Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to the Bioraasi Few and Far between podcast. I'm your host, Melissa Alice.
So how many of you are biotech enthusiasts? Always ready for the next adventure. My guest today has not only led expeditions in autoimmune and inflammatory disease, but also into the mysteries of a South American plane crash.
Trust me, Google him.
Isaac Stoner returns to the podcast to discuss his new adventure as CEO at Mind Immune Therapeutics. We'll take a look inside the novel way of treating Alzheimer's. We'll get a better understanding of drug development from the investor and operator side of the table. And we'll find out why building a biotech peer group in your hometown is so valuable. Also, be sure to stick around the lightning round questions. Okay, let's start the podcast.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Hey Isaac, great to have you on the podcast.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: Hey Melissa, thanks so much for having me on. This is exciting.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: I'm really interested in starting right off from the top about Mind Immune. Give me like the 62nd. What are you building?
What would winning look like in the clinic? Excited to hear about it, definitely.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: So here at Mind Immune we're taking a big swing. So we've set out to tackle some of the hardest diseases there are. Starting out with Alzheimer's, so majorly impactful disease, millions and millions of patients.
This is a disease without any good treatment options. Right now we have a couple of anti amyloid antibodies that have been introduced just over the past couple of years, but really all they do is slow decline, marginally, maybe 15 or 20% slowing of decline. At my immune, we've taken a radically different way of looking at Alzheimer's. Instead of looking at this as a disease of the brain, we're looking at this as a disease of the immune system.
So the data we have generated, the evidence we have generated, starting with samples from patients, so postmortem autopsy samples, is that really what this is, is an immune response to amyloid plaques that's causing damage to neurons? This is what's responsible for this decline. So if this is indeed an immune disease instead of really a CNS disease, it just happens to be an immune disease that presents in the brain. We can treat this disease by correcting that bad behavior of the immune system, correcting that immune defect. So that's the fundamental approach that Mind Immune has taken towards some of these really, really impactful neurodegenerative diseases.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: That's fascinating and inspirational as well for what this potential is.
So here you are in your development plan. How are you thinking about the choice of taking an early swing in efficacy in Terms of your phase one planning or powering up for phase two, what direction do you think you're heading?
[00:02:53] Speaker C: It's really, you know, we've spoken to all the world experts about this, right? What is the right way to run an Alzheimer's study?
How do you stage gate your efficacy readouts?
You get completely different answers depending on who you talk to. If you talk to a pharma, a large, multinational, globally distributed commercial stage pharma company, they'll say no, run your, you know, you're sad, mad, your phase one single ascending and multiple ascending dose in healthy volunteers, establish safety, figure out your dosing and then run an 18 or 24 month powered hundreds of patients cognition endpoint efficacy study. And you know, that would be nice if we were sitting there with the bankroll of a large pharma company, but we're not. We're a scrappy little biotech. Therefore we're taking the alternate approach.
What we have set out to do and what we've designed in a very clever way is, is a way to extract an efficacy signal, biomarker based efficacy signal from patients in our Phase 1B in that multiple ascending dose study. And it's taken some real creativity to think through how to do that and how to appropriately de risk and power that study.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: And this is precisely what I'm hearing in many conversations where we have the accountability for a capital constrained drug development environment.
And how is it that we can collapse or get to signal in a way that is considered faster?
So what counts as signal for you?
[00:04:24] Speaker C: So for us, in six months we are not likely as possible, we are not likely to see a cognitive benefit. It's just too rapid. What we're instead looking for is utilizing CSF draws. We ought to be able to show a couple different things. First, show that our mechanism is our drug is doing what it's meant to do. So we are capturing the effect of our drug at impacting these specific immune cell populations that traffic into the cns. We should see evidence of those markers coming down in CSF over the course of six months. We should also be able to look at biomarker endpoints, proteomics endpoints that are known to correlate really nicely with cognition. And at six months these are things like gfap, NFL. So using the right CSF draws and the right number of patients, we think we should be able to prove both mechanism as well as show that glimmer of effectiveness of efficacy in a relatively rapid and relatively small phase 1b study.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: The two major constraints that we try and solve.
So in mitigating risk, what is something that moves? What are some of those big risks that perhaps moving quickly, you may be incurring more?
[00:05:42] Speaker C: Well, and that's the thing. What if we've gotten it wrong? What if six months is not long enough for these markets to move? So even though our drug is effective, we're just not seeing movement and therefore investors are not willing to support a subsequent study, that study that is powered up for cognition. So that's the big risk.
And a lot of what we've been focused on using translational animal models, as well as looking at the massive amount of human proteomics that's been produced by a couple of consortia studies, one led by Gates, is is there evidence to support this happening? Are we likely to be right? Right. Are we taking an acceptable level of risk by running this rapid biomarker powered response study in that phase 1B?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: And this is our challenge, that level of decision making despite all the uncertainty. But then this is the frontier of innovation.
[00:06:34] Speaker C: It's moving forward with acceptable risk. Right. Moving as fast as you can with acceptable risk. Not to patients, but acceptable risk that our hypothesis is wrong or that we have designed the study wrong. Right?
[00:06:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, indeed. So how do you uncertainty of that? How do you communicate that in a way that builds confidence? You have a lot of stakeholders that you're engaged with in this journey.
What ways help to instill the confidence that you need?
Right.
[00:07:02] Speaker C: So in moving into the clinic, first we gotta make sure that we have all the right people involved with that clinical development plan. Right. These are people who have been there, done that. We have right now is our chief medical officer, this gentleman, Mark Foreman, who has this uniquely perfect background to drive this plan. Right. So he's a physician.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Congratulations on new addition to Mind Me. That's wonderful.
