While raising $20M in funding is a validation of building something exceptional, it only represents half of the journey, as A-Alpha Bio’s co-founders will tell you. Following the team’s Series A raise, they were setting their sights on how to use their breakthrough technology for their own drug discovery, but it took recruiting a great leader to pull it off. This is the story about the shaping of that great leader and the journey he took that positioned him to change the trajectory of A-Alpha Bio in the best of ways.
Oregon native Ryan Swanson grew up with dreams of playing NBA basketball for the Portland Trailblazers. Things like immuno-oncology and founding a company couldn’t have been further from his mind. But a lesson introducing Punnett square genetics and evolution in his AP Biology class triggered an interest in biology and sent him to the University of Washington for a degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology.
After college, rather than attend graduate school, Ryan chose to engross himself for more than two decades in Seattle’s emerging biotech scene, working at companies like ICOS and Amgen and then launching his own startup. His successful career in drug discovery and development made him the perfect leadership hire to take A-Alpha Bio, which uses synthetic biology and machine learning for drug discovery, to the next stage of growth. As senior director of biologics, Ryan’s now leading the company’s efforts to complement AlphaSeq and data science expertise with traditional wet lab drug discovery infrastructure to develop novel drug candidates — something the founders had been preparing for since landing their $20M Series A in September of 2021.
Just 10 months following Ryan’s start at A-Alpha, the company announced its first class of immuno-oncology therapies at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting. The A-Alpha founders attribute this rapid progress to having the right team – with Ryan at the helm.
Go for it!
In the early 2000s, Seattle was emerging as a biotech hub with big-name companies like Amgen, ICOS, and ZymoGenetics pulling amazing talent into the area at a rapid clip. But when California-based Amgen shuttered its Seattle campus in 2014, the biotech community felt a seismic shift. Roughly 660 biotech workers flooded the Seattle market – less than 10 percent of Amgen’s impacted employees chose to relocate to the Bay Area.
Ryan’s love for the Pacific Northwest and the local community kept him in Seattle. He’d been with Amgen for nearly nine years and was passionate about his work to revolutionize cancer treatment through checkpoint inhibitors and costimulatory molecules. As an expert in that field, he, and fellow scientist Michael Kornacker, decided to combine knowledge and apply it in new and interesting ways outside of Amgen once the company left Seattle. And with so much tenured talent available, it seemed like a perfect time.
“I said to my wife, ‘I think this is real, and we can do this,’” Ryan remembered telling her when explaining why he was choosing to launch his own startup rather than take a job at another biotech company.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it because my kids were still young, and I knew it would be life altering. But after talking it through with my wife, and maybe pushing her a little past her comfort zone, I realized I just had to go for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
And Ryan’s glad he did. With the support of incredible friends and members of the community, he began his founder journey – with no experience or any clue where to begin. The connections he’d made in the Seattle area were pivotal in introducing him and his co-founder to the right VCs, who Ryan said did a lot of the heavy lifting initially. It was an unreal learning experience. The company, Alpine Immune Sciences, was founded in 2015, went public in 2017, and before Ryan’s departure in 2019, it had developed two clinical drug candidates with a third on the horizon.
The Love of Building & Recruiting
If there’s anything Ryan loves more than science, it’s building teams. He said it is something many early companies struggle with, but he loves the ride.
“To see our idea at Alpine grow and get to patients was a testament to the team we built and everybody fully committing to the same goal,” he said.” I love bringing people together and watching what happens.”
But with scale comes maturity and the need to transition from growth to meaningful progress. Ryan attributes Alpine’s success in getting to first patient in just four years to hiring the right senior talent who could hit the ground running. He said he only hired experienced scientists — many of whom were only accessible through Amgen’s, and later ZymoGenetics’s, departures. Yet he’s the first to admit everything needs balance, which is a lesson he brought with him as he continues to build his team at A-Alpha Bio.
“Early-career scientists are hungry and bring a lot of tech expertise, especially surrounding computational data analysis and newer technologies that tenured biotech scientists don’t necessarily have a good handle on,” he shared. “At A-Alpha, I’m working on finding the right balance of those experiences.”
