40 AND UNDER: The Silicon Valley biotech stars who are backing startups aiming to cure disease, prolong life, and fix the food system

Title: Principal, DFJ

Age: 28

Before becoming a principal at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm DFJ, Mohammad Islam used his background in engineering to work on the technical team of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC arm.

At DFJ, Islam focuses on "frontier technologies" like machine intelligence and biotechnology — arenas where startups would essentially be creating brand-new markets for their goods.

He's especially excited about companies like Memphis Meats, which aims to get its first cell-based duck and chicken products in restaurants by year's end, and Zymergen, a robot-powered factory that turns bacteria into new materials.

Title: General partner, GV

Age: 33

Blake Byers, the son of famed venture capitalist Brook Byers, started doing biomedical research as a high-school student at Stanford University. His research spanned biomedical engineering, stem cells, Parkinson's disease modeling, and more, resulting in multiple journal papers and patents.

Byers continued running research projects throughout his academic training and his early years working at GV (formerly Google Ventures).

As an investor, Byers partners with founders of life science and digital health companies — such as Collective Health, a startup offering tech-savvy tools for managing health benefits, and genetics-testing company 23andMe — to create a global health impact.

He also helped incubate a new cell-therapy company, Pact Pharma, which is working on technology that reprograms a cancer patient's immune system cells to attack the disease. Byers has raised over $125 million for the company while serving as interim CEO. Pact will announce a new CEO later this year.

Title: West Coast Partner, Canaan

Age: 35

Julie Grant got her start in the life sciences during her freshman year in college while interning in a professor's organic chemistry lab. Since then, she's nabbed degrees in science and business from Stanford, Cambridge, and Yale. Grant also spent six years at pharmaceutical giant Genentech, where she worked on a pancreatic-cancer drug and learned the ropes of the federal drug-approval process.

"I love being able to take blue sky, completely novel research from universities and translate that into something that could be useful for society. That's my true north," Grant told Business Insider.

Since joining health and technology venture-capital firm Canaan as a partner in 2013, Grant has backed promising startups including Protagonist Therapeutics, which aims to create new drugs for autoimmune disorders like inflammatory bowel disease, and Glooko, which makes an app to help manage diabetes.

Title: Principal, 1955 Capital

Age: 32

Benjamin Tseng is a principal at venture-capital firm 1955 Capital, where he focuses on advanced technologies in energy, healthcare, food, agriculture, and new manufacturing models.

Tseng got into venture somewhat accidentally, when what he thought was an informational interview with international venture fund DCM turned out to be a real one.

"I convinced DCM to take a chance on me," Tseng told Business Insider.

Tseng spent four years at the firm before joining a messaging startup he helped seed called Yik Yak, which raised more than $60 million in VC funding under his helm.

Tseng is interested in the potential for emerging technologies to help feed the planet and spot disease early. He's also focused on healthcare and renewable energy.

His firm has a particular emphasis on connecting startups in North America and Europe with market opportunities in China, which has some of the largest global demand for new products focused on health and clean tech.

Title: Bioengineering lead, CRV

Age: 40

When he graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science, Dylan Morris was looking for a place to have an influence on the world. Shortly after starting graduate school at Caltech, he found venture capital.

His VC career started at Innovation Endeavors, a tech-centric firm that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cofounded in 2010. But two years later, when George Zachary, a partner at venture-capital firm CRV, had a scare with cancer, he picked Morris to head up the firm's leap into bioengineering.

Morris believes we can use what we've learned about cancer to treat — and eventually cure — a handful of other diseases, including those that occur when the body's immune system begins attacking itself or other parts of the body, also known as autoimmune diseases.

"Taking what we've learned about cancer and applying it to autoimmune, neurodegenerative, and infectious diseases — that's where we're headed," Morris told Business Insider. "Our immune system is the center in our bodies that keeps disease at bay and what we're learning about it is too exciting for words."

Title: Healthcare associate, Venrock

Age: 29

Shortly after Megan Blewett earned her doctorate in chemistry at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, her research project turned into a startup. Called Vividrion, the company has since received $101 million from pharmaceutical giant Celgene to create drugs for hard-to-treat diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. Later, Blewett founded a medical analytics company called VoxHealth.

Despite her prolific research background, Blewett felt like she could have more of an impact from the finance side. Last year, she joined heavy-hitting venture-capital firm Venrock to focus on biotech and pharma startups.

"In a Ph.D. lab you talk to the same people over and over again. On this side of things, you're learning about a new topic every single day," Blewett told Business Insider.

Blewett is interested in the opportunities that new tools like CRISPR are opening up for basic research and tackling disease.

