Who am I?!

I’m Alex Kesin!

And I hail from Long Island, NY—where suburbs achieve peak suburbanness. After briefly pursuing data science at the University of Michigan, I realized traditional academia wasn’t my path and instead spent the next year and a half immersed in biotech as an analyst at age1, a San Francisco-based life sciences fund fixated on longevity. Now, I'm doing something new - like writing this blog!

My particular obsession lies in leveraging biotech as a means to enhance healthy lifespan, especially addressing frailty-related diseases like osteoporosis and sarcopenia—the sort of challenges everyone faces eventually but few talk about effectively.

Quick fun-ish facts, because listicles are internet catnip:

Biking is the one aerobic activity I genuinely enjoy, which sounds like faint praise but isn’t.
I can sustain a ten-minute conversation in Chinese–a feat achieved mostly through stubborn repetition and sheer force of will.
Favorite films include The Social Network, because Sorkin dialogue is a cheat code for making nerds look cool, with Dune and Oppenheimer inching dangerously close to dethroning it.
For one fleeting moment in first grade, I was the best Hebrew reader in my yeshiva class, a distinction that has yet to prove lucrative.¹

What this blog is about

Pharma blogging today can feel like decoding FDA legalese or corporate PR disguised as insight, catering to hyper-specialized niches. Across the valley, meanwhile, the tech and venture community engages biotech mostly through oversimplified thought experiments ("Why don’t we just YC this?") as though cellular pathways respond to seed funding and demo days.

Pharma, if it's ever truly to be disrupted, first needs to be understood—not just in regulatory minutiae or biochemical pathways, but in broader cultural, economic, and existential dimensions. That’s the goal here: to provoke understanding, incite change, and perhaps entertain along the way.

Welcome! I sincerely hope you enjoy the ride.

Contact me

Email: kesin[at]umich[dot]edu

Twitter: @alexkesin

¹ Which is to say: I grew up Orthodox Jewish. My parents, both baal teshuvas, met through a matchmaker and had a brief but intense Orthodox phase—yeshiva, strict kosher, the works—before veering off in spectacularly opposite directions. My dad, who grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, eventually went full New Atheist and now eats bacon like it’s a personality trait, while my mom, a second-generation Long Islander, doubled down and became Lubavitch. I, caught somewhere between rebellion and apathy, landed agnostic—partially out of sheer contrarian reflex, but mostly because I find the familial glue of Judaism more compelling than the fine print.