Screening 100 million antibodies at once to unlock the drug targets everyone else called impossible.
Richard Yu does not study easy problems. He studies GPCRs - the family of membrane proteins that regulate everything from pain to blood sugar to immune response, and that conventional antibody drugs have almost entirely failed to reach. There are roughly 800 GPCRs in the human genome. Biotech has successfully drugged exactly 8 with antibodies. Richard is building the machine that changes that ratio.
His company, Abalone Bio, runs a platform called FAST - Functional Antibody Selection Technology - that engineers yeast cells to link their own survival to the activation of a target receptor. Screen 100 million antibody variants at once. The ones that actually work keep the yeast alive. It is a brutally efficient filter. Competitors measuring binding affinity in flat-bottomed plates cannot compare.
In May 2025, Abalone Bio and Mount Sinai published preclinical results on the world's first CB2 antibody agonists - candidates AB120 and AB150 - showing robust anti-inflammatory and anti-fibrotic effects, potent cytokine suppression, and, critically, blood-brain barrier impermeability. In plain terms: they activate a receptor implicated in pain and fibrosis without touching the central nervous system. The fact that this had never been done before with antibodies is not a footnote. It is the entire point.
Antibodies are molecules originally used by our immune system to shut stuff down - but we want to fulfill the full drug-like potential of these wonderful molecules.
- Richard Yu, Co-founder & CEO, Abalone BioThe path to this moment started at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, where Richard studied biophysics alongside computer science with a focus on AI and graphics. He earned his PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale under Axel Brunger, training that wired him to see proteins as both computational and physical objects simultaneously. That dual vision - the molecule and the model, the cell and the code - never left him.
After Yale, Richard spent years at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, studying how yeast cells process and transmit information through signal pathways. He met Gustavo Pesce there in 2003 on an interdisciplinary project measuring the yeast pheromone response. They would go on to co-found two companies together. The first was Green Pacific Biologicals, an algae biofuel startup Richard ran as Chief Scientific Officer. The second was Abalone Bio, founded in 2018 after Richard had also served as Scientific and Operations Director at MBC Biolabs and as a Principal at Mission Bay Capital. He was not a first-time founder when he walked into Y Combinator's W20 batch. He was a veteran deciding where to place his largest bet.
That bet is working. Pfizer is a partner. The University of Pennsylvania signed a collaboration in March 2025 to develop next-generation obesity drugs using Abalone's platform - their collaboration involves studying a class of GLP-1 alternatives with an unusual edge: UPenn is one of the few labs in the world that maintains Asian musk shrews, one of the only animals that reliably demonstrates nausea responses, letting researchers test for side effects that plague current weight-loss drugs. Three pharma partnerships total, worth $3M in revenue with $125M in downstream potential. Not bad for a 23-person company in Emeryville.
Richard speaks about his late co-founder Gustavo Pesce with plainness that reveals grief processed rather than buried. "Gustavo's passing is still motivating me and teaching me things to this day," he has said. "He's been with me throughout this whole ride." That kind of loyalty shapes how he builds: kindness and directness are not opposites in his view, and "surrounding myself with really capable, smart, awesome people" is his stated leadership theory. It shows in the caliber of scientists Abalone attracts on a seed-round budget.
Functional Antibody Selection Technology - built on the same yeast signaling system Richard studied at the Molecular Sciences Institute 20 years ago.
Yeast cells are engineered so that their survival depends on whether a test antibody successfully activates the target receptor. Function equals life. Binding-only equals death.
100 million antibody variants evaluated simultaneously - more than 100x the throughput of competing platforms that rely on traditional binding assays.
Every screen generates proprietary large-scale functional activity datasets. That data trains protein language models and AI systems to predict the next generation of agonist candidates.
Machine learning models trained on Abalone's unique functional datasets guide antibody optimization - closing the loop between experimental biology and computational prediction.
Lead antibodies advance to preclinical validation. The CB2 program demonstrates the full cycle: from FAST screen to Mount Sinai collaboration to published peer-reviewed results.
Published in collaboration with Mount Sinai, May 2025. Candidates AB120 and AB150 show anti-fibrotic effects without crossing the blood-brain barrier.
Collaboration to discover GPCR-modulating antibodies - one of the most technically demanding categories in drug discovery.
Exclusive option agreement to develop next-generation obesity drugs, announced March 2025. Tests for nausea side effects in Asian musk shrews - a capability almost no lab in the world has.
SBIR Phase I and Phase II funding from the National Institutes of Health - validation from the scientific establishment that the biology is real.
Admitted to Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, marking Abalone Bio's emergence from research project to venture-backed startup.
Academic contributions spanning structural biology, systems biology, and antibody engineering - the scientific foundation under the company's IP.
The magic is always at the intersections.
On interdisciplinary thinkingBiology wasn't just this observational thing... it's more of, like, an engineering discipline. Right? Like, making stuff.
On the shift from physics to biotechSuccess means drawing a direct line to reducing suffering and increasing quality of life for many people.
On what winning looks likeAI has transformed once-impossible problems - from protein folding to natural language - into solved challenges, fundamentally reshaping drug discovery.
On AI in biotechThe West Coast is much more about the frontier mentality: 'What's the new thing we can create? Forging a path out.'
On entrepreneurial cultureProcessing grief and mortality gave clarity and focus - stripping away what's inessential and integrating all aspects of life and work.
On the loss of co-founder Gustavo PesceRichard's unusual mix of physics, computation, and molecular biology was not an accident. He trained at UC Berkeley to see proteins as computational objects - structures whose behavior could be predicted from sequence and geometry. At Yale, Axel Brunger's lab forced him to reconcile those predictions with experimental reality.
The Molecular Sciences Institute added a third layer: systems. Not just "what does this protein do?" but "how does this cell decide?" The yeast pheromone response pathway he studied there - how a single cell detects a signal and commits to a course of action - became the conceptual and literal foundation for Abalone Bio's screening platform.
His Google Scholar profile spans structural biology, signal transduction, synthetic biology, and now antibody engineering. It reads less like a career pivot and more like a long-form argument: biology is engineering, and engineering requires data at scale.
Abalone Bio and Mount Sinai publish preclinical results on CB2 antibody agonists AB120 and AB150 - anti-fibrotic, anti-inflammatory, and BBB-impermeable. A proof point 7 years in the making.
Exclusive option agreement with the University of Pennsylvania to develop next-generation GLP-1 alternatives. The collaboration uses Asian musk shrew models to test for nausea - one of the rarest experimental setups in pharma.
Abalone Bio reached a total of $7M in SBIR grant funding from the National Institutes of Health - support that has let Richard build science-first without diluting equity at the worst time to raise.
Rock climber - applies the same problem-solving approach to vertical walls as to membrane proteins.
Motorcyclist who builds and fixes his own bikes - the tinkerer mindset that also drives Abalone's cell engineering.
Obsessive about tea and coffee. Studies extraction the way he studies antibody binding - with rigor.
Enjoys home repair and building Rube Goldberg machines. The same hands that debug cell assays fix plumbing.
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