Business Of Biotech

Matt Pillar

The Business of Biotech is the pod dedicated to leaders of emerging biopharma firms. SUBSCRIBE to our new newsletter at www.bioprocessonline.com/bob. We bring you insight into organizational, finance and funding, HR, clinical, manufacturing, and regulatory challenges you’ll face as you navigate your company from an idea to success in the clinic. Each episode features guest commentary and best practices from accomplished founders and biopharma industry luminaries. The Business of Biotech is produced by Bioprocess Online and Life Science Connect and brought to you by Cytiva.

  • 57 minutes 35 seconds
    The Anti-CDMO with CTMC's Jason Bock, Ph.D. and KSQ's Thomas Leitch

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    This isn't your typical drug sponsor + CDMO story. In fact, CTMC's Jason Bock, Ph.D. says you shouldn't even classify his company a CDMO. He's not wrong. While some of the company's services aren't dissimilar from those offered by a contract developer, CTMC began with a more fundamental mission in mind -- to help early clinical-stage companies like KSQ Therapeutics prepare for and enter their clinical stage on the best possible footing, and with the best possible clinical partner in the MD Anderson Cancer Center. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, KSQ's Thomas Leitch and Dr. Bock join us to share the story of CTMC's evolution, KSQ's partnership need as it advanced its lead phase 1 TIL therapy for solid tumors, how the partnership unfolded and who's on the hook for what as KSQ begins its clinical journey. 


    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    20 May 2024, 10:00 am
  • 40 minutes 13 seconds
    A New Prescription For PBMs with Allan Shaw

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    Back by popular demand, biopharma industry opinionator extraordinaire Allan Shaw rejoins the Business of Biotech to expose the murky role Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) play in the last, costly mile of the drug distribution supply chain. Allan pulls no punches in his criticism of the current rebate structure and shares why the model leaves patients and manufacturers stuck with the spiraling tab. He also explains why an election year, all-time lows in public perception of the pharmaceutical industry, and inflation might create the perfect storm for real change. More than a gripe session, Allan offers up advice for biotech leaders entering the fray, shares his own ideas for systemic reform that would reward patients, not PBMs, and waxes on what, and who, it might take to change the broken paradigm. 

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    13 May 2024, 10:00 am
  • 59 minutes 10 seconds
    New Apps For AI in mRNA With Anima Biotech's Yochi Slonim

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    From San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to Tel Aviv’s Silicon Wadi, software business entrepreneur Yochi Slonim made a name for himself in global tech hubs around the globe. Notably, he was co-founder of billion-dollar Mercury Interactive, which HP acquired for $4.5 billion, and previous to that a leader at Tecnomatix, which sold to UGS and was acquired by Siemens. Those big deals that came on the heels of several other Yochi Slonim software startups.  But Slonim's not in software development anymore. Not for the software industry, anyway. He's now leveraging his tech chops to develop something with far more potential impact: drugs. On this epsiode of the Business of Biotech, we'll learn about his foray into biopharmaceuticals with Anima Biotech, a company he’s been building for the past ten years and which boasts pipeline partnerships with heavyweights Abbvie, Takeda, and Lilly. 

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    6 May 2024, 10:00 am
  • 59 minutes 11 seconds
    Circular RNA with Orna Therapeutics' Tom Barnes, Ph.D. and Advancing RNA's Anna Rose Welch

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    As if Orna Therapeutics' CEO Thomas Barnes, CEO isn't a enough to draw you in to the Business of Biotech, we teamed up with Advancing RNA Editorial & Community Director Anna Rose Welch to co-host this week's episode. Together, Anna Rose and I press Dr. Barnes on his transition from academia to biotech, the therapeutic proposition of circular, or "O" RNA and why it holds great potential to best linear RNA constructs, the novel, platform- and partnership-based approaches Orna is taking to address B-cell lymphomas and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, viral vector and lipid nanoparticle complexity, and a whole lot more.

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    29 April 2024, 10:00 am
  • 1 hour 1 minute
    Physician + Biotech Builder with Tome Biosciences' Rahul Kakkar, M.D.

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    Novel technologies aren’t interesting to Rahul Kakkar, M.D. unless they help patients. Sounds rational, but it’s actually a unique perspective in a platform-crazed biotech industry. Dr. Kakkar’s worldview is shaped by his work as a physician—work he continues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital even as he builds Tome Biosciences, where he serves as President & CEO. Tome, which is developing programmable genomic integration technology, is the latest of Dr. Kakkar’s entrepreneurial efforts—he previously led Pandion Therapeutics to a $1.85B acquisition by Merck and Cordivia to a $2.1B acquisition by Novo Nordisk. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, Dr. Kakkar shares why he took on the brainchild of two MIT scientists under his wing, the nascent inflection point for gene editing therapy, how his work as a physician informs his biotech leadership, biopharma’s bad rap, and a whole lot more. 

