🧬 Issue #54: Making Genomics Actionable
PO alumnus Sharon Hausman shares her story of the founding of IntellxxDNA and her career as a family physician
💬 Welcome to issue #54 of Between the Lines
Sharon Hausman-Cohen (PO) shares a bit about her career story and the founding of IntellxxDNA - a platform that provides licensed health care professionals with accurate, accessible, and actionable genomic intelligence to support advanced clinical decision-making.
Also, if you’re looking to hire an experienced GTM leader, check out Sol Estin’s profile below. Some pretty exciting opportunities to work with Claremont alumni too. 🤤
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Sharon Hausman-Cohen
After Pomona, Sharon went to Harvard to get her master's and M.D. before becoming a family physician. For the last 30 years, Sharon has been practicing evidence-based medicine as a family physician and teaching other doctors across the country. She is now the co-founder and Medical Director of IntellxxDNA - a platform that provides licensed health care professionals with accurate, accessible, and actionable genomic intelligence to support advanced clinical decision-making.
How did you get the idea to start IntellxxDNA?
People started coming to me, and they would ask, “can you use my genomics to help me prevent Alzheimer’s? Can you use my genomics to help me prevent heart disease?” I started looking for a tool for doctors that was evidence-based that would help me use genomics in practice, but I found that none of them were really very helpful. I needed something organized, accurate, and clinically actionable.
At this point, I had already opened up a concierge practice with my colleague, who later became my co-founder for IntellxxDNA, Carol Bilich. We said, let’s see if we can’t make a genomics resource of our own? As soon as we started working on it and realized the thousands of hours it took to build a useful genomics tool, we realized we had to make it for the world, not just for us. Our first topics covered or “panels” were heart disease, macular degeneration, and dementia. Right from the beginning, we realized we did not want to just identify gene variants or SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), but we wanted to help docs have ideas about what to do with the information. The biggest problem that we set out to solve was to help address the common question that clinicians and patients asked about genomic changes: “Okay, I’ve got this gene SNP, what do I do about it now?”
We built a whole tool that explained how the gene worked, how you could address the gene, both a diet, lifestyle supplements, and even where certain medicines worked from a genetic standpoint. And we made everything referenced so that doctors could know in the literature how that particular supplement or vitamin had been used in all those studies. The platform is what is called a “clinical decision support tool.”👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Solamon Cruz Estin
Sol Estin is a general manager, operations and sales leader, and former founder who graduated in Political Economy and Latin American Studies from Pitzer. After Claremont, he launched and scaled several early-stage tech startups, including Uber, where he was a Latin America Launcher and amongst the first 400 employees. Sol went on to launch UberEATS in several city markets and has since taken on leadership roles at HopSkipDrive (supply buildup and marketplace efficiency in a safe ride-sharing for kids), Pangaea (international D2C e-commerce), CloudKitchens (delivery order management and digital brand franchising), and most recently, as the Florida General Manager for sunday, a European hospitality fintech.
Sol has a sleeves-rolled-up mentality, is an energetic team coach and builder, and has a passion for sales, customer success, and strategic partnerships. With experiences in California, all over Latin America, and now in Miami, Sol is ready for his next challenge in a mission-driven tech company focused on solving a tangible real-world problem. He’s also open to consulting and advising. If you have a role you think would be a good fit, reach out to Sol.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Sabrina Baum Low
Sabrina Baum Low (PO) is the General Counsel and Head of People Operations at NOCD, a leading provider of online behavioral health services primarily focused on treating OCD. NOCD was founded by another PO alumnus, Stephen Smith, and is home to the largest online OCD community, with over 200,000 members. Sabrina was recently recognized as one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Consumer HealthTech of 2022:
Low joined NOCD last year as the company's General Counsel and first in-house attorney. During a period of tremendous growth, she has been responsible for steering the company through a complex legal and regulatory landscape while expanding into new business lines. Low now also serves as Head of People Operations, working to enhance the employee experience. Before NOCD, she was a litigator at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and clerked for Judge Joseph F. Bianco (formerly E.D.N.Y., now Second Circuit). She received her bachelor's degree in Politics and Environmental Analysis from Pomona College and her JD from Harvard Law School.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Machine Bio is an early-stage biotech company co-founded in 2018 by CMC & KGI alumni David Marash, Jack Fernandes, and Alexander Hilbert. The Claremont-based company is developing a novel, proprietary protein synthesis platform that can produce pure protein from a DNA template in an easy-to-use, single-step, 4-hour process. Machine Bio’s platform has a range of possible applications across drug discovery and development, synthetic biology research, industrial enzyme optimization, and commercial therapeutic manufacturing. They were chosen as the winner of BioTools Innovator’s first competition with a $200K grand prize last October. They’re currently looking for interested Claremont members to join their R&D Team:
Ho Nam (HMC) is the co-founder and Managing Director of Altos Ventures – a VC firm and SEC Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) that invests in high-growth, capital-efficient, founder-led companies. Founded in 1996, their investment team has been the first and lead institutional investor in 100+ companies worldwide. The firm has $10B AUM and invests in both consumer and enterprise tech companies, with a particular interest in enterprise SaaS, FinTech, e-commerce, and consumer brands.
