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Elizabeth Iorns, Co-Founder & CEO, Familiar Therapeutics
When Elizabeth Iorns' French Bulldog, Lily, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2020, she went looking for answers. As a cancer biologist and co-founder of Science Exchange, she knew where to look. She found promising research on a cancer treatment already tested in dogs, but a problem remained: no company had developed it for veterinary use. Lily never got the treatment. She passed away in 2021.
That experience eventually led Iorns and her longtime co-founder, Dan Knox, to launch Familiar Therapeutics, a veterinary biotech working to bring promising human medicines to dogs and cats. In just five months, the company has assembled 13 drug programs, secured pharmaceutical partnerships, and raised $5 million.
By building on years of existing human drug research, Familiar aims to bring selected treatments to pets in significantly less time than the seven to ten years traditional development typically takes. We spoke with Iorns about the science, the business opportunity, and what it will take to bring more treatment options to pets.
Let's start with Lily. In 2020, your French Bulldog was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Can you take us back to that experience, what you discovered while searching for treatments, and how it ultimately led you to start Familiar?
Lily was my French Bulldog, and she was really a member of our family for many years. She was also an office dog at my prior startup, Science Exchange, and was always with the team as we were building the company in its early days. Everyone who met Lily loved her.
In 2020, Lily was diagnosed with canine glioma, which is very similar to glioblastoma in people, and it's a terminal diagnosis with a terrible prognosis. I'm a cancer biologist, so I knew what I would want if Lily had been a human patient. I'd want a checkpoint inhibitor, something like Keytruda. But there was nothing approved for dogs. That’s true for the vast majority of these really serious diseases in dogs and cats.
So I went through the research literature, and I found a checkpoint inhibitor that a team at the University of Minnesota had tested in pet dogs with brain tumors. It looked really promising, but no company had ever taken it forward for canines, so there was no way for Lily to get it. When you're a pet owner and you read a study like that, and you realize there was something that could have helped your dog but it was never developed, it's really heartbreaking.
Even though Lily passed away in 2021, Dan and I decided to license that checkpoint inhibitor to a small company we set up called Unleash Therapeutics (which we ran as a side project while we were still running Science Exchange). We partnered with Ardent Animal Health to combine it with their personalized cancer vaccine, and we ran a registrational study in dogs with osteosarcoma. We just got the results, and it achieved its registrational endpoint. By serendipity, the final dog in that trial is also named Lily, and she's still doing well. That full-circle moment was really meaningful to me.
That experience is really the launching pad for Familiar. It showed us there are great assets out there, that biotech companies are open to partnering on a companion animal indication, and that if someone does the work all the way through to approval, these medicines can actually reach pets. Familiar is us taking that lesson and doing it at scale.
For those hearing about Familiar for the first time, what exactly is the company building, and what problem are you trying to solve?
Familiar is a veterinary biotech company. Our goal is to give vets proven, FDA-approved disease-modifying treatments for serious diseases in dogs and cats, where today they often have very few options.
The problem is really that gap between human and animal medicine. People treat their pets like family, but there are fewer than ten new drugs approved by the FDA each year for companion animals, versus more than fifty for people. So for a lot of serious diagnoses, vets are choosing between older drugs, human medicines used off-label, or no treatment at all. And unfortunately, a lot of serious cases end in euthanasia because there just isn't a good option.
I think it's a really big ask for general practice vets to prescribe human medicines off-label without clear information about the dose and the safety in a dog or a cat. That's why we think it's absolutely critical to do this through the FDA, on a regulated pathway, so vets get a medicine with a proper label they can feel confident using.
The way we do it is we partner with pharma and biotech companies and license the companion animal rights to their drugs. Then we do all of the veterinary work, the studies in dogs and cats, the manufacturing and the FDA process, all the way through to approval and commercialization. We focus on indications where either nothing is approved, or what's being used today just controls symptoms. In most of the areas we're working in, we'd be the very first approval.
You spent more than a decade building Science Exchange with Dan before launching Familiar together. What made you decide to enter animal health, and what convinced you there was a business opportunity here?
Dan and I have been working together for about fifteen years. We started Science Exchange in 2011 and built it into an outsourced R&D marketplace used by big pharmaceutical companies and many biotechs for drug discovery and development. So we always got to see the really exciting breakthrough science our customers were working on, all on the human side. And because we worked with all of those companies, and their large networks of CROs and manufacturers, we built relationships with R&D leaders across the entire industry. You don't get that kind of exposure working at any one company.
At the same time, Dan and I both really love our pets. They're family. And then with Lily, we saw firsthand how big the gap is. Unleash started as a side project, partly out of necessity, but it became the foundational example for us. We found a great asset, partnered with it, and got it through a registrational study, and we realized you could do this at a much bigger scale.
So when we sold Science Exchange and started thinking about what we wanted to do next, a lot of things converged. The more we dug into the industry, the more we saw that there's so much innovation on the human side that just isn't being translated. There's a whole universe of assets out there.
