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Joachim Eeckhout (00:00)
How do you market an AI biotech company without falling into the hype? How communicating a bold vision can help you attract investors? Can AI truly transform stem cell therapy? Or is it just the latest marketing buzzword? Well, you're about to find out. Welcome to the Science Marketer podcast, the show where we explore the world of marketing and communication in life sciences and deep tech. I'm your host, Joachim Ecoute.
And today you're diving into the world of AI and stem cell therapy with Somite.ai. The company aims to develop a digital twin of the embryo in order to produce cell therapies addressing diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and muscular dystrophies. Somite was founded in October of last year and already raised $10 million investment. My guest today is Miha Brakestone, co-founder and CEO of Somite.
He is an experienced entrepreneur who already sold his previous company Corus.ai for $575 million and founded Noralight, a company which raised $30 million in only 12 months. I'm Mirha, welcome to the Science Marketer
Podcast.
Micha Breakstone (01:08)
Thank you so much Joachim, it's a pleasure to be here.
Joachim Eeckhout (01:11)
my first question, the magazine Forbes called your company the open AI of stem cell therapy. What does this mean for you and your team?
Micha Breakstone (01:21)
That's a great question. You know, a lot of people use AI and maybe analogies is kind of hype, but in our case, I hope it's actually true. I guess for three main reasons. The first is when I think of OpenAI, was the first to really commercialize foundation models. And we're doing, you know, we're building the infrastructure and the foundation models for
cell differentiation, cell protocol discovery and optimization and kind of understanding the communication between cells. So in that regard, we hope to do to the quote unquote language of communication between cells the same that OpenAI did to the communication between people or natural language. It's number one. Number two is kind of like OpenAI was the first to do that and a slew of
competitors or other players came after and we believe we're the first to actually unlock this opportunity of deciphering the kind of hidden dimensions or the signals that go that cells communicate in and differentiate thereby with. And the third is just the absolutely huge opportunity that is upon us, right? Like just like OpenAI
unlock these endless opportunities with language. We hope to do the same with cells, cellular therapy, and human repair in general.
Joachim Eeckhout (02:49)
And Somite was started in October last year with a wave of AI companies in biotech at the same time. Why did you launch at this point and why are you confident about this space?
Micha Breakstone (03:05)
I was thinking of my next company for a while. very good friends, been very close friends with one of the professors who's a scientific co-founder, Alon Klein. We go back 25 years. And I reached out to him. I was looking for something deeply impactful at the intersection of AI and therapeutics. And I reached out to him kind of...
a good few months before and asked him if he had anything interesting for me, at which point he said, Micha, let's stay friends. And I said, Alon, give me something interesting. He said, let's stay friends. Third time I asked, he introduced me to Cliff Tabin, who's the chair of the genetics department in Olivia Perkey, another professor at the genetics department and National Academy of Science member. Both of them actually are.
They were thinking of building or they were trying to build
company in the space of self therapy and they were seeking help from kind of a repeat entrepreneur.
wasn't premeditated. I was just looking to do my passion.
So the CEO of NVIDIA recently had this incredible quote on the fact that biology has now the opportunity to become more than a science and engineering, or not a science anymore, an engineering problem. And once things become an engineering problem, they have the opportunity to build upon...
everything that has been accumulated thus far in scale and kind of completely transform a field. And as I was thinking about what areas, you know, AI is not commoditized in and where will there be real pun unintended differentiation, it stood out that biology or chemistry, physics would be kind of the hard sciences would be or the sciences would be the next frontier. So was clear to me I wanted to do something there. Having sold
few businesses and done pretty well for ourselves. It was important for me to leave a legacy and build something that is deeply impactful. So for me, naturally, it was to look at therapeutics and I was looking for incredible people that had groundbreaking novel science on the one hand and on the other hand, I could marry it with deep AI. So hence the kind of the choice to do that at that point. But really, I was following my passion. I'd, you know,
It was partially governed by a business decision. I wouldn't start a company that I didn't think had a chance of being a multi-billion dollar huge opportunity on the one hand. On the other hand, it was really important for me to follow something I cared about and wanted to do. Does that make sense?
