About Unleash Therapeutics
Our origin story
It began with one dog’s fight against cancer.
In 2020, our co-founder, Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, received devastating news: her beloved French Bulldog, Lily, had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. As a cancer biologist and entrepreneur, Elizabeth was intimately familiar with the frontier of human medicine. She was immediately struck by the disparity between the advanced options available to humans and the limited, decades-old treatments offered in veterinary care.
As she navigated Lily’s treatment, Elizabeth realized the problem was larger than oncology. The experience exposed a fundamental "translation gap" across the entire animal health industry. Despite billions spent on validated human therapeutics, the infrastructure to bring those breakthroughs to companion animals was missing.
Unleash was born to build that infrastructure.
Together with long-time collaborator Dan Knox, Elizabeth set out to bridge the gap between human and veterinary medicine. What began as a search for a better cancer treatment evolved into a mission to industrialize veterinary innovation—ensuring that the next generation of modern medicine is accessible to every pet.
Our mission
Every pet deserves access to the frontier of modern medicine.
While human medicine has entered a golden age of innovation, veterinary therapeutics have remained largely stagnant. This disparity isn't due to a lack of scientific potential, but a lack of infrastructure designed to translate human-validated breakthroughs into animal health.
Unleash is building that infrastructure. We are creating a vertically integrated platform to identify, develop, and scale high-impact therapeutics—starting with oncology and expanding to address the most pressing unmet needs in pet care. Our goal is to ensure that the next generation of medicine is never out of reach for our best friends.
Our founders
Unleash was founded by Dr. Elizabeth Iorns and Dan Knox, long-time collaborators with a shared vision to transform how science serves our best friends.
Elizabeth is a cancer biologist and entrepreneur; Dan is a technology and operations leader. Together they spent more than a decade building Science Exchange, a global R&D platform that redefined how scientific research is conducted at scale.
When Elizabeth’s French Bulldog, Lily, was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, it exposed a fundamental gap in the animal health industry. That experience inspired the creation of Unleash—a platform designed to bring human-validated breakthroughs to the pets who need them.
Their partnership blends scientific rigor with operational execution, driving a mission to ensure companion animals have access to the same level of medical innovation that humans do.