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Sujal Patel, co-founder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology. (Nautilus Photo)
Nautilus Biotechnology CEO Sujal Patel had to deliver tough news on a Thursday morning call with analysts. The company has laid off 25 workers, or about 16% of its workforce, and pushed back by one year its target for commercializing its technology.
The good news?
Patel is confident that the company’s revised goal of releasing a product in late 2026 is financially and technically achievable. And its product could help address a crucial challenge in biotech and drug development — providing a platform that can identify and quantify all of the proteins in a biological sample.
“We have no debt. We’re in excellent financial condition,” Patel told GeekWire. The company has more than $206 million in the bank.
Science has “conquered the human genome,” he said, explaining that it’s quick and relatively cheap to sequence anyone’s DNA. What is trickier is figuring out which proteins are being made from the DNA in particular cells, which is the question being tackled by the field of proteomics.
“If we don’t understand proteins, we don’t understand cellular mechanics and the underpinnings of disease mechanisms,” Patel said. “So everyone wants to understand protein at a much deeper level, and every year the scientific community is more vocal about it — but existing methods to measure proteins in samples are incomplete.”
The company recently decided on a course correction in its scientific approach, choosing a solution that will take longer, but “lead to the highest performance product,” he added.
Nautilus has taken private venture capital from high profile investors and went public in 2021 using a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It initially traded at more than $10 a share — putting its valuation at over $1 billion. The stock dipped Thursday to just above $1 a share.
Patel is a veteran Seattle tech entrepreneur who founded the data management company Isilon Systems, which sold for $2.5 billion in 2010. He co-founded Nautilus with Stanford University associate professor Parag Mallick.
The company’s corporate and software operations are based in Seattle, while its core R&D work is done in San Carlos in Silicon Valley. Patel said the company aimed to make the layoffs substantial enough that another round won’t be required anytime soon, if at all.
And Nautilus should not face significant impacts from Trump administration efforts to slash research funding relied on by academic and nonprofit organizations. Potential Nautilus customers are most likely to be biopharma businesses that don’t take public dollars themselves, though they do build on research from publicly funded organizations.
“Nautilus has been on a mission now for eight years, doing something that is incredibly ambitious in the proteomics space and building a completely new platform using a new method that’s never been envisioned before,” Patel said. “And those things take time.”
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