Joachim Eeckhout (05:23)
Yeah, totally. And I think this leads to my next question, especially with what you said with Nvidia, that more and more AI drug development companies that are rebranding as TechBio instead of Biotech, right? Is this distinction important to you and where do you place so much?
Micha Breakstone (05:39)
Mm-hmm.
first of all, unquestionably or unequivocally, somebody does tech bio, it's not biotech. It's hugely important for me. Biotech is a company that, you know, is a more traditional developing, usually therapeutic usually, not always small molecule, MAPs, cell gene therapy. But basically you're hedging or you're risking the company, betting the company on usually a therapeutic or a program or...
or even a series of programs or even a specific biological scientific technology. In our case, the innovation is that the technology itself in the sense of the machine learning or AI. we're developing a platform that in and of itself is an innovation. And we are betting the company's fate not on a specific program or a series of programs, but rather on the capabilities of the technology to
spawn an infinite or huge amount of programs. So it's a big difference. I think the risk profile of the company is very different.
So of course we also have the wet labs and the programs themselves, but we place a deep emphasis on our technological capabilities. There's a saying in the field,
that if you're successful platform company, you'll survive long enough to have an asset. So we're starting off with an asset, right? We're not just a platform on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's critical for us to build this very, very robust platform that actually owns its own fate, whereby we are going to transform unit economics for data generation and
create a deep mode around us in terms of our ability to identify novel programs and create these deeply meaningful collaborations.
Joachim Eeckhout (07:35)
It makes sense. So while we're on the topic of
does this make the partnership models that we usually see in biotech a bit different for you? Or how do you approach partnership, basically?
Micha Breakstone (07:49)
so I think the best way to think about it is think of alpha fold 3 where there's a server up and anybody can use it for free But if you want to use it commercially or you need some managed solution you need to pay up So we're gonna be doing something quite similar. We haven't yet
done a GA, a general availability release for AlphaStem, which is our platform, but we, know, it's up and running internally on our servers and the results are pretty great. We're using it as we're eating our own dog food or you're French, so drinking our own champagne. But the idea is to launch that in kind of the next, let's call it six to nine months and compel people to use it as
as prolifically as possible, right? As pervasively as possible and then share it and compel people that actually get value to reach out to us and to begin collaborations on specific cell fates that they care about. you can imagine or one can imagine that you, know, there are 200 lineages or 200 large main lineages in the human body of cells and each one has thousands of or hundreds of subtypes of cells.
can imagine that if you're trying to develop a specific drug for a cell of a very specific phenotype, very specific fate, you can point at that cell and we would be able to basically generate a protocol for you to take it from an IPC, from an induced pluripotent stem cell to all the way to the cell fate you're looking for.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:20)
so are you saying that the model will be kind of open source or is it a bit different than open source?
Micha Breakstone (09:25)
I didn't say open source, it's open availability more than open source. We haven't decided yet if we're going to open source it or not, but it will be available. idea is to, it's not the model, but the tool, the discovery tool will be, our plan now is to open access to it rather than open source it.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:29)
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
and mostly to researchers maybe like in academia who might need it.
Micha Breakstone (09:49)
To anybody the truth is, but if somebody wants to use it commercially, of course, we'll ask them to engage
Joachim Eeckhout (09:55)
Yeah.
Micha Breakstone (09:57)
formally.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:58)
this concept of digital twin, first, don't think it's, you know, it's not necessarily easy to understand for everyone what it is.
And then you're also mixing it with stem cell therapy, which is another layer of complexity. How do you balance this really technical topic with the need to make your message accessible?
Micha Breakstone (10:26)
It's a challenge. It's a challenge. Look, I think... is it Einstein that said if you are not able to explain what you're doing to an elementary school child, then you don't understand what you're doing yourself. There's a lot of elegance in distilling a message. I think we use analogies.
