29: Kevin Caldwell — A Bio Bank for the Future

In the last Flux episode of 2020, Alice talks with Kevin Caldwell, founder and CEO of Ossium Health, a company building the first bank of on-demand bone marrow stem cells and developing therapeutics to treat leukemia, blood cancer, and other diseases.  Kevin discusses how he navigated his many career options and how his time with grandparents shaped his values. After graduating law school and getting degrees in physics and economics, working at McKinsey and at hedge funds, Kevin realized he wanted to have more impact and switched to life sciences.  We discuss the history of stem cell therapy and why the potential for living drugs is so exciting. Kevin shares why no-one has used bone marrow from deceased donors, and how Ossium is building the first major procurement network to enable donor and recipient matches at scale. He gets into the business model, views on the future, and the advantages of raising from both life science and traditional tech investors. Full transcript on Medium. This episode was produced by Daniel Bouza.