The business case comes from that. Pet owners spend a lot on their animals, and for most of the indications we're working on, there's nothing approved. That's very different from human drug development, where you're always figuring out whether you'll be first, second, or third line. And honestly, it's the most fun thing we've ever worked on. Every single person you talk to about it gets excited, because everyone wants this to exist for their pets.
Human medicine has made enormous advances in treating cancer and other serious diseases, yet many of those treatments never reach pets. Why does such a large gap still exist between human and veterinary medicine?
A big part of it is where drug developers focus their capital and time. On the human side, a company's teams and budgets are pointed at human patients, which makes sense. If one of their drugs could also help dogs, developing it for animals isn't anyone's job, and most of those companies don't have veterinary expertise in-house. So the program just sits there.
Part of it is that developing a drug for animals is real work in its own right. You need studies in the target species, the full manufacturing package, and FDA review. And manufacturing the drug product is one of the longest and most expensive parts of drug development, on either side.
What really struck me, though, is that the science is often already there. The targets are validated, the mechanisms are understood, and sometimes there's even a published study in pet dogs showing that something works. It's just that nobody has done the translation work all the way through to an approval. That's exactly what happened with Lily, and it's the gap Familiar is built to close.
Familiar is building on years of existing human drug research to shorten the path to veterinary approval. How does that approach work, and what are the biggest challenges in getting these treatments approved?
A lot of it comes down to where we start. A new animal drug developed from scratch can typically take seven to ten years. We're starting with drugs that have validated targets and often already have extensive manufacturing packages and safety data. Because manufacturing is one of the longest and most expensive parts of the process, being able to reuse that work is a really big advantage.
Then, because we focus on indications with significant unmet need, where nothing is approved or what's used is only symptom control, the FDA has pathways that let you run a single pivotal efficacy study. And where it fits, there's the conditional approval pathway, which can bring a medicine to vets years earlier while the full effectiveness work is completed.
The other thing I don't think everyone understands is that the risk profile is very different from the human side. The most common reason biotech companies fail is that a drug fails in the clinic, usually for efficacy, because the pivotal trial is often the first real test in patients. In animal health, you can run a pilot study in pets who actually have the disease, under an IACUC protocol, in a matter of months, before you ever run your pivotal study. So by the time you get there, the chance of the drug not working is much lower.
The challenges are more about execution. You have to get the dose right in each species; you need great clinical partners and owners who are willing to enroll, and the FDA holds you to the same standard on every technical section. So for a lot of it, the main job is doing every step properly and as quickly as we can.
Familiar has raised $5 million and, in just five months, built a pipeline of 13 programs, secured pharmaceutical partnerships, and advanced four lead programs toward clinical studies. How have you been able to move so quickly, and which milestones are you most excited about?
Honestly, the speed has surprised even us. A lot of it is experience. Dan and I have done this before, and one of the lessons from Science Exchange is that you can create a lot of problems by hiring too many people too quickly. So our core team is small by design. In addition to Dan and me, our team includes a group of senior animal health experts: Stacy Ross, our Head of CMC and Regulatory; Karen Greenwood in regulatory affairs; Mark Steele in CMC regulatory affairs; and Tiffany Prentice in analytical chemistry.
Between them, they have more than a hundred years of combined experience at companies like Zoetis, Elanco, Bayer Animal Health, and Loyal, and they've contributed to more than fifteen FDA approvals. We also use AI really extensively, and that lets a small team do a lot.
The relationships also matter a lot. Because we worked with pretty much every major pharma company at Science Exchange, we can reach R&D leaders across the industry. And we have an amazing advisory board of veterinary specialists, people like Tim Fan at Illinois, Pete Dickinson at UC Davis and Jessica Quimby at Ohio State, who help us choose the right programs and design the right studies.
We also built a diverse portfolio on purpose. We didn't want the company to depend on one or two assets. So today we have four lead programs and nine more behind them, and we can move them forward in parallel.
The milestone I'm most excited about is our first clinical study. FAM-010 is for hemangiosarcoma, which is one of the most aggressive cancers in dogs, and there's nothing approved for it. The pilot study opens at the University of Illinois this fall, with Tim. We've also opened two INADs with the FDA, signed our first pharma partnerships, and we're preparing studies in immune-mediated disease and spinal disc disease in dogs.
Elizabeth Iorns and Dan Knox, co-founders.
When you speak with potential investors, what gets them most excited about Familiar? Is it the size of the opportunity, the science, the business model, or something else?
What usually gets them most excited is the combination of the opportunity and the speed. Investors see a really large, growing market where people treat their pets like family, and yet there's this huge shortage of FDA-approved drugs. Then they see how much we've been able to do in five months, and how capital-efficient the model is.
We're very focused on building a really large business, and taking our assets through to commercial stage ourselves, but with a strict focus on getting to self-sustainability as early as possible. With Science Exchange, we raised around seventy million dollars in total before it was acquired. But today it's possible to build a company in a way that just wasn't possible when we started Science Exchange, or even a few years ago. With AI and a strong network of research partners and manufacturers, a small team can now do work that used to take a much bigger company and a lot more capital. That lets us create a lot of value very quickly, and I think investors really appreciate that. And Dan and I have both invested in this round ourselves, so we're all in.