Also, of, you know, messaging is important, but when we are engaging the top scientists, kind of the science speaks for itself, right? So, but, you know, at the same time, kind of our view of the world is one in which...
you know, the digital twins, et cetera, are more a tool of explaining things and kind of the vision in itself is rather straightforward, right? The vision is to harness or leverage AI to usher in basically a new age of human repair. And the mission is also simple. It's transforming cellular biology into an engineering or compute bound.
engineering challenge. So I think at of the day, the messaging is relatively clear at the high level of vision and mission, then kind of how do we go out and do that, right? We build up this platform, we're calling it cellular AI and explaining kind of what are the different components of the platform, alpha stem, the lab module, the cell therapies and
how we're leveraging all of that to transform the production of cells into something that is scalable, compute-bound engineering problem.
Joachim Eeckhout (12:09)
You raised already $10 million of investments. So what was your communication strategy to convince investors to join you?
Micha Breakstone (12:22)
In truth, we were kind of lucky. I built a few companies in the past, so this was my first, I put in the first check and I was planning on funding the company for a while. have some good friends in the VC space that decided to, they wanted in, so when they learned that I was doing a new company, they asked to come in and kind of the first money was very, very easy and simple and we were lucky enough to attract, I think,
So I'm from Israel originally, Israel's top pre-seed fund, Tekaviv. So the first money was relatively easy. Then the next five million was actually even easier. So we were just very lucky. We had a few companies that read about us and it...
align strongly with what we're doing. You know, there's a lot of hype in cell therapy and AI, as you've alluded to. think if you look at the caliber of the scientific co-founders, including the chair of the genetics department, three National Academy of Science members, my co-founder and CTO is the head of the fundamental AI group at MIT, cetera, et cetera. You understand that you wouldn't be able to convince people of this caliber to put their name to this if there wasn't a real breakthrough in real deep science here. So
We were very lucky to attract money towards us rather than having to go out. One of our most important partners is a Japanese pharma company that had reached out to us, Stellas, that invested a couple of million in us. So we were very lucky, I think. We've actually turned down more money, not the other way around, so for now.
Joachim Eeckhout (13:50)
Yeah, so yeah, maybe like also being in the right place at the right time, like bringing AI and self-therapy as you said, like
to be really the good time.
Micha Breakstone (14:00)
There have been a few companies that did
I don't think it's only the right place at the right time. It's the right place at the right time, the right people, the right idea, and the right execution
Joachim Eeckhout (14:07)
Yeah, right.
Micha Breakstone (14:09)
Just look at the founding team, right? So Alon Klein was the one, the professor that pioneered single cell RNA sequencing in droplets, probably seven, eight years ago, nine. We have Jay Shindure, who's literally the person responsible for the largest scale single cell RNA sequencing out there. have Johnny, who invented, pioneered deep learning scaling laws. And then we have Cliff and Olivier with...
differentiation of cells and not to toot my own horn, but I've built and sold a few AI companies. So, kind of, I think it's an incredible team. So it's more than just being the right time in the right place. It's I, I, I, a friend of mine says, or has tattoos on his hands says in Hebrew, hard work brings
Joachim Eeckhout (14:38)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
you're coming from the AI and more like tech side, right? Like your previous company was or your first company was not in biotech. What do you bring to biotech and especially on the communication side? Do you see something different?
in the way you communicate,
Micha Breakstone (15:13)
Yeah, look, biotech is a different animal than tech. I mean, they both have the same word tech in it, but they're very, very different. Biotech behaves or operates at different speeds, different cadences, different scales, different scales of money, different risks profiles, so entirely different. I would not have built a biotech company. think it's... There is very... I believe in companies that are founder-led and that where the founder has the chance of actually changing...
the trajectory of the company and influencing it, right? So when you're developing a therapy, you can pray, right? Like there's very little you can do to change the outcome. You can do everything right and still fail, which is, it's right also in tech, but the chances are more, you know, they're more determined by you and internally rather than kind of, I like owning my own fate as an entrepreneur.
And at SoMight, of where the platform we're developing is, and the way we're going about it is in a way that, I don't want to say ensures 100%, but mitigates the risk of us failing because of a drug failing, right? The drug may fail, 10 drugs may fail, and the company will still be a huge success, right? That's, first, I hope the drugs don't fail, right? But we're not.
leaning the company on one or two or a series of programs alone, but rather on the technology and its value in general. And yes, the ecosystems, the way people think about risk, the way people think about reward, the way people think about investment timelines, it's all very, very different between biotech and tech.
