Christopher Pirie is one of the few founders in the biotech sphere who has explored multiple frontiers. In this conversation, he shared powerful lessons from his ventures, spanning synthetic biology, RNA vaccines, and sustainable manufacturing.

Christopher also talks about alternative financing, customer-centric business models, the history of biotechnology, and the impatience of going through the journey of building his latest startup, Decycle Bio. Decycle Bio has secured funding from top-tier investors like Ecosphere Ventures and Pack Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• 
  
• Venture formation is often about timing, team, and the courage to make strategic pivots.
  
• Alternative funding sources, such as grants, licensing, and angel investors, can offer resilience in tough markets.
  
• Sustainability in biotech is both a necessity and a massive market opportunity.
  
• Your investor’s track record says as much about them as their term sheet does.
  
• The best technologies don’t sell themselves; founders must learn to translate deep science into compelling business narratives.
  
• Failure forces introspection, tests assumptions, and sharpens your execution instincts.
  
• Founding a company is also a personal journey that involves significant life changes.
  

 

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About Christopher Pirie:

Christopher Pirie is an entrepreneurial biotechnology professional with a focus on innovation in areas such as protein and enzyme engineering, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, polymers, drug delivery, and biopharmaceuticals, including RNA vaccines and therapeutics.

His expertise encompasses alternative financing and business models for the commercialization of cutting-edge technology, intellectual property protection strategies, and customer engagement.

Christopher holds a PhD in Biological Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in Bioengineering with a Minor in Chemistry from the University of Washington.

Christopher has contributed to various organizations, including serving as a coach at MIT Bootcamps, co-founder and COO of HDT Bio, advisor to the Science Bounty System, CEO of Virvio, director of Protein Engineering at Manus Biosynthesis, senior scientist at Manus Biosynthesis, and board member of MIT Entrepreneurship Review, among others.

He has also worked as a research scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and held roles such as founding editor at MIT Entrepreneurship Review and research assistant at MIT.

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Connect with Christopher Pirie:

• 
  
• LinkedIn
  
• Crunchbase
  
• Life Science Washington
  
• Clay
  

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today, we have an amazing founder—someone who has done it multiple times. I think we’re going to learn quite a bit about building, scaling, financing, and more. This conversation is going to be quite inspiring. We’ll cover how he thinks about alternative financing, customer-centric business models, the history of biotechnology, and how he has dealt with impatience throughout his journey. So get ready for a really exciting conversation.

Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Christopher Pirie. Welcome to the show.

Christopher Pirie: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: Originally born in Northern California—give us a walk down memory lane. What was life like growing up for you?

Christopher Pirie: Oh gosh, quite idyllic, I would say. Five acres of Sonoma rolling hills is not a bad place to wake up every morning when you’re a little kid—just walk out the door and run around in the woods.

Christopher Pirie: It was an amazing place to spend my early years. When I was a bit older, we moved up to Seattle, which was just as pleasant a place to grow up. It also gave me a great educational foundation. Seattle is amazing in that regard.

Alejandro Cremades: How did you get into problem-solving, and all of that good stuff that eventually led you to MIT?

Christopher Pirie: As an undergrad, like so many folks navigating the college experience, I went to an academic counselor and said, “Look, I’m good at math and science—what should I do with my career?” They said, “Well, if you want to live in California, major in chemical engineering. If you want to live in Seattle, major in biological engineering.”

Christopher Pirie: I loved Seattle and was at the University of Washington, so I joined the biological engineering department.

Christopher Pirie: There, the undergraduate class was about 50% pre-med and 50% pre-PhD. I gravitated toward research.

Christopher Pirie: At the same time, I had a real fear of becoming a doctor and having patients who wouldn’t listen to my advice and would keep getting sicker. So clinical practice scared me.

Christopher Pirie: I leaned more toward the research side of things, and when it was time to pick a graduate school, MIT was hard to say no to.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. How did you start getting into the business side of things? It sounds like the venture world came knocking during your time at MIT.

