HUMAN PROOF OF CONCEPT

After a run-in with Joe Biden’s entourage, Marty Lehr joined me on the first full day of the 35th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. He discussed his prior life at Osage University Partners, his current life at Context Therapeutics, and how his romantic life once dictated his professional life.

In 1999 Glen de Vries started a tech company in his 5th floor walkup - very much the NYC equivalent of a garage in Silicon Valley. Today Medidata Solutions continues to transform human drug studies with their clinical cloud platform. They are approaching 3M patients and a $3B market cap.

Glen explains how he plans to reach escape velocity with no exit strategy.  

And how he keeps his feet on the dance floor and head in the cloud.

Barry Kappel of Sapience Therapeutics and Gerard Honig of Symbiotic Health joined me for a fireside chat at the Foundation2016 conference.  

Held at Cold Spring Harbor Labs, it was a beautiful day in pre-election times. If you listen closely you can hear local wildlife in the background: birds chirping and (the) James Watson roaring around campus in his Porsche. 

I asked them about their startup companies, and after they critiqued the VC industry, I gave them a pop quiz.

Moderna is the Kendall Square startup developing a variety of drugs made of messenger RNA, leaving your cells to translate them into proteins. Forging a new ecosystem doesn’t come cheap: in only 5 years, Moderna has raised nearly $2B and is valued around $5B.

Its financial position may be the envy of its biotech neighbors, but it is also polarizing. It has generated intrigue and invited scrutiny, including in a recent article that questioned both the science and culture under its CEO, Stéphane Bancel. Quite the juxtaposition since it was just announced that Moderna is - again - one of Science’s Top Employers, and has even moved up in the ranks. What is going on over there?

In this episode, Stéphane is the messenger. He takes us inside the how and why of Moderna.

Today, Francois Nader is merely President of the Jesra Foundation, trustee of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, Chairman of Acceleron Pharma (XLRN), Director of ArRETT Neuroscience, Clementia Pharma, and Advanced Accelerator Applications (AAAP), and Advisory Board member of the Open Future Institute.

But you might remember him from such former roles as President, CEO and Executive Director of NPS Pharma (NPSP now Shire) prior to its $5.2B acquisition, Venture Partner at Care Capital, 2013 Ernst and Young National Life Science Entrepreneur of the Year, Chairman of BioNJ, and Board member of BIO, Noven (NOVN), Trevena (TRVN), and Baxalta (BXLT now also Shire).

He joins me to describe the art of being small while thinking big, and to share some decidedly unconventional wisdom.

Bill Newell is a lawyer turned large molecule wrangler. He’s CEO of Sutro Biopharma, and their special sauce - literally - lets them manipulate and manufacture antibodies with the kind of control scientists have had over small molecules for decades.

Where other biotechs find scientific challenges can threaten their survival, with Sutro it comes down to strategic challenges. And Bill has led them to enviable partnerships, capital, and optionality.

Sutro has an unfair advantage: Bill Newell.

Home or away, Brian Bloom is recognized for his wildly successful conference and boutique investment bank.

With a mission to uncover and cultivate Canadian life sciences companies through scientific focus and range of services, Bloom Burton & Co., which he co-founded in 2008, has risen swiftly to be profitable and globally unique.

And its Bloom Burton Healthcare Investor Conference achieved actual hockey stick growth since it broke onto the Canadian biotech scene 5 years ago.

But hockey and cheerleaders do not go together. Brian’s knowledge of the Canadian biotech scene, and his seat on umpteen boards, leads him to a frank, no-apologies stance on the industry.

Brexit isn't the only newsworthy and dismal problem out there. Consider a couple of others - some VCs would rather not touch them with a ten foot pole, yet Kate Bingham is taking a stab at them:

There's Alzheimers. This past October, SV Life Sciences where she is Managing Partner, became the fund manager of the Dementia Discovery Fund. Launched with a charity and six pharmas at the table, and $100M in the bank, the fund brings a fresh operating model to the tired approach.

And then there's gender diversity. Following the JP Morgan biotech investors conference this year, Kate co-authored an open letter to the industry, alongside Karen Bernstein of Biocentury. It queried why “the smart, dynamic women in our industry are forced to choose between demeaning themselves and making business connections.”

Kate has the knack for looking at improbable problems and seeing a path to success. Perhaps because she herself is an improbability in the industry - having found her way into it 25 years ago, on account of a lucky phonecall and a mistaken post-it note. She joins me on this episode to talk closed deals and open letters.

Have you heard the one about the guy who founded a biotech startup in the middle of Manhattan? Around a repurposed, hydrolysable, insoluble small molecule? To treat massive strokes, traumatic brain injury, and other neuro indications? Using a highly translatable rodent model? During the financial crisis? Unpartnered? And who spent $1M per year to generate randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind PhII results that show a 50% reduction in mortality from strokes that were too big for other trials and too late for other treatments?

That’s Sven Jacobson. He is CEO of Remedy Pharmaceuticals, and was Partner at Carrot Capital Healthcare Ventures, the nontraditional VC that founded and funded Remedy.

For a long time, Remedy was one guy and one drug. But that drug, Cirara™, combats swelling in the central nervous system - a root cause of morbidity and mortality in multiple diseases. Today Cirara™ is still investigational, but in line to be the first therapeutic advance in the stroke field in over 20 years. And an in-progress Ph II trial in TBI has it poised to tackle football as well.

Sven doesn't have a swelled head - and he doesn't want anyone else to have one either.

Colin Cahill swears he didn’t grow up wanting to be a life science venture capitalist. But you would think he had planned it from his very first job cleaning glassware. His path from there to Venrock may appear linear after the fact, but at the time it was based on serendipity plus a hunch he should stay close to both science and business for as long as possible.

In this episode, Colin deconstructs some of the great VC mysteries:

How do they decide which deals to do, since “there’s no rules-based decision paradigm for venture investing”?

Why, when other VCs have run screaming from med devices, has Venrock retained its breadth?

And what does “falling in love” mean when a venture capitalist says it?