Joachim Eeckhout (16:47)
if we look also at your company right now, you recently received the orphan drug and rare pediatric disease designation from the FDA for your program, in induced muscular dystrophy. Is this playing a role in your
communication strategy right now or in the future?
Micha Breakstone (17:08)
think so. think, look, it's getting that recognition from the FDA is very serious, It means the FDA is taking us serious. The agency looks at us as a future potential solution. It's high recognition. It goes a lot to kind of to the credit of our incredible translational team, Dr. Christy Brown.
And Dr. Carl Morris lead that on our side and they've done a phenomenal job with the agency and conveying the potential. And I think, you know, as we prepare for pre-IND work, type B meeting end of year, I think that shows investors that the potential of our platform is not just
kind of up in the air and it's not AI hype, it's actually kind of taking something, being taken very seriously by the people that matter, namely the agency.
Joachim Eeckhout (17:54)
Hmm.
So let's finish with a few questions, like more specific to your marketing. If there is marketing at this point, so that's also what I'm trying to figure out. So first question is like, how do you approach your public branding? So for instance, are you using social media to promote some of it?
Micha Breakstone (18:17)
So we use LinkedIn and Twitter, or X. We have kind of put in some effort there, but not enough. And I think that education of the market is really important, especially in the nascent market like ourselves. So the plan is definitely to tell our story more prolifically and reach a wider audience. I think we were very lucky, as I shared, that some great companies and people reached out to us.
But I think as we want to expand and go bigger, I think that's going to be really important. It's all about audiences. So social media, we're not probably not going to go on TikTok for now, just because we're not targeting teenagers, but sorry, I'll take that back. Maybe we will. don't know, right? I don't know where the top scientists hang. I think usually in kind of...
Joachim Eeckhout (19:02)
Mm-hmm.
Micha Breakstone (19:11)
great quote by my scientific co-founder, Cliff Tabin, who's also the chair of the genetics department, who likes to say,
I really prefer that my work be written about,
that I don't read about my work in the New York Times before I read about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, right? So that's kind of, says that was a big smile. And I think,
Social media is a very, very valid channel to get your message out there. I think also the science absolutely needs to speak for itself. we'll go out and use, leverage our scientific breakthroughs, whatever channel makes more sense.
Joachim Eeckhout (19:43)
Yeah, as you said, your team is also at a very high level of academic results. So I guess that's also your strategy to bet on them because they are bringing the attention ultimately, especially towards the audience.
Micha Breakstone (19:58)
It's not,
yeah, it's not, look, there are scientists that are very good at creating a following, a personal following. Our scientists or our researchers or our founding partners are, I think they're very humble people and they kind of almost avoid the spotlight. So it's been difficult leveraging them personally, but leveraging their work is much easier.
so, getting attention because of their science is, is, is, is, is easier because their, their work is, is top caliber,
Joachim Eeckhout (20:27)
So still on this topic, I have seen that you recently appointed a VP strategy and operations. Can you tell me more about the
Micha Breakstone (20:34)
Yeah.
look, we founded the the founding team is myself and Johnny, CTO, a deep learning wizard, expert ninja, whatever, luminary, use the adjective or the noun there yourself, and four scientific co-founders, and we brought in an exceptionally strong translational team, so our...
SVP Translation was previously head of translation at Solid Biosciences and our CSO was also CSO there as well. At its peak it was like a $2 billion Nasdaq traded company. very, and a slew of extremely strong wet lab scientists. Most of them are PhDs and stand out post-docs.
But we, on the tech side itself, other than the AI engineers, we were lacking kind of the operational excellence that, you know, it mostly me and my chief of staff. So it was really important as we scaled to build up that muscle within the company. Sorry, muscle is unintended. Our first program is for muscle. So we're building out that internal muscle of execution and operational excellence and, you know, ops.
