silicon-valley-biotech
(2)
Shidong Jia
Shidong Jia, MD, PhD, is the founder and global CEO of Predicine, a Silicon Valley precision-oncology company building multi-omic liquid biopsy tests that read cancer from blood and urine. Trained as a physician-scientist at Harbin Medical University, Peking Union Medical College, Dana-Farber and Harvard, he ran oncology biomarker strategy at Genentech before leaving to start Predicine in 2015. His pitch is simple: precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine, built 'From Pharma, For Pharma.'
Joe Betts-LaCroix
Joe Betts-LaCroix is the co-founder and CEO of Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco longevity biotech on a mission to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. A scientist-turned-serial-entrepreneur who once held a Guinness World Record for building the world's smallest Windows PC, he now leads a company backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, valued at $1.8 billion in 2026, that has run an Alzheimer's clinical trial and co-developed a longevity-focused AI model with OpenAI. He came to biology by an unlikely route: a D-average high schooler who tinkered in shared houses, then earned straight A's, transferred to Harvard, and did research at MIT and Caltech before co-discovering principles of electron transfer in proteins.