In Vivo

April 18th, 2025

So, biomanufacturing.

I was shocked when I first visited the UC-MSC manufacturing facility of a startup owned by my PI last summer. It was like a 1950s car assembly line. The facility has three stories, each of which houses 10-20 rooms, and every room has at least one operator. The facility costs at least 8 million USD, and they aren’t even pumping their product out for clinical uses, but only for research. In short, the investments that went into this were hefty. As a high school researcher, who at the time was only into ML-driven oncology (HCC) research, it was simply too complicated to be part of my business.

Still, I know I want to step into the biotech field in some way. The original plan was actually pretty simple: get into a reputable school offering a strong BME undergrad program, do the same thing for MS, and settle myself in Redwood to be a puny engineer for Retro. I thought to myself, 100K isn’t bad. Cali isn’t bad. Working on longevity with resources funded by OpenAI, I can just spend every day fighting my thanatophobia (literally). Maybe even start a family there. And mayhaps I would be contributing to the greatest human achievement of all time (at least to Bryan Johnson). The merger of humanity and ASI. Think about it. Sam Altman is pouring money into Retro, and Retro opened a bioengineer position. Everything seemed perfect. All I needed was the right college name on my resume and MS to basically settle in a 9-5 that wants me to train AI models with longevity applications.

Two days later, I checked Retro’s job opening page again, and that position is gone.

“What, you think they will have this open forever?” My friend William Tsang asked. “They are not going to wait for you to graduate in 2029. They are already full.”

My response to what he said was “Well, bummer.”

But turns out, to truly contribute to human longevity, you have to join all the scientific frontlines. In an article written by Ada Nguyen (a prospective LBC founder), there are four paradigms: Reset & Repair, Replace, Reprogram, and Discover. And when you look at the market map, there are so, so many companies working on different things. Genome instability, telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunctions, cell regeneration, tissue and organ transplant, disabled macrotaphagy, and more. I can go on forever. There are at least 60 distinct LBCs on that market map, and while I was deeply fascinated by how organized this whole mission of increasing human lifespan is, it was equally discouraging. There was no simple solution to anything the current biotech industry is working on.

This hurts my brain. Source: Ada Nguyen on X.

“You either become the next Frankenstein or find the next Frankenstein to discover the correct formula for immortality,” William said. “And to become the next Frankenstein, you need to be a genius at birth, and you are probably not. And if you are looking for the genius, go to JHU, and that guy will be at Stanford, go to Stanford, and that guy will be at Berkeley. You will never find him because the chances are just that low. And even if you do, he will be hired by another startup. What I’m saying is realistically, that ain’t happening.”

After that conversation on March 15th, I wrote this to myself: “There are so many scientific frontlines. It's overwhelming. I might have to take a step back and realize I don't even need to step in. There are enough LBCs in this world. More than enough fundings. More than enough labs. More than enough professors. How can I stand out? To join the frontline and meet a few million experts? Or wear my suit and tie to face these experts and realize... I can sell you something?”

So the questions lies: What can I sell?

Five days later, I pinpointed the answer.

The global stem cell therapy market is expected to see significant growth, with forecasts showing it will grow from 4.45B in 2024 to 9.95B in 2030. Every player in regenerative medicine reseach require high-quality and low-cost cell culture. Now is the best time to step in and become a dominant biomanufacturing company and fuel the stem cell industry.

The key is low cost. The answer to that, however, is a story I will tell on another day.

Fast forward a week or two. While I was drowning myself in market research, more unfavorable news hit: I was waitlisted by both of my dream schools. I wasn’t alone—some of my most capable friends faced similar results.

I was left with Amherst College.

Sure, I knew Amherst was a great school. But in the context of my ambition—to work on stem cell biomanufacturing—it wasn’t what I had planned for. None of the professors were working directly in the field I wanted to enter. There was no BME department. No built-in pipeline to a biotech hub.

After cycling through the four stages of grief, I arrived at the fifth: acceptance.

And like any founder, I reminded myself—if the plan doesn’t work, you don’t abandon the goal. You find another way.

I began mass emailing people at Amherst and nearby schools to inquire about potential learning/research/internship opportunities in biomanufacturing, as well as incubator facilities I could tour. The response rate was 100%—professors invited me to tour their labs, sit in on their lectures and panels, with some allowing me to meet with them over Zoom. I also secured visits to two nonprofit incubators in Boston. With everything lined up and adequate preparation, my journey to Massachusetts begins.

On my way to the Amherst town, I called a SBU alumni who currently lives in Boston and informed him about my trip, and he warmly invites me to come to Boston to see him. He told me Amherst is a fantastic choice and it’s the perfect starting point if my eventual destination is Boston. He told me to do some research on Boston biotech companies. So I did. It turns out that at least 10 companies/institutions have been utilizing iPSCs to develop medical solutions. I was so unenlightened to the extent I didn’t realize Boston is the biggest biotech hub in the entire world.

Just as I was beginning to process this unexpected path (Amherst → Boston), I met Professor Goutte.

The Science Center at Amherst College.

She had just finished a genetics lecture that could’ve been a TED Talk. I stayed after, told her about my background, and she immediately invited me to chat in her office.