This is the first time in Altos Ventures' 26+ year history that they are publicly posting for an opening on their investment team:
Make sure to check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
As always, if any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer and are looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Sagar Batchu is an HMC alumnus and the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - a developer first API platform building Zero Ops APIs. Sagar was previously Director of Engineering at LiveRamp. He and the team share how they have been iterating on Speakeasy’s essential design decisions.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Pomona and Stanford alumnus Victor Penev is the founder and CEO of EDAMAM - the leading provider of nutrition data and analytics. Edamam provides nutrition solutions to food, health, and wellness businesses, leveraging its proprietary cloud-based, structured-data semantic technology platform. Victor will be speaking at the FoodNiche Global Summit this July.
MeetKai is a conversational AI company that has expanded into building a real-world metaverse. It has created its own "lifestyle VR world" called the MeetKai Metaverse. The company claims to offer a series of AI-powered VR experiences, including everything from museum tours and personalized meditations to private boxing lessons and safari tours. James Kaplan (HMC) is the CEO and co-founder along with billionaire Weili Dai.
A fun video profile of the Claremont Colleges, circa 1962-1964, with black and white 16mm film print. These prints are held by the Pomona College archives!
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🔋 NineDot’s New York Energy Niche….. NineDot Energy, a clean tech startup in Brooklyn’s Urban Future Lab incubator, is helping NYC’s decarbonization by supplying distributed, community-scale energy storage by land and EV. David Arfin (CGU), a pioneer in solar financing, co-founded the company in 2015, building on his work as the originator of SolarCity’s popular lease financing for rooftop panels. NineDot focuses on systems that use lithium-ion batteries and places these systems on plots of land around NYC, feeding energy to the grid.
🦠 The Future Of Protein….. Protein purification is one of the biggest bottlenecks for biotech companies. However, Machine Bio is developing a next-generation protein synthesis platform that can produce pure protein from DNA in hours, minutes, or continuously using a single-step process. Machine Bio's synthetic biology approach to bioprocessing is based on standalone transmembrane synthesis reactors that can efficiently convert DNA to pure protein. The startup is co-founded by David Marash (Keck), Alexander Hilbert (Keck), and Jack Fernandes (CMC).
🕶️ The Future Mood Of Music & Fashion….. As the lines between brand and celebrity blur, music's role as a pop culture conduit continues to rise. Rapper Lil Yachty is the latest investor as sunglasses brand Futuremood expands its pop culture lens. The company also sealed an investment from the Chainsmokers. Futuremood is a manufacturer of uber-stylish sunglasses that alters moods with their saturated psychedelic optics. The company was founded by designer and CEO Austin Soldner (CMC), who previously co-founded Playground.fm (acquired by Jawbone in 2014).
📞 AI Changing The Client Engagement Dynamic….. Smith.ai, co-founded by CEO Justin Maxwell (PO), combines live agents and AI to provide superior virtual receptionist and intake services to small businesses. Before founding Smith.ai, Justin spent time at Apple, Intuit, and Google. In 2019 the company raised $7M from NFX and SignalFire, and they just announced an expansion, giving customer firms access to recordings and transcripts of all client engagement around the clock while redacting PII like credit card and social security numbers.
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