Title: Investor, Spark Capital

Age: 29

With a portfolio that includes Twitter, Slack, Cruise, and Oculus VR, Spark Capital has earned its reputation for taking risks on product visionaries. Tech investing wunderkind John Melas-Kyriazi leads the firm's investments in companies using life sciences and software to tackle biotech-adjacent problems like food security and climate change.

He works closely with the founding teams at Full Harvest, a platform that connects food and beverage companies with farms to buy surplus and imperfect produce, and Wild Type, which is working on technologies that would allow any meat to be cultured in a lab.

Melas-Kyriazi, who earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Stanford University before dropping out as a doctoral candidate, was previously one of the first employees at StartX, a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs affiliated with the top-ranked university.

Title: Vice President, Venrock

Age: 35

After working in a molecular biology lab at Harvard, the Texas native Racquel Bracken met a fork in the road. She could either go to medical school, as many of her colleagues did, or she could explore the business side of the medical system. She opted for the latter, and has never looked back.

As a vice president at Venrock, Bracken sits on the board of Cyteir Therapeutics, which aims to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases using emerging science on how DNA repairs itself. She's also a board observer at Inscripta, a gene-editing company that recently nabbed its first patent for a CRISPR protein, which can be used to tweak genes within the cells of mammals and microbes.

Dan Estes, another individual on this list, says Bracken is "one of the most energetic, thoughtful, and insightful VCs around."

When deciding whether to back a startup, "I consider whether your therapeutic can have a large, demonstrable effect on the population," Bracken told Business Insider. "Can you be best in class? First in class? Those are fundamental tenets that I look for."

Title: Partner, Sequoia Capital

Age: 34

Michael Dixon is interested in what he calls the "big, tectonic plate shifts" happening in the commercialization of healthcare.

He works with companies at the intersection of healthcare and enterprise software, including AirStrip Technologies, a medical software company that delivers real-time, critical patient data to their mobile devices, and Clover Health, a new kind of insurance provider that's focused on driving down costs and improving outcomes for elderly and low-income patients.

Dixon also sits on the boards of Comprehend, Cortexyme, Health Catalyst, Implantable Provider Group (IPG), Percolate, and Stemcentrx.

Before joining Sequoia, Dixon earned his degree in finance and accounting from Boston College and worked as an associate at Fidelity Management & Research Co.

Title: Partner, Lux Capital

Age: 39

Renata Quintini believes in leveraging technology to improve quality of life. She partners with entrepreneurs whose ideas aim to transform the future of humanity.

"Technology has been giving humans superpowers," Quintini told Business Insider. "As we continue to better understanding (through gene sequencing and other diagnostics), modify (through gene editing), and create biology (through synthetic bio), we are unlocking these superpowers and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, both in terms of our life span and quality of life."

At Lux Capital, she's invested in a brain-nutrition company that's still in stealth, as well as RDMD, which is accelerating treatments for patients with rare disease.

Before becoming a venture capitalist, Quintini left her hometown of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to earn her business degree at Stanford University. She also worked as an investment manager at Stanford's endowment, which invests in dozens of private equity and venture funds.

Title: Resident Data Scientist, 8VC

Age: 31

Francisco Gimenez, the resident data scientist at biotech-focused venture-capital firm 8VC, made his first moves in the industry by showing up to meetings he wasn't invited to.

A recent Stanford grad, Gimenez had already amassed a few years' venture experience at San Francisco-based VC firm Formation 8 when he jumped to a biotech-focused offshoot of the firm called 8VC. As it began to take shape, Gimenez made an effort to learn as much as he could as quickly as possible — starting with showing up to random internal gatherings where he could learn what the firm needed.

Today, Gimenez focuses on the firm's investments in biotech and artificial intelligence.

He's particularly excited about a handful of portfolio startups, including Synthego, which sells CRISPR kits for scientists experimenting with the tool; Hexagon, a drug-discovery company; and Senti, which is focused on creating programmable seek-and-destroy cells that could help treat disease.

"So far we've been using chemistry to hijack the mechanisms of biology," Gimenez told Business Insider. "But soon ideally, we should be using living entities to modulate our internal living organism.

Title: Scientific Director and Partner, IndieBio

Age: 31

Armed with doctorate degrees in chemical biology and immuno-oncology (a research approach that aims to use the body's own immune system to fight cancer), Jun Axup built two of her own startups — MYi Diagnostics and Biochemies — and worked as a scientist in several others. She left that side of the startup world to help others succeed.

She's now a partner at leading biotech hub IndieBio, which provides funding and resources to biotech startups working on everything from cultured meat to non-opioid painkillers.

Axup has her eye on two main industries: food and disease diagnosis.