The Current Chapter
A-Alpha Bio has been Ryan’s home for the last 10 months, where, in his words, he gets to build alongside some of the “smartest scientists ever.” The intersection of data and life sciences is the perfect place for Ryan to interact with the next generation of dry lab scientists with deeper data science and computational skillsets as he and his team focus on drug discovery and asset development in the wet lab.
Ryan was obviously drawn to the team, but the technology caught his attention many years ago when it was first published out of the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. Specifically, Ryan saw that measuring protein interactions at a library-on-library scale, a key differentiator of the AlphaSeq platform, was a game changer for discovering new medicines. AlphaSeq uses a modified yeast surface display to generate quantitative binding measurements for millions of protein interactions in a single experiment rather than one at a time. The network of proteins that can be probed provides expansive opportunities to identify protein interactions of interest and get early reference to multiple parameters previously not possible. For example, hundreds of thousands of potential drugs can be evaluated for efficacy, toxicity, and other key properties at the earliest discovery stage.
“It’s mind-blowing what this technology can do. We leveraged standard yeast display at Alpine – we thought we were pretty creative, selecting against two or three different counter structures to engineer affinity or specificity within those interactions,” Ryan said. “Here, there are no boundaries. You can have thousands of proteins on one side selecting against thousands on the other — and all those interactions are quantified. It was more powerful than anything I had ever heard of. As far as I know, it’s the only technology in the world that can do that. I was excited to be a part of it.”
Developing wholly owned therapeutic assets is central to the strategic vision A-Alpha Bio co-founders Randolph Lopez and David Younger outlined for the company when raising their Series A funding. And it was no accident that they ended up with a veteran like Ryan leading those efforts and nicely complementing A-Alpha’s synthetic biology and machine learning know-how. Hiring, especially for leadership roles, is something Randolph and David take very seriously – and this role, without question, was pivotal to the company’s success.
“Not only did we need a veteran who had successfully navigated the drug development process, but we also needed someone who was willing to take risks and understood how our platform served to advance our vision — how we were doing things differently.” co-founder, Randolf Lopez
“This position was incredibly difficult to fill. Not only did we need a veteran who had successfully navigated the drug development process, but we also needed someone who was willing to take risks and understood how our platform served to advance our vision — how we were doing things differently,” Randolph said. “We had plenty of ideas and had learned a tremendous amount from working with pharma partners, but we lacked the conviction and experience that comes from 20+ years discovering and developing drugs in a range of industry roles and environments.”
At this stage of a startup, leadership hiring is make or break for the business. Top talent is an incredible accelerant, and Randolph said Ryan’s impact was immediately clear.
“By his sixth week, Ryan had drafted a proposal for a therapeutic program, gotten internal leadership alignment, pitched the proposal to the board, and worked with his team to place a DNA order for our first validation experiment,” Randolph said. “We had high expectations, but Ryan exceeded them.”
It was also critical that Randolph hand over the baton to someone who was culturally aligned, given whoever stepped in would lead and manage the team he had worked carefully to build. These softer, personal elements must be considered thoughtfully to avoid disruption to the team.
“Both strategically and culturally, the individual members of the biologics team are critical for the company’s success – it was very important that they stay engaged despite the change in reporting structure,” Randolph said. “Ryan is a kind leader who embeds himself into the team. He does whatever it takes to push the program forward, including filling gaps and doing work in the lab himself, if that’s what it takes to accelerate the program timelines. Ryan’s actions and passion quickly earned trust from the team.”
A-Alpha’s announcement at AACR is generating a lot of buzz and excitement for the team as they gear up for in vivo pharmacology experiments this summer. Ryan couldn’t be happier leading the way for this particular therapeutic program.
“I almost cried talking to my wife about it,” Ryan shared. “How proud I am of what we accomplished in just six months. The drug candidates we’ve built and everybody working together in a highly functional way. It’s one of the coolest experiences I’ve had to date.”