Christopher Pirie: I’m not sure it’s unique to MIT, but being close to the business school helps. Most grad students eventually realize they won’t be in academia forever, and start exploring beyond scientific research.

Christopher Pirie: For me, that meant taking classes at the Sloan School and building relationships with MBA students—some of whom I still work with today.

Christopher Pirie: Spending time both in the lab and in business classrooms gave me cross-sectional exposure. I’d already had a bit of that growing up—my dad started a couple of companies in the telecom industry, so I’d been around early-stage ventures.

Christopher Pirie: I always enjoyed operating at the interface of cutting-edge science and the entrepreneurial journey. Towards the end of my thesis work, I connected with a couple of like-minded folks and started my first company.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about that. How did your first company get started?

Christopher Pirie: It actually began in one of those Sloan classes. Researchers from across campus would present their work, hoping it might have commercial potential.

Christopher Pirie: As a student, you’d rank which technologies you wanted to work on. I listed one as my second choice and ended up with it when I didn’t get my first.

Christopher Pirie: That second-choice technology became the foundation of Manus Bio. I worked with the inventor, a postdoc in the chemical engineering department, during the semester.

Christopher Pirie: After the class, I was ready to return to my thesis work. Then, a few weeks later, he emailed me and asked to meet. He brought along a Sloan fellow he had worked with, and said, “I think the three of us should start a company.”

Christopher Pirie: And that became Manus Bio. We spent the next 6–12 months hanging around campus, figuring out what to build and working through early product-market fit for what began as a very academic technology—but ultimately became a commercial success.

Alejandro Cremades: Looking back, what were some of the toughest things you faced as a first-time entrepreneur?

Christopher Pirie: As a scientist, especially in academia, you’re rewarded for how much you know—passing exams, publishing papers, presenting at conferences. You prove your knowledge to the world.

Christopher Pirie: But very quickly after starting the company, I realized that didn’t matter much. In a startup, you’re part of a broader, cross-functional team tackling grand challenges.

Christopher Pirie: Success starts to hinge on communication—especially with non-scientists—and on how well you manage people, which is less about knowledge and more about human interaction.

Christopher Pirie: I definitely had growing pains, but I was lucky to have two co-founders with some experience in those areas to support my growth.

Alejandro Cremades: So what did Manus Bio become?

Christopher Pirie: Manus Bio was built on metabolic engineering—modifying microbes to eat sugar and produce flavors and fragrances, many of which are natural products traditionally sourced from plants.

Christopher Pirie: Our approach was to use fermentation, a classical process used for centuries to make beer and wine, to produce these ingredients more efficiently at scale.

Christopher Pirie: One example we used a lot was rose oil. If you wanted enough for every woman in China to have Chanel No. 5, you’d have to cover the planet in roses. But we could ferment an acre of corn into the same compounds at scale.

Christopher Pirie: They’ve since scaled manufacturing and brought those early products to market, even after I left a few years ago.

Alejandro Cremades: And the company recently announced a merger and raised over $100 million. That’s a strong outcome. When did you feel it was time to turn the page and move back to Seattle?

Christopher Pirie: It’s always hard for a founder to recognize when it’s time to transition—whether the company outgrows them, or they grow in different directions.

Christopher Pirie: For me, it was personal—I wanted to be closer to friends and family on the West Coast. And frankly, I was tired of shoveling snow in Cambridge.

Christopher Pirie: After five years, I felt I’d built the enzyme engineering team I was hired to lead and had empowered them to succeed even in my absence. So I left to return to Seattle and start my next company.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about Verveo. As they say, you either succeed or you learn, and Verveo was definitely full of learning.

Christopher Pirie: Absolutely. It was an opportunity to work with David Baker—now a Nobel Laureate—at a time when his protein design techniques were still underappreciated.

