Episode overview

Matt Keon joins Give It A Nudge to tell one of the most unusual origin stories the show has featured: a former advertising professional who, after meeting two people with motor neurone disease through coincidental social encounters, co-founded a genomics startup with them to tackle the disease. The conversation covers how GenieUs uses genomic data to find biomarkers and disease targets, the challenges of raising capital without a science background, the expensive research mistakes that shaped the company, and how framing affects resilience in founders.

An unlikely origin story

Four years before this episode was recorded, Matt was an advertising professional with no science background. He met a friend’s acquaintance living with MND, sat in their living room, and realized that genomic data for neurodegenerative diseases was fifteen to twenty-five years behind where cancer research was. Soon after, he coincidentally met a second person with MND through another friend. The three of them decided to tackle the problem together. Both people with MND became co-founders of the company.

Building credibility from outside the field

Raising capital with an advertising background in a hard science field required Matt to construct credibility from scratch. GenieUs started as a not-for-profit to keep the mission pure, then transitioned to a commercial entity once the research began producing valuable IP including biomarkers. Matt published research papers and became a first author, assembled a team of bioinformaticians and respected advisors, and focused on what he calls true believers: investors who had seen the data and believed in the process before any institutional money came in.

Expensive lessons and the importance of study design

Matt reflects on two categories of mistakes over four years. On fundraising: he underestimated how long it takes to bring institutional investors on a journey and tried to close investment too quickly in the early years rather than building relationships from day one. On research: the quality of study design determines whether data is rigorous and reliable. Setting up experiments without enough variables controlled for led to results that could not be built on, which he describes as a steep and expensive learning curve.

The science: RNA therapies and what GenieUs has found

Matt explains genomics and RNA therapies using the analogy of a conductor and orchestra: microRNA is the conductor, genes are the orchestra, and messenger RNA is the sheet music. When one element is dysregulated, RNA therapies can intervene without touching the gene itself, making them safer than approaches like CRISPR. GenieUs has validated two mutations in patients that appear to cause significant disease pathology, and is now screening drugs against those mutations with a goal to stop disease progression within the year.