The Mission

Today, 90.6% of therapies fail in human clinical trials. As a result, one drug costs an average of $2.3B and takes 12 years to get to market.

Animal studies is where the fate of therapies is decided. Once a drug has entered humans, very little can be changed.

But today, almost all animal studies are done by hand, with methods that date back to 1960s. This makes studies expensive, low throughput and irreproducible. Only about 30% of animal studies replicate even in the same animal species.

Olden is building Animal Research 2.0.

Our tech turns an ordinary cage into an automated data collection platform that captures 20 biomarkers of health continuously, at a scale and reproducibility no other existing method can match. This means lower cost studies and more reproducible studies, as well as less human bias.

If we succeed at bringing this to the world at large, the impact could be enormous.

Reducing clinical trial failure rate even by 2% would mean 10 more drugs approved per year - more than the output of the two world’s largest pharma companies combined. The impact of your work at Olden could equal that of a full Big Pharma department.

Founding In Vivo Scientist

The role. Be the first in-house scientist at Olden. You'll run the animal studies that build and validate entirely new measurements of health, cognition, strength, vision, hearing and more, and turn them into products used by labs worldwide.

Why you'll love this.

• You build new science, not the same assay for the hundredth time. You design and validate brand-new automated measurements and watch them ship.
• Your work gets seen. You'll be an author on the papers it produces, and our science travels (our first customer paper passed 100k views).
• You grow instead of narrowing. You work across biology, hardware, and AI/computer-vision, side by side with the engineers building the tech.
• First scientist hire: early, high-ownership, and you shape how Olden does science as it scales.
• The science you want to do, at 10x speed, without the red tape, grant cycles or the decade-long wait to find out if it mattered.

What you'll own.

• In-house mouse studies for metric and neural-network validation; dataset design and labeling; experimental design; and occasional scientific support for customers.
• You'll shape the design of new tech, feed the engineers data and feedback, run the studies that validate our measurements against gold standards, generate the data behind our papers and possibly also write the papers.

What you will achieve.

• Test and validate new tech for automated vision, hearing, weight, temperature, cognition, and strength testing, all to be launched by January 9, 2027.

Details:

• Comp: Meaningful equity + $70-120k cash depending on experience/fit.
• Location: On-site in South San Francisco, California

You might be a fit if (Required).

• A PhD or a BSc/MSc with at least 1 year of hands-on animal experience in neuroscience, physiology, animal behavior, or a related field.
• Rigorous thinking and a solid grasp of basic statistics