New, More Precise Cancer Therapies Could Soon Be Here - EP 51 Richard Fuisz

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Hello friends, this is Ashlee. I am coming to you with a little bit of a different version of the Core Memory podcast this week. We have Eryne Marrogi, who writes for us. Sometimes he's a scientist, he's becoming a doctor, and he's going to be the host of the show. He's talking to Richard Fuisz, who's also a scientist, and he just started a company called Nonfiction Labs. They have a new type of potential cancer therapy they're working on. Eryne is going to explain it all to you. Just wanted to give you a little bit of context as to why I'm not hosting and to let you know this is a special, extra, extra, extra sciency version of Core Memory. And if you're listening to this, keep listening, and then go to Core Memory and check out Eryne's story on Richard. He's broken the story on Nonfiction Labs, so he's doing double duty for us.
As ever, we hope you enjoy. Please like, subscribe, leave a review, all that kind of stuff, and thank you for listening.

**Eryney Marrogi** (1:24)
All right, well, welcome to Core Memory. I'm Eryney. Today's guest is Richard Fuisz. Thank you very much for coming here, Richard.

**Richard Fuisz** (1:33)
Yeah, thanks for being here.

**Eryney Marrogi** (1:34)
I'm gonna do a little bit of an intro about you for folks who don't know. And then you just correct me anywhere you feel like is correctable. Richard is a little bit of a legend, I feel like, in biology in the Silicon Valley area. You have done quite a number of things. So you graduated a while ago from Stanford, right? And you're kind of in the bioengineering space, but you've done a few, I think, like pretty big ticket projects. So you're involved in Arcadia.
You're also involved in something that's pretty popular nowadays, kind of hot, is Future House, which is like a AI for science project. And then most recently, and I think what I'm most excited to talk to you about is your most recent venture into kind of like a bioengineering startup called Nonfiction Labs. Yeah, maybe we can go from there. Yeah, I don't know. Does that you feel like I kind of just listed three things, but I summarized you poorly in 30 seconds.

**Richard Fuisz** (2:43)
I think that's a decent start.

**Eryney Marrogi** (2:45)
Okay.

**Richard Fuisz** (2:45)
That's pretty good. Okay.

**Eryney Marrogi** (2:47)
Yeah.

**Richard Fuisz** (2:48)
So, I mean, maybe it would be interesting to talk about, well, I certainly can say a little bit about what we're working on right now. But I think a couple of directions. Yeah.

**Eryney Marrogi** (3:01)
You know, we'll have plenty of time to talk about what you're working on now. I definitely have plenty of things I want to ask you. I'm actually, I'm mostly just curious, you know, you went to Stanford, you were there during like the peak of like the, you know, everyone wants to have like a start up, not in biology, obviously, people were doing startups and everything except for biology. How does someone go from, go to Stanford and then not end up making like B2B SaaS?

**Richard Fuisz** (3:27)
Yeah. I think that was interesting. Okay. That's a place we can work.

**Eryney Marrogi** (3:32)
I think that's a good story.

**Richard Fuisz** (3:34)
I, so, well, for first off, I had a bunch of friends who did go into B2B SaaS stuff. Crypto was I think increasingly becoming a big thing. This is like mid 2010s.

**Eryney Marrogi** (3:45)
Okay.

**Richard Fuisz** (3:47)
I had, at the time, I had a good friend, Noor, who went on to serve Orchid.
But at the time, this was in undergrad, she was already sort of like lining that up, and she'd done her tail fellowship before. And so I think I sort of was watching some of that build out. I think it was also, I guess really what I would say is, I think it was like that mid 2010s was a part in time when you could start weird biotech stuff. And I had been working with some friends of mine. We found this way to get some money at Stanford to start this lab, where we basically we had access to like, we'd go into the lab like after hours, after five o'clock, we'd like take over the space, and we'd work on various projects. And we was treated as like a club. That's how we got it funded. And then there I sort of working on doing DNA synthesis stuff. Because the idea was we would like, well, the grand idea was sort of like Church Lab, like Pennsylvania, so they had to do with like, let's seed the galaxy with life. And however interesting what is on these planets is currently, surely it would be more interesting if they had something living on them. And if we had a DNA synthesizer, and if we had the ability to transfect cells to get that DNA into cells, we could do remote genetic engineering. And in the hundred years it would take to get the hardware on the planet, we'll be better at engineering then. And so that's what we'll do. So this was the idea we were working on out of undergrad. Maybe this is the answer to your question of, well, what I was doing wasn't software.