Elizabeth Iorns
Co-Founder & CEO, Science Exchange · 4 appearances on the record.
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founderexecutivescientistinvestor@elizabethiorns ↗elizabethiorns.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Elizabeth Iorns is a cancer biologist and entrepreneur who co-founded Science Exchange in 2011, a platform that streamlines outsourced scientific research. She also co-founded the Reproducibility Initiative to validate published scientific findings and served as a biotech expert and part-time partner at Y Combinator.
40statements → 20claims → 13claims resolved → 77%fully supported → 3.8/5average certainty → 1.98/5average debate potential → 4said about them ↓
10 supported 1 partly supported 2 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 20 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 18 assertions · 7 opinions · 13 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 20 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 13 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Elizabeth argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Their most notable contradicted claim
Iorns: Diet research shows strong responses only in small subgroups
“All of the research that's been done on diet and dietary interventions, if you actually look at the clinical data, it suggests that
There's a subgroup of people that respond to that dietary intervention very well, but the vast majority don't really at all, and…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
Everything Elizabeth Iorns said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Iorns: Replication studies show most published scientific results are not reproducible
“So the reality is that the results that have been generated show that most published results are not reproducible.”
Iorns: Biotech Startups Do Not Need Business Co-Founders
“People have this Kind of illusion that they're, like, antisocial or, like, they don't understand business, and I just, like, completely disagree with that. I think scientists have to be very articulate. They frequently present in front of large audiences. They…”
Iorns: Backing Only Repeat Founders Excludes Academic Scientists with Domain Knowledge
“If you just fund like the same people over and over again, Then yes, they'll be like really efficient. They'll understand what it takes to do this, but you'll also miss out on all of the other innovative, different thinkers who are out there who actually made …”
Iorns: Scientific experiments often have 10x price differences for equivalent results
“So for example I was seeing literally 10 times price differences for an equivalent experiment because people really just didn't have access to what should it actually cost. And we see that still on Science Exchange today is that when people go and look for mul…”
Iorns: Biotech spinouts rely too much on figurehead principal investigators for funding
“I think that's still very difficult for scientists, particularly PhD and postdoc scientists, so they actually make the discoveries in these labs, so they're the ones doing the work but a lot of the time for them to actually be the ones to be the founder of the…”
Iorns: Scientific founders should not prioritize finding a business co-founder
“No, I don't think that should be a goal. I think I actually do have a business co-founder, so you would probably be mad that I say that, but, and he's great, and I literally couldn't have built Science Exchange without him, but not because of his business back…”
Iorns: Future biotech will rely heavily on direct consumer payments
“I believe that the future will definitely involve a strong component of user pays, so I think the products that are developed will have to be in indications that the patients are actually willing to pay for”
Iorns: RNA Editing Will Face Lower Regulatory Barriers than CRISPR DNA Editing
“So I think there you'll see less of a regulation barrier because you're not editing the actual genetic code. You're just editing the end product.”
Iorns: Specific circulating factors driving young blood rejuvenation remain unreproduced
“What hasn't been very successful is trying to figure out what causes the effect. So when people have tried to analyze the blood of young mice and old mice and say, what is the growth factor or the hormone or what is it that's causing this? There's been controv…”
Iorns: Research market information inefficiency creates high-margin marketplace opportunities
“So that was something that was a big a big learning point for me at that time point was you could actually create a company that had margin in that space because the market was so inefficient due to the lack of information.”
Iorns: Universities own research results, making academic spinouts challenging
“Because actually when you work in academia, the results you generate don't belong to you, so I think that's kind of a common misperception that, you know, universities actually own your work, so it's often a challenge to spin those results out of the universit…”
Iorns: Science startups should wait for grant-funded R&D before joining accelerators
“Actually I do think a good time to join is once you've already generated a lot of the R&D from grant-funded work, because you don't want to spend years and all of this money trying to You know, pursue a research hypothesis. You really want to be in the develop…”
Iorns: B2B marketplaces need major suppliers onboard for enterprise adoption
“I think one of the important lessons that we learned quickly was for this to be a really effective solution, it had to be the platform that was used for everything at the companies that were using it, so not just one-off Come and shop on the marketplace, but a…”
Iorns: Biotechs cannot pivot like software because science either works or fails
“Biotechs are different because you can't really change the outcome of the science. Like the science is the science. So either it works or it doesn't work. And that's very different than software where you can actually, you know, pivot around and keep developin…”
Iorns: Founders can start biotech companies without holding a PhD
“I think if you're building a biotech company, you obviously have to build a scientific team and then you'll end up with PhDs in your team, but you can be a co-founder without a PhD.”
Iorns: YC Biotechs Advance Market Understanding Rather Than Lab Experiments
“So they may not make, you know, a really significant advancement in terms of the experimental work, but they certainly will make a significant advancement in terms of understanding the market and understanding what steps are required To get to the market in a …”
Iorns: YC Biotechs Get Rapid Results by Outsourcing Lab Studies
“So if they can outsource those experiments, then they'll often be able to get results quickly, and we have had a lot of success with that with our biotech companies where they've actually worked with external companies that are already up and running to do, fo…”
Iorns: Biotech Startups Face Tech Risk Rather Than Market Demand Uncertainty
“I think one of the interesting differences between biotech companies and sort of software, just tech companies is that the actual market, there's not really that, that question. Like if you're a biotech company and you're going to cure Alzheimer's disease, the…”
Iorns: Early drug discovery phase suffers from industry-wide underinvestment
“Particularly the earliest phase of discovery, that is an area where there's significant underinvestment just generally in the industry.”
Iorns: Pharma companies source innovation primarily by buying clinical-stage biotechs
“The pharma companies are desperate for buying in innovation, and so they're really looking for companies to get to that initial proof of concept in a human, in human studies. So that, that's really where a lot of their innovation is coming from, is biotechs th…”
Iorns: Postdocs face a severe shortage of academic faculty jobs
“And there's this pretty well-known phenomenon called the postdocalypse that Ethan Pilstein came up with, which is this concept that there's so many postdocs now and no jobs for them. So there's just nowhere for them to go in terms of staying as An assistant pr…”
Iorns: All marketed drugs require commercial industry to reach patients
“Because the reality is, you know, all innovations that come to market are through industry. So, you know, you don't see drugs on the market that came from academia. They were all, many of them discovered in the earliest phases, the basic research was done in a…”
Iorns: Internal Incubation Model by Traditional Biotech VCs Is Highly Successful
“That's very effective. I mean, that's like Third Rock, Atlas Polaris flagship. Like that's all of those big funds take that strategy and it's very successful. They have created a lot of, you know, the most well-funded and recognized companies that you probably…”
Iorns: Early-career academia carries huge risk due to lack of job certainty
“There's a huge degree of risk of staying in academia when you're at that stage in your career because there's no job certainty. So you're definitely like, what's going to be my next job? I don't know, I could be a postdoc forever.”
The other half of the tape: Elizabeth Iorns's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Adora Cheung 2Craig Cannon 1
Statements about Elizabeth Iorns, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (4)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders · Y Combinator | Oct 3, 2018 | 41m |
| Elizabeth Iorns on Biotech Companies in YC · Y Combinator | Sep 13, 2017 | 33m |
| Founders of Science Exchange, Goldbely, and The Flex Company Discuss Fundraising · Y Combi | Aug 16, 2017 | 6m |
| YC Panel at Female Founders Conference 2015 · Y Combinator | Feb 23, 2015 | 1m |