Bob Nelsen had been quietly wondering how to eradicate the viruses for years, before one day in 2015, he greeted a pair of immunologists at the ARCH Venture Partners offices on the 34th floor of the Wells Fargo building in Seattle.
Louis Picker and Klaus Früh, professors at the Oregon University of Health and Science, had already spent 5 years touring the country in search of funds for their startup, TomegaVax, and Früh, at least, was nearing the end. The Gates Foundation was interested but told them they needed other investors. Investors told them to come back with more data, pharmaceutical executives said they were in the wrong game: too little money to win fighting infectious diseases. Still, a well-connected board member named Bob More got them a meeting with the coveted venture capitalist, and so, in a narrow conference room overlooking the Puget Sound, Picker prepared to again explain the idea in which 15 years had passed: engineering a benign microbe in the first vaccines against HIV and better vaccines against hepatitis and tuberculosis.
“This light bulb went to the head,” Picker recalled in a recent interview. “Most of them just didn’t get it. And Bob’s hit.
At the time, Nelsen was more than just a venture capitalist. Skinny and gray, but no less stubborn at 52, he was harassed at biotech conferences, earning a reputation for rude wisdom and bizarre foresight for making big bets on big ideas that changed medicine. Those ideas included DNA sequencing, which he first eliminated on a check in the 1990s, and harnessing the immune system to fight cancer. He made millions by making billions of dollars companies.
However, for years he had harbored an almost singular obsession: “I hate viruses,” he told Forbes in 2016. He told me that he was “angry” with them. The obsession led him to his first investment in biotechnology in 1993, for an inhalable flu vaccine approved a decade later and still in use. And it led him to invest in CAR-T as a possible cure for HIV, years before it proved to be a very effective treatment for some types of cancer.
Now, listening to Picker talk about T cells and antibodies and the curious biology of cytomegalovirus, Nelsen began to wonder if it was time for another bet. Picker’s technology was not only promising, he reasoned, but it could be the foundation of a company that changed the way researchers approached viruses. Instead of trying to find an antidote for each pathogen, you could do what cancer researchers had learned to do and take advantage of the immune system to do the work for you.
This was not a popular opinion at the time. “It’s like the least modern idea in the world,” Nelsen told me. “People were saying, ‘Why the hell are you going to have an infectious disease?'”
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