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    22 April 2024, 10:00 am
  • 56 minutes 54 seconds
    Commercial Readiness with ImmunityBio's Bobby Reddy, M.D.

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    This episode of the Business of Biotech begins with a personal story about my dad and the standard of care in bladder cancer, before shifting to the work that Dr. Bobby Reddy and his team at ImmunityBio are doing to change that standard of care. They're painfully close. Dr. Reddy, Chief Medical Officer at ImmunityBio, gives us a long look behind the curtain at the commercial preparations the company is making as its lead Phase 3 candidate, Anktiva, nears the goal line in non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). From grassroots engagement with physicians and urologists to making a global press to share clinical results, Dr. Reddy offers plenty of insight into biopharma commercial readiness, and good reason to hope for nearly a million NMIBC patients in the U.S. alone. 

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    15 April 2024, 10:00 am
  • 49 minutes 47 seconds
    Precision Drug Delivery with Ampersand Biomedicines' Jason Gardner, D.Phil.

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    Ampersand Biomedicines CEO Jason Gardner, D.Phil. first took the leap from a global pharmaceutical giant to a startup at the forefront of transplant medicine innovation. Since that time, he's seen most of the ups and the downs that come with biotech leadership, and in his latest venture with the Flagship Pioneering-backed Ampersand, he's putting all those hard-fought lessons to good use. On this episode of the Business of Biotech -- the final (finally!) of several recorded at the JPM Healthcare Conference in January -- Gardner shares how and why he's applying his experience to the buildout of a precision medicine platform company, his thoughts on how big data and AI are influencing the precision medicine space and putting the "tech" in "techbio," his company's acquisition strategy, most recently demonstrated by Ampersand's acquisition of AbCheck, why "paranoid optimism" is central to his company's culture, and much, much more. 


    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    8 April 2024, 10:00 am
  • 40 minutes 16 seconds
    Funding Alzheimer's Tx Dev with ADDF's Karen Harris

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    We've really been looking forward to dropping this episode with Karen Harris, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Mission-Related Investing at the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation. While the markets have warmed a bit since we recorded this episode, Karen's thoughtful perspective on the sometimes tumultuous Alzheimer's therapeutics space is valuable to any drug developer working in the cognitive medicines arena. In this episode of the Business of Biotech podcast, we follow Karen's journey from institutional investment banking to the incredibly gratifying work she does now, helping to fund the novel biopharma companies that are working in earnest to solve an emotionally burdensome and expensive problem. Karen shares ADDF's strategy and offers plenty of insight into the value proposition that venture philathropy offers the biotech community. Tune in!

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    1 April 2024, 10:00 am
  • 1 hour 13 minutes
    The AI Impact with Generate:Biomedicines' Mike Nally

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    Few drug discovery and development concepts are as hyped, and as such, draw as much polarity from drug developers, as machine learning and artifical intelligence. One company on the bullish end of the spectrum is Flagship Pioneering's Generate Biomedicines, which bills itself at the "intersection of machine learning, biological engineering, and medicine." To get a grip on the "generative biology" work it's doing and the AI/ML impact it anticipates in the discovery and development of therapeutics, as well as clinical trials, we sat down with veteran biotech builder Mike Nally, CEO at Generate and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. 


    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    25 March 2024, 10:00 am
  • 47 minutes 52 seconds
    Strategic Deals with CinRx's Gavin Samuels, M.D.

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    Gavin Samuels, M.D. found his work as an intensive care physician boring. After earning his M.D., he did that for a few years before moving into intensive care management roles. It wasn't until he left the hospital and entered biopharma that he found his footing, cutting his teeth in business development at places like Merck, Pfizer, Quark Pharma, and Teva. He even headed growth strategy at Lonza for a while. Now, he's Chief Business Officer and General Partner at CinRx Pharma, where a deep pipeline of early- to late-stage candidates keeps him on his dealmaking toes. Within minutes of our conversation, Dr. Sameuls' introspective reflections on biotech dealmaking and negotiations planted this episode firmly on the Business of Biotech podcast highlight reel. 

    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    18 March 2024, 10:00 am
  • 31 minutes 32 seconds
    Serial Success With Triumvira's Rob Williamson

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    Rob Williamson's mind and hands have shaped more than 20 biotech startups, leading some to IPO and landing others firmly in Big Bio through acquisition by companies like Merck. Hanging around as many successful exits as Williamson has seen, one might become expert via osmosis. But Williamson isn't passive about honing his vision for progressive therapeutic dealmaking. He's an active leader, and for this episode of the Business of Biotech, he took a breather from a hectic agenda at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference to share some introspection on the work he's done, the work he's doing at Triumvira with T-cell therapeutics in oncology, the big opportunities in cancer therapeutics, and what's coming next.


    You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!

    11 March 2024, 12:00 pm
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