About me
My name is Alex Kesin, and I hail from Long Island, NY—where suburbs achieve peak suburbanness. After briefly pursuing data science at the University of Michigan, I realized traditional academia wasn’t my path and instead spent the next year and a half immersed in biotech as an analyst at age1, a San Francisco-based life sciences fund fixated on longevity. Now, I'm doing something new - like writing this blog!
My particular obsession lies in leveraging biotech as a means to enhance healthy lifespan, especially addressing frailty-related diseases like osteoporosis and sarcopenia—the sort of challenges everyone faces eventually but few talk about effectively.
Quick fun-ish facts, because listicles are internet catnip:
Biking is the one aerobic activity I genuinely enjoy.
I can sustain a ten-minute conversation in Chinese—a feat achieved mostly through stubborn repetition and sheer force of will.
Favorite films include The Social Network, with recent contenders like Dune and Oppenheimer edging dangerously close.
My heritage is vaguely Eastern European: my father grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, my mother's family is Polish Jewish.
What this blog is about
Pharma blogging today can feel like decoding FDA legalese or corporate PR disguised as insight, catering to hyper-specialized niches. Across the valley, meanwhile, the tech and venture community engages biotech mostly through oversimplified thought experiments ("Why don’t we just YC this?") as though cellular pathways respond to seed funding and demo days.
Pharma, if it's ever truly to be disrupted, first needs to be understood—not just in regulatory minutiae or biochemical pathways, but in broader cultural, economic, and existential dimensions. That’s the goal here: to provoke understanding, incite change, and perhaps entertain along the way.
Welcome! I sincerely hope you enjoy the ride.