Christopher Pirie: I saw a Nature paper he’d published with a postdoc and was inspired to try commercializing it in 2016.

Christopher Pirie: In hindsight, you can always look at the team composition, the tech’s timing, or product-market fit as weaknesses in the venture thesis.

Christopher Pirie: But for me, the most valuable part was exploring every operational mode the venture could take, and struggling to get traction.

Christopher Pirie: Success usually happens in one mode. Failure teaches you through many. That was powerful—it helped me grow personally and as a founder.

Christopher Pirie: We’re all passionate about our science and our ventures, but that passion can blind you to fundamental flaws. I came away from Verveo a more dispassionate, pragmatic entrepreneur.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. So when did HDT Bio come into the picture?

Christopher Pirie: Like many founders, relationships from one chapter come full circle in another. An investor who passed on Verveo later came back and said, “We liked what you were building, even if it wasn’t right for us then.”

Christopher Pirie: He introduced me to two folks developing RNA vaccine tech in 2019. We developed the vision for HDT Bio around RNA cancer vaccines.

Christopher Pirie: At the time, RNA wasn’t an accepted therapeutic modality. But then the pandemic hit in early 2020—and suddenly everyone wanted RNA-based infectious disease vaccines.

Christopher Pirie: And that very quickly catalyzed the growth of HDT Bio through multiple government contracts, international licensing transactions, and clinical trials. Ultimately, it demonstrated that the underlying technology was tremendously successful in differentiating itself in terms of patient safety, memory, and cellular immune response—through clinical development in several countries, but principally in India, where the technology eventually received emergency use authorization.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously at this point, you had raised money a couple of times, given your experience with previous companies as well. How did you go about raising the $20 million at HDT Bio? What was that experience like? What were you really looking for in investors?

Christopher Pirie: I think both myself and the other founders had a fair amount of prior fundraising experience and familiarity with institutional capital. In HDT Bio’s case, our investor base was largely made up of angels from the outset and was heavily supplemented by a combination of government grants, contracts, and international licensing revenue.

Christopher Pirie: Putting all those together gave us a funding base that wasn’t tied strictly to traditional venture capital fund cycles or market-driven liquidity opportunities.

Christopher Pirie: It was fascinating for us as founders and operators to watch the 2021–2022 downturn in the public markets and see its consequences on many of our peers in the early-stage biopharmaceutical world—while we remained relatively insulated, thanks to the diversity of our capital base.

Christopher Pirie: That foundation has helped the company grow to over 50 people, and we continue to innovate on the RNA vaccine platform through partnerships with government entities and commercial organizations. We’re exploring more infectious disease applications, have recently published some of our successes, and maintain interest in the cancer vaccine domain as well.

Alejandro Cremades: So now, when it comes to timing, it sounds like you know when it’s time. You did that with Manus Bio, and you did that again with HDT Bio. Now you’ve launched a new company—DeCycle Bio. Talk to us about timing, because for a founder, it’s like saying goodbye to your baby, and that’s never easy.

Christopher Pirie: Yeah, and it’s really about fit. Sometimes you leave too early or stay too long. There’s no exact science to it—it’s about personal feel and how both the company and the people evolve.

Christopher Pirie: I’ve learned a lot about myself over time. During the HDT Bio journey, the pandemic affected everyone—but personally, I also got married and had two kids. So over the course of those five years, my whole world changed.

Christopher Pirie: I was doing the business things I knew I’d signed up for, but my personal life evolved in ways I hadn’t expected. Having kids made me realize how important each day is—and how much the future matters for our children.

Christopher Pirie: That realization is part of what inspired DeCycle Bio. I had spent nearly a decade in biopharma after Manus Bio, which itself was focused on sustainability.

Christopher Pirie: In 2024, after my second child was born, I read a paper from MIT on biochemical reaction modeling using AI. It reignited memories of my time at Manus Bio, and I saw this as an opportunity to build on that work.