Execution and strategy are not always the same thing, but I think getting somebody that is great for both is really good because at end of the day strategy is about operating and choosing the right focuses to operate on. Shai is, he doesn't have any biological background per se, but kind of he's a graduate of the Israeli program Talpiot, which is the top program, academic program in Israel for a period like the Rhodes Scholarship in the U.S.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:21)
Mm.
Micha Breakstone (22:21)
I think 15 or 20 people are selected every year. absolutely, you know, brilliant with a deep scientific background on the one hand, and the other hand kind of as an MBA from Wharton, an MBA from Harvard has spent time, think Alvarez and whatever McKinsey for a while, right? Like all of these and was previously also chief of staff of one of Israel's most successful VC backed companies as well. a huge amount of operational background and strategic background and being based in Boston is a huge plus. So
you know, kind of, it made a ton of sense. And yes, he is, his role is one, helping us turn the company into a well-oiled machine on the one hand, on the other hand, making sure that the machine is operating on the things that we actually care about. So putting
together the right model, the right financial models, the right operational models to leverage the platform and get to make sure that the programs.
Joachim Eeckhout (23:08)
Mm-hmm.
Micha Breakstone (23:15)
our budget did correctly on the one hand, on the other hand we have the right strategy to compel great partners to start working with us.
Joachim Eeckhout (23:23)
So to finish, just two questions. The first is what's your advice to someone who is doing science marketing in a similar company, so a company with really good science, early stage, a technology that could potentially make breakthrough. What do you recommend to people in this situation?
Micha Breakstone (23:46)
Look, I think at the of the day marketing needs to serve the goals of the business. So the question is what, you know, why are they doing marketing? If it's to be in the newspaper and show your mom, that's probably not a great idea. If it's to drive specific partnerships, then tailor the marketing towards those partnerships.
Find the right channels, the right avenues, where to communicate.
Go and interview with the founder of the top European outlet for bio, right? Like I'm doing now. I'm joking, of course. I'm just saying tailor what you're doing in marketing to your end goals and make sure that you're serving the company and its goals correctly. And you know,
Joachim Eeckhout (24:35)
Yeah.
Micha Breakstone (24:40)
Some companies just don't need to do marketing, right? They're incredible, incredible. I'm invested in a few companies that have very, very little marketing and they're doing phenomenally well and they're happy with that. Other companies need that in order to survive.
So just ask yourself why you're doing the
Joachim Eeckhout (24:55)
Yep.
Micha Breakstone (24:55)
marketing and what you're trying, what attention you're trying to attract and why. There could be many different reasons, right? Attracting top talent is different than...
attracting commercial attention than attracting financial attention. So there needs to be really good reason of why you're doing what you're doing.
Joachim Eeckhout (25:18)
Yeah, and it's also a question of stage, maybe like, you know, like a company with very early stage might not need to invest in, let's say, communication marketing while
when you approach maybe an event like even an IPO, maybe then this becomes more important because you need to convince retail investors, et cetera.
Micha Breakstone (25:38)
I
100%.
look, I've never lived really in Europe, I don't know for certain, but my sense is when I visit there is that Europe is more risk averse than say Silicon Valley or Israel where I come from. So maybe part of the marketing is just to establish that this isn't as risky as one might perceive it for a startup if you're early stage, right? Just like we're real, this is a real opportunity.
Joachim Eeckhout (26:03)
Is there a book that you like to
Micha Breakstone (26:05)
there's great scientific books like in my space, there's the I think it's called the song of the cell or something like that, like a beautiful book about cellular biology, which is a great intro for this space.
Joachim Eeckhout (26:05)
ha ha ha ha ha
Yeah.
Okay, yeah, that's a great recommendation. Well, that brings us to the end of today's episode. A huge thank you to you, Mihah, for joining us and sharing your insights.
Micha Breakstone (26:29)
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Joachim Eeckhout (26:30)
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so don't miss any updates. And for even more content on science marketing and communication, be sure to sign up for my newsletter at thesciencemarketer.com. You can also find links and references in the show notes. The transcript will be available on thesciencemarketer.com. Thanks for listening and see you next time.