"We've come so far in our understanding of the molecular makeup of foods and how we can use that to address global problems like climate change," Axup told Business Insider.

Title: Principal, Versant Ventures

Age: 29

Less than six months into his career at San Francisco-based venture firm Versant, Graham Walmsley signed off on one of the largest Series A financing deals in biotech history. That deal, completed in 2016, launched BlueRock Therapeutics, a cell-therapy company formed in partnership with pharmaceutical giant Bayer.

Today, Walmsley is a principal at Versant, where he specializes in healthcare and biotech investing. He recently led the firm's investment in a clinical-stage therapeutics company focused on treating non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which is poised to be a significant burden on the US healthcare system due to the growing number of patients with the disease.

Walmsley is also the head of business development at two other therapeutics companies in Versant's portfolio, both of which are based in San Diego — Jecure, which uses traditional drug development approaches to treat NASH, and Pipeline, which aims to treat Multiple Sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases by rebuilding the protective sheaths surrounding the nerves in the brain and spinal cord.

Title: Associate, Canvas Ventures

Age: 26

At Canvas Ventures, Jennifer Kaehms finds ambitious companies focused on digital health, as well as software, artificial intelligence, and consumer tech.

But it's other activities that make Kaehms a standout venture capitalist. She oversees the firm's liaison programs at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. Students at these top-ranked colleges sit in on partner meetings, organize events for the firm, and develop thesis areas around tech investing — an unparalleled opportunity.

Participants often go on to work at venture-capital firms or startups, according to Kaehms.

After earning her degree in bioengineering from University of California, San Diego, she moved to Silicon Valley to set up a hacker house focused on artificial intelligence and hardware companies. There she learned how to build companies.

On a whim, she sent a cold email to Rebecca Lynn, a former chemical engineer and cofounder of Canvas Ventures, and wound up with a job.

Title: Managing partner, Refactor Capital

Age: 36

Zal Bilimoria may be one of the most qualified operators in Silicon Valley. The Wharton School graduate spent 10 years building features and products at Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn, before joining top venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

As a partner who helped launch the firm's Bio Fund, one of the first specialized funds to emerge from Andreessen, Bilimoria sourced deals at the intersection of biology and engineering. He doubled down on his investment thesis with the creation of a new firm, called Refactor Capital, which backs founders solving "fundamental human problems."

"Marc Andreessen said in 2011 that 'software is eating the world.' We believe 'biology is eating the world'; as in, literally everything around us is being re-thought and re-engineered using biology instead of pure chemistry," Bilimoria told Business Insider.

He said he's most excited about the "tremendous" opportunity for biotech to transform consumer and industrial applications outside healthcare — spanning the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and "the ingredients in almost every physical product we touch."

Among Refractor's investments are PathAI, an AI platform that aids doctors with cancer diagnostics and treatments, and Checkerspot, which uses fatty acids from algae to create outdoor recreation products like moisture-wicking fabrics and other materials.

Title: Partner, Frazier Healthcare Partners

Age: 38

Dan Estes has spent nearly a decade at healthcare and pharmaceutical venture firm Frazier Healthcare Partners, where he focuses on backing drug companies that treat everything from cancer and rare diseases to skin conditions.

Racquel Bracken, who nominated Estes, said he's "a true partner to his teams and fellow investors — always adding value and providing helpful and strategic perspectives. He's not afraid to roll up his sleeves and partner with the entrepreneurs he backs."

At Frazier, Estes serves on the boards of four pharmaceutical startups, including Cirius Therapeutics, which is focused on tweaking the human metabolism to NASH, and Sierra Oncology, a cancer therapeutics company. He also recently led one of the earliest-stage investments ever signed at Frazier with a company that remains in stealth mode but aims to have a drug in the clinic within the next two years.

"The best investments are the ones where you can very clearly see where a physician would use this drug. Where you can answer the following questions: How would it help patients? What would that look like?" Frazier told Business Insider.

Title: Venture partner, GV and director of product management, Flatiron Health

Age: 31

Vineeta Agarwala's résumé that reads as if it belongs to someone who's been in the workforce longer than she's been alive. Agarwala, a medical resident at Stanford University, juggles two other jobs as a venture partner at GV, Alphabet's venture arm, and director of product management at Flatiron Health.

The cancer-technology company collects clinical data from cancer patients, like medications patients have taken and how they responded to them, to aid understanding of how cancer drugs work in the "real world." Agarwala is leading the development of national databases that combine data for drug development and oncology research.

Agarwala kicked off her career with degrees from Stanford, Harvard Medical School, and MIT, where she studied the genetic basis of disease.

She previously worked as an early data scientist at health-tech startup Kyruus in Boston and a consultant for biotech clients at McKinsey & Co. in New York.