Why I’m Investing in Siren Biotechnology: A Universal Gene-Therapy Playbook for Solid Tumors

My Exponential Portfolio is my personal record of the early-stage investments I’ve made in breakthrough technologies. Each entry highlights founders and companies working on scalable solutions that can transform entire industries—not just incrementally improve them.

The thread running through my investments is simple: While I will mostly be investing in AI and robotic companies,  I also believe the future of healthcare will be built on platforms that scale across diseases, shorten development timelines, and turn once impossible problems into solvable ones. That’s why I invested in Siren Biotechnology, a company pioneering what it calls Universal AAV Immuno-Gene Therapy™—an approach designed not for one cancer type, but for many.

Cancer today is still fought as a case-by-case battle. Each therapy tends to be bespoke: one disease, one drug, one incremental step forward. Siren Biotechnology’s vision is to flip this model on its head—to create a universal therapeutic backbone that can be reused across multiple cancers, starting with the deadliest brain tumors but ultimately designed to treat solid tumors more broadly.

A New Hope for the Toughest Brain Cancers

Siren Biotechnology’s lead program, SRN-101, is aimed at high-grade gliomas, among the most aggressive cancers with some of the bleakest survival statistics. In late 2024, the FDA granted SRN-101 both Orphan Drug and Rare Pediatric Disease designations—important regulatory tailwinds for a disease area where children and adults alike have few, if any, effective treatment options.

Today, SRN-101 is in the IND-enabling phase, preparing for the final safety and toxicology work needed before human clinical trials. Along the way, Siren Biotechnology secured nearly $4 million from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to accelerate preclinical development and support its FDA interactions. The company also unveiled encouraging preclinical data at the 2025 ASGCT Annual Meeting, where its scientists presented transcriptomic analyses and immune-activation data showing the therapy’s potential to safely and effectively ignite the immune system inside tumors.

This is a bold milestone: a small, first-time biotech led by a scientist-founder is advancing a platform that regulators, funders, and the research community are all beginning to recognize as a potentially transformative modality.

The Founder’s Journey

At the center of this story is Dr. Nicole K. Paulk, PhD, founder, CEO, and president of Siren Biotechnology. This is her first company, but she is far from untested. Nicole has spent nearly two decades immersed in the science of adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene therapy, training at OHSU, Stanford, and UCSF. As a faculty member at UCSF, she pioneered next-generation AAV platforms, building tools that are now widely used by other labs and companies in the field.

What makes her story compelling is not just her scientific pedigree—it’s the leap she made. Walking away from a secure academic career to found Siren Biotechnology was not a financial decision; it was a mission-driven one. She recognized that the conventional model of gene therapy—developing highly specialized, one-off programs for rare genetic diseases—was too slow and too narrow. With Siren Biotechnology, she chose to design a platform that could be universal, scalable, and clinically practical.

That kind of vision, paired with execution, is exactly what I look for in founders. Nicole is not only building a therapy; she is building an entirely new way of thinking about how we treat cancer.

Backed by World-Class Investors

When Siren Biotechnology launched in 2023, it quickly attracted a syndicate of top-tier investors: Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Innovation Endeavors, ARTIS Ventures, Civilization Ventures, and Savantus Ventures. Each of these firms is known for backing companies that aim to reshape categories, not just participate in them.

Founders Fund has built its reputation by supporting ambitious, transformational technologies that push boundaries. Lux Capital is a specialist in deep-tech and life sciences, providing long-term support where engineering and biology intersect. Innovation Endeavors, co-founded by Eric Schmidt, focuses on companies at the frontier of science and computation. ARTIS Ventures has been a consistent champion of TechBio—ventures at the convergence of biology and advanced technology. Together, this group provides not just capital but also the strategic scaffolding needed to take an early-stage concept through clinical trials and into scaled deployment.

In parallel, Siren Biotechnology opened a community round on Wefunder, allowing patients, families, and everyday believers in science to invest alongside world-class VCs. This hybrid of institutional rigor and grassroots support ensures that the company grows with a broad base of stakeholders aligned around its mission.

Why This Fits My Exponential Portfolio Thesis

In My Exponential Portfolio, I invest in founders who tackle massive health challenges with technology-first solutions, demonstrate feedback loops that compound with time, and balance practical early execution with transformative long-term arcs.

Siren Biotechnology embodies all three.

The long-term potential of Universal AAV Immuno-Gene Therapy™ lies well beyond high-grade gliomas. It represents an early case study in how we might reimagine cancer care as scalable, repeatable, and universal—rather than fragmented, bespoke, and prohibitively expensive. By using the same backbone across multiple indications, Siren Biotechnology is building a platform that could drastically accelerate the pace at which therapies move from concept to clinic.

Over time, this model could normalize the idea of modular oncology treatments—where the core design is proven and trusted, and the focus becomes adapting it to different tumor environments. That means lower costs, faster timelines, and broader accessibility, even in rare or neglected cancers where traditional development paths have failed patients.

The implications are profound:

• For patients, it could mean safe, potent, locally delivered therapies that activate the immune system only where needed—reducing side effects while maximizing efficacy.

• For healthcare systems, it could mean a shift from resource-intensive, one-off treatments to scalable platforms that expand impact with each new dataset.

• For society at large, it signals the possibility of democratizing cancer treatment—turning a bespoke science into a reusable toolset accessible far beyond the elite academic hospitals where innovation often begins.

That’s what excites me most. Not just what Siren Biotechnology is building today, but what its universal design could unlock across oncology in the years to come. It’s the potential to go from one therapy for one tumor, to a framework for treating many. Investors who wish to learn more about this opportunity should visit Wefunder.