Richard Yu is the CEO & co-founder of Abalone Bio, a therapeutics company developing functionally active antibody drugs for challenging membrane protein targets like GPCRs.
Before founding Abalone Bio, Richard served as Scientific and Operations Director at QB3's life sciences incubator in San Francisco, co-founded Green Pacific Biologicals focused on algae biofuels, and was a Research Fellow at the Molecular Sciences Institute studying cellular information processing.
At Abalone Bio, Richard leads development of the FAST platform—Functional Antibody Selection Technology—which uses engineered yeast cells to screen 100 million antibodies simultaneously for functional activity rather than just binding affinity, integrating synthetic biology with machine learning to discover GPCR agonist antibodies.
With a research collaboration with Pfizer, breakthrough CB2 agonist antibodies showing efficacy in models of liver fibrosis and diabetic neuropathy, and a background spanning structural biology at Yale, computational protein engineering, and serial entrepreneurship, Richard's journey demonstrates how interdisciplinary experience can unlock previously undruggable targets.
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