"Find the thing that gets you excited, that fascinates you, and then have the thing you love be something else." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, in which Jacob Glanville discusses his transformative years at Pfizer's Rinat site and his transition to Stanford. He describes how an open, collaborative culture allowed him to roam across teams, trading his coding skills for scientific mentorship while building critical bioinformatics infrastructure for antibody discovery. Jacob shares how he converted a corporate laptop into antibody.pfizer.com, creating an internal web server that centralized analysis tools and enabled scientists to rapidly interrogate antibody libraries. Early access to deep sequencing let him dissect repertoires before and after selection, iteratively design better synthetic libraries, and publish influential papers—ultimately being promoted four times to Principal Scientist with only a BA. Despite this success, his burning idea for a universal vaccine drove him to leave Pfizer, pursue a PhD at Stanford, and simultaneously launch Distributed Bio. At Stanford, Jacob explains how he "separated church and state," keeping therapeutic antibody work in his company while focusing academic research on T-cell receptors and cytokine analysis. He reflects on navigating Stanford's tech transfer process and contrasts the priorities of academia versus industry, emphasizing the value of finding work that fascinates you.
