Earli tackles the #1 problem in the $100B cancer drug market: systemic toxicity. On-target/off-tumor effects force suboptimal dosing, reduced efficacy and sidelining some of the most potent drug classes such as cytokines. Earli’s BioAI approach flips this paradigm: Drugs are produced only where needed— in the tumor, by the tumor, against the tumor. Cancer cells become their own drug factories, enabling localized immune activation, even in cold tumors.
This was enabled by three core innovations:
Together, these technologies create a new biological control layer, allowing tumors to self-identify and trigger their own targeted immune attack—achieving specificity beyond current targeted or IO therapies.
Earli plans to enter the clinic by mid-2027 with a Phase 1/2 lung cancer trial. The company is backed by a16z, Khosla, Perceptive, Alex Gorsky, Marc Benioff, Breyer, Emerson Collective, Sands Capital and others. The SAB includes Jim Allison (Nobel Laureate, MD Anderson), Bob Langer (Co-founder Moderna, MIT), Phil Greenberg (Co-founder Juno), Amy Abernethy (frm. Principal Deputy FDA Commissioner), Bill Hait (former J&J EVP Oncology R&D), and Alan Ashworth (President UCSF Cancer Center). The leadership team brings deep gene therapy, LNP, CMC and tech experience; CEO Cyriac Roeding previously led a $250M (11x return) exit.
Who You Are
The Position
Earli is currently seeking a Head of Translational Biology to oversee and lead the translational/in vivo biology group. The successful candidate will have a proven track record of successfully initiating and managing pharmacology and translational science projects across oncology indications from Discovery through IND enabling studies. She/he will be responsible for working with the existing scientific leadership for the design and planning of in vivo preclinical studies to characterize the efficacy, PK/PD and safety properties of Earli’s proprietary compounds . This position will report to the Chief Scientific Officer.
Primary Responsibilities
Education Requirements:
Required Experience, Knowledge and Skills
The base salary for this position is $215k-$235k per year.
If interested in applying, please attach a CV or have a well-developed LinkedIn profile for us to be able to assess your background.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Earli mission is to make cancer a benign experience by turning cancer against itself.
Earli creates genetic constructs that turn on only in cancer cells and then re-program the cancer cells to produce their own therapies, to kill themselves.
Earli has been funded by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Bio+Health Fund, Khosla Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Sands Capital, Marc Benioff, Menlo Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Han River Partners (S Korea). Earli is based in Redwood City, California.
For decades, the vision has been dreamed about to one day “program disease cells to kill or cure themselves.” If disease cells could be taken control of, they could be forced to run “injected biologic programs” to attack themselves or activate the body’s immune system to fight the disease. Standing in the way is a fundamental unsolved questions in medicine: how to correctly distinguish healthy cells from disease cells. For cancer, many attempts have been made to “kill the bad cells while not killing the good ones.” The conventional approaches are still crude; they attack both cancers and patients, or don't produce any response at all.
Earli turns the approach to targeting cancer cells on its head. Based on original research at Stanford University and subsequent 7 years of research at Earli, the company has built programmable genetic constructs that can infiltrate any cells but use conditional logic inside the cell nucleus to determine if a cell is a cancer cell, or not. The construct switches on only in cancer cells, then forcing them to become "factories" that produce encoded proteins that activate the immune system to attack and ultimately kill the cancer. In essence, the cancer cells are forced to produce their own therapies.
