He had a title at Genentech and a drug target with his fingerprints on it. In 2015 he walked away to build Predicine - a company whose name is really just a promise: precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine.
Most scientists spend a career chasing a single, clean result. Shidong Jia got one - he identified p110beta as a drug target for tumors that had lost the PTEN gene, a finding that helped push a new class of cancer inhibitors toward the clinic. Then he did something unusual with it. He treated the discovery not as a destination but as a starting gun.
In 2015 he left Genentech, where he ran oncology biomarker strategy, and started Predicine. The company builds liquid biopsy tests - assays that read a cancer's DNA and RNA from a patient's blood, and sometimes from urine, with no scalpel and no hospital biopsy required. The pitch fits on a business card. Precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine.
Jia is a physician-scientist by training, an MD from Harbin Medical University and a PhD from Peking Union Medical College, followed by postdoctoral years at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. By the time he reached Genentech he had the credentials to stay put for decades. What he noticed instead was a gap.
The drugs were getting smarter. The tools for figuring out which patient needed which drug, and when a therapy had stopped working, were lagging behind. That mismatch is the whole reason Predicine exists. Jia and a founding team drawn from Genentech, Roche and Novartis set out to close it - not by tweaking an existing test, but by rethinking the technology and the business model at the same time.
Founders love origin stories about whiteboards and napkins. Jia's is quieter and more deliberate. He built the mission straight into the name.
Squint and you can see it: precision diagnostics and precision medicine, compressed into a single word. It is a small thing, but it says something about how he operates. When your company name is your argument, you cannot drift from it without everyone noticing. There is another phrase he repeats that works the same way - a four-word operating principle that keeps the business honest about who it serves.
Predicine sells into biopharma partners running clinical trials. The founders had lived that world, felt its pain points, and built the diagnostics they wished they had had. It is an unusually specific answer to the question every startup faces: who is this actually for.
The technical bet underneath Predicine is that reading only DNA leaves signal on the table. The company pairs cell-free DNA with cell-free RNA, hunting mutations, fusions and other markers across both. It also works beyond blood - urine-based liquid biopsy for cancers like bladder, where a non-invasive sample can be collected without a needle at all.
In 2020 the company partnered with Epic Sciences to widen its liquid biopsy menu for biopharma. Two years later, one of its liquid biopsy next-generation sequencing assays earned Breakthrough Device Designation from the U.S. FDA - a regulatory nod that a test could meaningfully improve care for a serious condition. For a company built on the premise that diagnostics had fallen behind the drugs, it was a validating milestone.
Jia's route runs across three research cultures. Chinese medical schools, American academic oncology, and Silicon Valley pharma - and now a company headquartered in Hayward, California, with a global footprint. The timeline is compact for how much ground it covers.
Ten years into building a company, most founders sound tired. Jia describes his workday in almost ceremonial terms, a rhythm he still voices without irony.
He frames the work as a privilege rather than a grind - the chance to sit with what he calls the best and brightest minds, aimed at an unmet medical need. And he holds two ideas together that founders are often told to keep apart.
It is a neat line, but it also reads like a personal operating manual. The science is the reason he shows up. The business is the reaction that turns the science into something a patient can actually receive. His recognition includes the P.A.R.T. Investigatorship Award from Dana-Farber, a marker of the academic chapter that still shapes how he thinks.
Strip away the assays and the funding rounds and the goal is plain. Jia wants liquid biopsy to become routine - a way to catch cancer earlier, match a patient to the right targeted or immuno-oncology therapy, and watch in near real time for the moment a tumor develops resistance. The version of medicine he keeps describing is one where a blood draw carries the information a surgical biopsy used to require.
He has been building toward it for a decade and shows no sign of treating any single milestone as the finish line. The p110beta discovery was a starting gun, not a trophy. So, it seems, is everything since.