Telocyte Newsletter, Q2 2023: Tigers and Dragons

If you hunt only rabbits,
Tigers and dragons go uncaught.
Li Bai (李白)

As I sit at my desk, watching spring’s first daffodils arrive, I’m reminded of the hope that the spring season brings us all of us – at least those of us in the Northern hemisphere. On a broader cultural plane, it’s a time for Easter, Pesach, and Ramadan, to say nothing of the dozens of other cultural occurrences that come with the lengthening of our days. It is equally a time of hope and new beginnings for Telocyte.

A thousand years ago, one of our world’s most beloved poets, Li Bai, had much to say about spring and new beginnings, hopes, and dreams, but he also made a deeply accurate summation of the limits of those same beginnings. Too often, the problem is not that we lack the ability to create new beginnings, but that our aspirations are too narrow. With a sky above us, too often we stare only at the few feet in front of us. Keeping both feet on the ground is critical, but it is equally important that we see the sky and that we realize what is possible if we only open our eyes completely.

Most current work – whether targeting Alzheimer’s or other age-related diseases – targets symptoms and biomarkers of disease, without regard to the deeper causes of those symptoms and biomarkers. We see the rabbits; we miss the tigers and the dragons. The result is comingled surprise and disappointment when our proposed therapies fail to stop or reverse diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

At Telocyte, we set our traps for the tigers and dragons of life.

Yet, our feet are planted firmly as well. We are now in the midst of closing a round of funding with a committed group of investors. The future remains unknown and uncertain until it becomes the present, but we have worked hard for several years. We now have the expertise, the people, the understanding, and – it now appears – the funding to move ahead. We know the market, we know what to do, we know how to do it, we know who to do it with, and we’re ready to move ahead.

Now, let’s see if we can catch the tigers and the dragons.