By Abbas Kazimi, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC
Hospitals were never meant to be familiar to me, yet for over twenty years MD Anderson became a place I could navigate by heart: the cafeteria where families gather between updates, the hidden cafés where you grab a moment to breathe, the lobbies where hope and fear sit quietly beside each other. I know the hallways that lead to conversations no family ever wants to have, and I know the small relief of stepping outside to feel the humid Houston air after hours at a loved one’s bedside.
This October, my mother passed away at home after years with breast cancer in the same room my father passed away seven years earlier after his MDS turned into AML. Becoming “orphaned to cancer” is a phrase I never thought would apply to me, yet I have realized how many people live with versions of the same story.
While there are many hard moments in the journey for the families of cancer patients, the hardest moments are the last conversations — the moments when their oncologist has nothing left to give.
“We have run out of options, and the tumors grow as they remain untreated. It’s best to start giving [them] comfort.”
That finality stays with you. And it’s also what fuels me — why I, and so many of us, work in drug discovery and development, and why we stay committed to it.
Biotech’s Quiet Engine: Determination in a Cynical World
People outside biotech see the cost of a drug.
People inside biotech see the absence of one.
I’ve lived my entire adult life in bio-pharma — forming companies, advising founders, and now leading one. And what continues to strike me is how far the public narrative sits from our lived reality. Outsiders see pricing, margins, and mega deals. Insiders see the absence of a therapy that should have existed. What they also miss is that many people in this field carry their own losses where many of us have sat in hospital rooms wishing for an option that wasn’t there.
Most people in biotech didn’t choose it for predictability; they chose it because they want the next family in that room to hear a different sentence. That motivation shows up quietly, usually in the effort to understand imperfect data, in the patience to test whether a signal is real, and in the willingness to stop or redirect a program when the evidence demands it.
Grief can sharpen your focus, but rigor moves the science forward.
Personal experience can shape purpose, but it cannot dictate decisions. One responder matters profoundly, as I understand that now in a deeper way, but one datapoint cannot drive a program as well. We owe patients the discipline of evidence, the humility of uncertainty, and the willingness to stop when the data asks us to. The evidence eventually tells us whether a therapy has the strength to reach approval and truly change lives.
What This Means for Building Companies
Progress happens when personal motivation and data-driven judgment work together.
What truly builds a biotech isn’t jargon or frameworks. Capital efficiency. Portfolio discipline. Clear go/no-go gates. These ideas matter and they help keep teams focused. But, none of them work without something more basic: people who care enough to keep going when the work gets confusing or slow or frustrating.
Great teams carry resilience into failure, creativity into constraint, and urgency into every small decision because they know a patient, someday, will rely on them. We remember that behind every mechanism, every model, every IND package, there are real patients and families waiting for better answers than the ones my family was given. That mindset is what turns a research project into a real therapeutic effort.
Where Nimbus Fits In with My Mission
At Nimbus, science is our vehicle. Purpose is our driver.
I have often wondered whether my personal experience with cancer would pull me toward one part of our pipeline at Nimbus more than another. Instead, I found something broader: a vision driven by a simple belief that patients need therapeutic options, wherever it shows up. Our programs span oncology, immunology, and metabolic diseases. Each therapeutic space looks different on the surface and have their own unique challenge to develop, but they all start from the same place: something is missing for these patients. Every debate, every paused molecule, every long data meeting carries an unspoken truth: these choices will matter to real families. And eventually, the pharma partners — the shepherds, as we call them inside our office walls — who we believe will deliver our agents to patients most effectively and make the most meaningful impact.
Losing my parents has not hardened me, but instead brought me clarity. Experiencing death strips away ego and reminds us that time is our most precious currency and turns for me company-building from a strategic pursuit into an act of service. We don’t get to choose which diseases touch our families, friends, and loved ones, but we do get to choose how we respond. For me, the response is simple:
Honor their memory by building therapies that give other families more options.
Push the science forward with discipline and conviction, and stay grateful for the privilege of doing work that can change a life.
To continue supporting this mission, we created The Kazimi Family Endowment for the Institute for Data Science in Oncology (IDSO) at MD Anderson. It is one small way of turning grief into contribution and keeping our parents’ legacy alive in the work ahead. A memorial page for my mother can be found here.
