Aria Pharmaceuticals

ANDREW RADIN: Hi, I'm Andrew Radin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of twoXAR.

ANDREW M. RADIN: I'm Andrew M. Radin, and I'm co-founder of twoXAR.

ANDREW RADIN: So about five years ago, I was studying biomedical informatics at Stanford, and through my studies, I created the technology behind the company. Now at the time Andrew was studying for his MBA here at MIT, and we started connecting on whether this technology should be commercialized or whether I should write an academic paper. So after I created this technology as part of my coursework, I was having lunch with Paul Lee.

So Paul was the former president of Electronic Arts. He was there for 20 years before starting his own venture capital firm, had invested in some of my prior startups. And I was telling Paul about, sort of, my interest in doing something very powerful, right, to do something very meaningful for society creating this technology. And at the time, I was thinking about writing a paper.

And Paul has this look that he gives you when he's not satisfied with your response, and he started making that face. And I felt like why is he upset with me. And Paul said rather than writing a paper, right, which no one read and you're not going to change the world with that, maybe you should file a patent. Maybe you should raise some money and turn this into a company, right, and commercialize this technology and bring it to the world.

ANDREW M. RADIN: So Andrew I spent some time here at MIT Sloan and whiteboarded out how we'd approach commercializing this technology. We explored several different options, and then we went and went out to the market and talked to many folks in the biopharma space.

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