Drew Taylor’s pitch is straightforward: he wants to make the latest advancements in the field of regenerative medicine available to everyone.
A former minor league baseball hurler, Taylor is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Acorn Biolabs, which he launched in 2017 after serving as the Chief Science Officer at Epic Capital Management for a decade. An injury derailed his road to Major League Baseball, but as Taylor said in a 2024 interview, it was probably for the best: “I believe I was a better scientist than baseball player.”
His Toronto, Canada-based company collects and cryogenically stores each client’s stem cells while its science team works on stem-cell-based therapies. Taylor got the idea when studying for his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, as he considered the dynamics of cell-based therapies for aging patients. “As we age, our cells are getting older, and unfortunately, as a resource, when we think about regenerative medicine, we're using our own tissues to regenerate ourselves,” he said. “If that capacity for regeneration is diminishing, we really want to do something about it.”
That “something” is the heart of Acorn, which itself is at the heart of what Taylor calls the “anti-aging revolution,” the key to which is “getting ahead of the game with prevention,” as he said in an interview last June. “Ultimately, aging is the accumulation of damage. And as we go through that aging process, it ends up manifesting itself as something we define as disease. If we can actually treat the effects of aging, essentially, we’re going to be staving off disease.”
If that sounds like a lofty goal, it’s because it is. Taylor calls this a feature, not a bug. “We’re just at the precipice of what we’ll be able to do in this space,” he said. He compares it to air travel, which, when invented in 1903, could only carry people 100 feet. “Fast forward 40 years, and the first passenger was finally carried across the Atlantic Ocean. Within another 10 years, we discovered supersonic flight, then within another 10 we landed on the moon. The acceleration of that technology became rapid and I think regenerative medicine is only at the point where we’re just crossing the Atlantic.”
That’s not another way of saying he’s at sea; buoyed by his co-workers, Taylor says, he has taken lessons from his truncated baseball career that have helped him push the boundaries of what’s possible in science. They say baseball is a game of failure, but it’s really a game of learning from failure, and that ethos is at the heart of Acorn’s business. “If you haven’t built that thick skin and toughness in another environment, it’s pretty easy to crumble or bolt,” he said. “But we’ve both lost before, fought back, and won. We know how to power through.”