Christopher Pirie: I reached out to the authors, started a conversation, and—as often happens in entrepreneurship—one conversation led to another. By mid-last year, we had strong conviction that there was a business to be built around this technology.

Christopher Pirie: That became DeCycle Bio. We closed our first financing round in January and now have four full-time founders pushing this vision forward.

Alejandro Cremades: So what is DeCycle Bio all about? Give us the 30-second high-level overview.

Christopher Pirie: We’re using computational approaches originally developed at MIT and combining them with cell-free systems and techniques adopted from one of our faculty advisors at Stanford.

Christopher Pirie: We bridge those two approaches using enzyme engineering—the same kind I was practicing back at Manus Bio. Together, they enable what some call “waste-to-value” transformations.

Christopher Pirie: Many global industries generate waste streams that contaminate the environment. Our technologies create opportunities to convert those waste streams into value-added products.

Christopher Pirie: We operate at the molecular level—taking in waste molecules and using enzymatic cascades to convert them into valuable chemical products.

Christopher Pirie: These are inherently more sustainable than today’s typical chemical production processes, which rely on oil and gas feedstocks, high temperatures, high pressure, and often toxic methods.

Christopher Pirie: We’re using biology to enable more sustainable chemical manufacturing.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, as a repeat founder, raising money isn’t as hard because people can see you’ve been around the block. How do you filter for the right investors for the right reasons?

Christopher Pirie: That’s a great question. Though I wouldn’t say it’s always easier. Every venture is different. The type of investor we talk to at DeCycle Bio is different from those we spoke to for HDT Bio.

Christopher Pirie: The team, the technology, the market—everything is new. But relationships do survive across ventures, which helps.

Christopher Pirie: When thinking about investor fit, I look for those who are in it for the right reasons. Maybe not purely mission-driven investors, but those who truly put the founders and the venture first.

Christopher Pirie: Many claim to do that, but few consistently walk the talk.

Christopher Pirie: Getting to know your investors before taking a check is critical—whether it’s through direct conversations, speaking to founders of other portfolio companies, or researching how they’ve supported those ventures.

Christopher Pirie: Especially with pre-seed or seed-stage investors, their track record of guiding founders through growth says a lot about the kind of support they can provide—and their connections to the next stage of investors.

Christopher Pirie: We’re very thoughtful about who we bring around the table. Another important factor is whether they’ve operated in your tech or market space, because that affects their ability to help you with hiring, capital access, and business development.

Alejandro Cremades: Now imagine you go to sleep tonight and wake up in a world where DeCycle Bio’s vision is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Christopher Pirie: It’s a world where our business has successfully displaced one or more traditional chemical manufacturing processes with more sustainable alternatives.

Christopher Pirie: I don’t expect us to be the only company driving this shift, but I hope we’ll play a meaningful role in this broader transition toward sustainable, scalable chemical manufacturing.

Alejandro Cremades: So, Christopher, let’s look at the past for a moment. Imagine I put you in a time machine and take you back to your MIT days—those moments when you were thinking about co-founding a company. If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

Christopher Pirie: That’s a great question. At that time, I think there were a few key lessons I hadn’t yet learned.

Christopher Pirie: We touched on my experience at Manus Bio and the professional growth I had there. Then there was Verveo, where I became more dispassionate and pragmatic as an entrepreneur.

Christopher Pirie: If I could wrap all that learning into one story and tell it to myself coming out of my PhD, I think it would have made my journey a bit smoother. There are always growing pains, but sometimes you need to hear it from yourself for it to sink in.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. For those listening who would like to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way to do that?

Christopher Pirie: You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out through the contact page at dcycle.bio. Drop me a note—I’m always happy to support early-stage founders.

Christopher Pirie: I try to support locally here in Seattle and also through the broader MIT entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Christopher Pirie: I’ve had both successes and failures, and I believe the world needs more entrepreneurial leaders to guide us forward.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Christopher, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Christopher Pirie: Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.

*****

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