“In no case was any of these Nobel prizes an experiment that was aimed at finding a drug, aimed at understanding the disease,” she said. “If you look back to the papers that led to these Nobel Prizes, none of them says, we’re trying to find a cure for this disease, we are studying this disease. All of them are simply trying to understand fundamental biology. The idea is that if you understand fundamental biology, then that’s going to help you later when you’re trying to figure out some disease. A fantastic example of that is the rapid pace at which the COVID-19 vaccines were developed, and you all know that those are novel, those are RNA based vaccines. Why were they developed so quickly and approved so quickly? Because of this set of discoveries in the worms in 2006. The whole idea that you could inactivate a gene expression with a double strand RNA. That idea was discovered in the context of these people studying worm development.”

This struck me hard. I had been obsessed with having the perfect plan. The perfect undergrad program. The perfect startup dream. But science, real science, doesn’t work like that. I don’t run one perfect experiment and publish a cure for aging. I learn the foundational knowledge. I iterate. I test. I fail gracefully. I try again with a different approach.

Then I met Professor Marc Edwards, who informed me that if the foundational courses on bio, biochemistry & biophysics can’t satisfy me, I could utilize the five college consortium (especially UMass) to learn more about mech, bme, and cs.

When I talked to Grace Nah, she told me that I could be a little bit more open with my course choices because of the open curriculum (free to choose whatever course to take outside of my major). Maybe I should take some humanities courses instead of locking into a set of STEM courses. Amherst is open. Very open. And I have to fully utilize that special advantage.

Returning to my hotel after a two-day college visit, I sat in the coffee space and processed everything I’ve learned. My field requires me to become interdisciplinary. It is the combination of multiple subjects, which are all provided by the 5CC. I can learn even more within 4 years than if I just followed a rigid undergrad program under JHU or Berkeley. If I only BME, I would’ve been limiting myself in terms of the things I can learn. Amherst could also pave my way into future education at top grad schools (that are more specialized) in Boston. This new path seemed clearer to me the more reflected on it. All of a sudden (and I almost felt I was delusional for thinking like this), I said to myself, “I might not even choose Berkeley if they take me from waitlist anymore.”

California is less biotech but more tech, and unlike Boston, the biotech companies there are not really working on regenerative medicine. JHU is on its own. Somehow Amherst became the top choice for me. I originally thought Amherst would be the end of my ambitions. No BME, no pipelines to labs, just a beautiful LAC in a small town. But it was far from being the end. It was the beginning of a very different kind of journey.

But I still had one stop left: Boston. The global biotech capital. The place where everything (my ambition, my uncertainty, my new path) might finally converge.

The Engine, a nonprofit incubator in Boston.

When I walked into The Engine, the atmosphere buzzed with energy. The guide greeted me warmly. As we toured the facility, she shared a perspective that stuck with me. She said a liberal arts education is actually a huge advantage. It gives you the space to set your own pace, to breathe, and to think creatively. In a city overflowing with hyper-focused students, she said, the real edge often comes from having the freedom to be a bit bored, to gain fresh perspectives, and to discover unconventional solutions. That insight hit me hard. It wasn’t just about technical prowess; it was about having the mental space to innovate. At the end of the tour, she suggested me to apply for the incubator program when I’m ready.

The next incubator I visited, which I’ll keep unnamed, had an immediate sense of possibility. The tour guide welcomed me and led me through a labyrinth of spaces. They had everything: communal lounges, playrooms, cafeterias, libraries, open labs, private suites, offices, and even a room dedicated to a particular technical procedure that I won’t disclose. It felt like a perfect environment to grow a startup from the ground up. Backed by major biotech companies such as Thermo Fisher and Pfizer, the incubator had already fostered the growth of numerous successful startups. And fun fact, I was the only person touring at that moment. By the end of the tour, the guide handed me the names of two people I could reach out to for future internships. It was clear that this place could be the launchpad I’d been looking for.

Meeting with Natasha at Cambridge, MA.

After that, I visited my friend Natasha at Harvard. We’d first met at ISEF a couple of years back, and catching up in the dining hall felt like no time had passed. We swapped stories about the last two years, and then I asked about her research. She told me she was studying the blood-brain barrier with certain drugs, using iPSCs. The moment she mentioned iPSCs, something clicked. Here was a term I’d been buried in for weeks, suddenly alive in her work at a place like Harvard. That realization was electric. It made everything I’d been working on feel more tangible, more impactful. We dove deeper into her research, and I left that conversation with a newfound sense of excitement and confidence in the potential of my own project.

After spending just one day in Boston, I realized that everything is possible here. I’m not on the wrong track at all. Being close to this biotech hub means I have the chance to pursue higher education and eventually grad school right in the heart of innovation. The freedom I’ll have during my undergrad years to build foundational knowledge and explore my creativity feels like a huge advantage. Whether through writing, music, or STEM, having that space to think and innovate is invaluable. This trip gave me hope—a reminder that when you’re desperate for solutions, you can always find them. If people can survive stage IV cancers, there’s no reason I can’t carve out my own path.

The Thermo Fisher Scientific HQ.

On my way home, I stopped by Thermo Fisher—one of the incubator sponsors—and snapped a picture. Now, as I refine my in-depth market research and my vision, I feel ready to take my report to my potential cofounder, Lily.

Finally, as I’m wrapping up this post, I want to leave this message by my music teacher for me: “Doubt can stifle dreams more than failure ever could.”

I'm done doubting.