We've also benefited from being repeat founders. A lot of the people who invested knew us personally. That includes Pioneer Fund, which is a really strong Silicon Valley early-stage fund, and Icehouse Ventures, which is one of New Zealand's most active venture investors. Dan and I are both originally from New Zealand. And then BreakTHRU, which is a syndicate of animal-health industry leaders and lots of veterinarians. I love that so many vets invested, because they see the unmet need every single day.
The other thing investors get excited about is that the science flows both ways. Studies in pets with naturally occurring disease can give really strong evidence for human drug development too, which opens up a lot of value beyond the veterinary market.
You've already secured licensing agreements with leading biopharmaceutical companies. What's the business case for these companies to partner with Familiar, and what makes this model attractive to both sides?
There are a few reasons, and it will vary by company. For a lot of them, it genuinely comes down to the data. With animals, you can test a drug in a clinical indication very quickly. You can run a pilot study in pets in a matter of months, which is very different from the years of work it takes to get a molecule into a phase two study in people.
I think that's something people really miss. Most drugs that fail in human clinical trials fail for lack of efficacy, and that's really a target validation problem. Everyone is always talking about how to get better predictive validity from preclinical models, and this is just sitting right in front of us. There are now a number of examples, in canine lymphoma or canine atopic dermatitis, where a drug developed for people worked in dogs and then went on to succeed in human phase two studies. It's the same disease, just in a different patient population.
The second piece is manufacturing. The manufacturing requirements on the veterinary side are essentially the same as on the human side, and we have to complete them earlier, because you need the finished drug product for the pivotal study. So we often end up advancing the manufacturing for our partner, and they can reference that work.
And then the commercial side. We only license the companion animal rights. The partner keeps all of the upside on the human side and gets royalties on veterinary sales once we commercially launch the drug, so it's sort of the cherry on top. Companies are already familiar with ex-US licensing deals, and this is a similar idea, except it's ex-human. We very much see it as a win-win.
How is AI helping you accelerate your work at Familiar, and where do you see it making the biggest difference?
We use AI extensively. We're not an AI company, but it's built into almost everything we do.
The biggest use right now is prioritization. We have AI agents that we built and trained in-house that pull together the patent literature, published papers, conference data, and information from the FDA itself, so we always know what approvals and clinical results are coming out on the human side. Then we look for a real breakthrough on the human side and a companion animal indication with shared disease biology where there's nothing approved yet, and that helps us score our priorities. That matters a lot in animal health, because the white space is so large. So really the question is which ones you do first, and in what order.
We also use it to source available molecules for in-licensing, and then computationally dock them to the canine and feline versions of the target, using structural modeling tools. That used to take months of lab work just to rule out a drug that doesn't bind. Now it can be a really quick computational check. It's a big part of how a small team can run this many programs in parallel.
Drug development is notoriously expensive and time-consuming. How are you thinking about building a sustainable business while keeping treatments affordable for pet owners?
Yes, this is really important, because on the veterinary side, pet owners are mostly paying out of pocket. A medicine only helps if families can actually afford it, so affordability is something we build in from the very beginning, in which programs we choose and which modalities we go after. We want to bring treatments to market that a typical pet owner can say yes to.
That's one of the reasons our portfolio is mostly small molecules. They have a really good cost-of-goods profile when we go to manufacture and distribute them, and they can be prescribed in general practice, not just at specialty hospitals.
On our own costs, we start from assets where a lot of the investment has already been made, and we use an outsourced network rather than building our own facilities, which is very much what we did at Science Exchange. I also think getting more medicines approved through the FDA will help with cost for families, because approved products can be covered by pet insurance.
For the business itself, we're building a portfolio so we're not dependent on any one program, and the goal is to get products to market and use that revenue to fund the next wave of programs. We expect to commercialize a lot of our products ourselves, using the newer veterinary ordering and distribution systems, and for some it may make sense to partner with an established player.
Looking ahead, what should we expect from Familiar over the next 12–24 months? And if everything goes according to plan, what could the future of veterinary medicine look like five or ten years from now?
Over the next year or two, it's really about clinical data and getting products to market. Our FAM-010 pilot study at Illinois starts this fall, and over the next several months we expect to reach some important milestones with the FDA on our lead programs. We'll be starting clinical trials across several of our other lead programs too. The goal is to get products to market and create revenue that sustains the next wave of innovation. We'll also be at VMX in January, so we'd love to meet vets who want to be part of future studies.
Longer term, I'd love it if, whenever there's a breakthrough in human medicine, there's a clear path for that same science to reach dogs and cats within a few years. And I'd love to see companion animals become a normal part of human drug development, because it's such a good way to get clinical efficacy data quickly. We'd likely have far fewer failures in clinical trials for humans if that were the case.
For Dan and me, this is our legacy company, the one we want to work on for the rest of our careers. Five or ten years from now, I hope a family sitting in the vet's office after a really hard diagnosis hears about real treatment options. That's what I wanted for Lily.