[00:07:26] Speaker C: Oh, thanks very much. Now, this is my favorite part of the job and one of the things I'm best at is recruiting, attracting and closing a deal with really, really good people. So our team has come a long way.
So he has this uniquely perfect background, both in immunology, physician scientist, has run multiple AV trials previously, just an absolute expert. And so we're having him really drive the development of this plan.
A lot of the evidence towards the biomarkers we're going to be looking at is coming directly out of CSF draws from animal disease models. So you can actually get CSF from a mouse. It's very hard. You don't get a whole lot.
That's where we are building the confidence that these Markers should be moving in relatively short timelines, as short as three months. We've seen markers moving in mice, which is where we're pretty confident in six months, if we're going to see the effect we want to see, we're going to capture that in a six month treatment regime.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: So what's the sort of the near term milestones, your most important next steps in the next six to 12 months?
[00:08:33] Speaker C: Yeah. So we're deep in CMC land right now. We're moving from the kind of scale up batches into the big batch. Right. The GMP run that's bearing down upon us right now. So we're crossing fingers and toes that that GMP run goes very well. We're running that with a domestic CRO CDMO called Wheeler Bio. They've been excellent, really working with us.
As soon as that material is done, we'll be in GLP tox. So that monkey toxicology study is designed, it's ready to go. We've got EVA Tech doing that work for us. But each of these things is stage gated and everything has to work in order for the timelines to fit together nicely. And this is where making sure trains run on time has become a big part of my job.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Right, yes, of course.
Well, you have a really phenomenal community and network of folks that you fostered, especially in the Boston area. I know that you're well known for a networking event that you started, I don't remember how long ago, but tell me about that as the catalyst for part of your growth and what prompted it.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: Yeah, so completely accidental. Like all the good things in life, this started with.
Started with five or six friends getting together around a table at a bar to talk about recent comings and goings in biotech, things that are happening in the headlines.
And we started this 10 years ago with maybe just five or six of us. And then people started asking to join and this thing kind of gathered its own steam and now There are about 1200 people on a listserv.
We'll get together about once a month when I get my act together because it's just me sending an email into the void. We'll get together and we've had corporate sponsors start to line up to pick up the tab and get their name associated with this thing. So I've started sharing not just invites, but also my thoughts on the state of the Union. Right. The state of US biotech. Sharing other events, sharing job postings, sharing resources that I think are useful. And what this community has become is really a network that's very much kind of small biotech C suite focused people who need that peer group who need to bounce things off each other and you need to compare notes on especially how to make decisions. The role is all about rapid decision making in the face of uncertainty and having a peer group who is able to weigh on that is tremendously valuable. So it's been fun. This thing has grown. I don't have the time or bandwidth to put a lot of work into it. So it's kind of organically blossomed into this thing. It's very fun.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: But that may be why it's resonated so much as well, is that it is just reflecting what the ecosystem is benefiting from.
It is lonely at the top. As much as that expression gets bantered about, it's a true thing. And finding like minded colleagues in similar decision making quandaries is a great place to do some problem solving or networking.
[00:11:23] Speaker C: Yeah, and I don't mean to say this is just people at the top as well. This is open to everybody and I think that's part of the charm. No name tags, no RSVPs needed.
The criteria for getting added to the list is you have to find a way to get in touch with me. I think that's about the highest. That's high bar.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: They'll figure it out. People are pretty smart about that.
That's fantastic. Well, that leads me to take our conversation toward a lessons learned perspective because in what we do we're often seeking of course to learn from those who've been there before us. And you've had a lot of priorities, hard earned experience prior to this role and I'm really curious about what you're bringing and how that is influencing your approach with mind immune.
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Yeah. So I've spent a little time on the investor side of the table. I've spent a lot of time on the operator side of the table, especially at very early stage companies, 10 people or less.
Most recently I was running a company called Octagon Therapeutics. We were focused on autoimmune disease, specifically immunomodulation directed towards autoreactive B cells. Could we make these B cells stop responding to self ant and by doing so address a number of these autoantibody driven diseases. Really elegant hypothesis, really nice scientific work done. We raised the antibody, had the molecule in hand, characterized it, got the opportunity to ask the right question, run the right study and we got the wrong answer in a very definitive way that our drug was not doing what it was intended to do or what we had hoped it would do.
So wound that company down, which I won't sugarcoat. It really sucked. That wasn't any fun at all.
But at least that kind of instilled or reinforced that if you are able to design the study correctly, you should get a clean thumbs up or thumbs down. Right. The worst thing you can get is designing the study wrong such that you get a glimmer of a thumbs up or a thumb sideways and are not able to make an actionable decision based off the data you get.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Precisely. And in the ambiguity is in fact one of the costliest risks we face in drug development.
We have to be realistic. This is where attrition happens, especially in these early phases. And you're right, it's heartbreaking when you don't get too advanced. But knowing that decision sooner rather than later at least spares some of the waste or some of the ongoing risks.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: Well, an opportunity cost is real, right? None of us want to dedicate years, decades of our lives to something that's not going anywhere, right? So this is where you got to get that answered. Be kind of honest with yourself about how it's to be going.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Where do you think we under invest early and end up paying for it later.
[00:14:10] Speaker C: So I think a lot of drug discovery is people want a molecule, right? And they want to sprint forward with the molecule. As soon as they have indication that molecule is doing something, especially in vivo in an animal model, they're going to put their arms up, say we did it, we land on the aircraft carrier, we're going into IND enabling work.
We're in a structure mechanism world.
I think that translational studies really understanding even before you get into something as contrived as an animal disease model, you need to know the exact functional activity of your molecule, what it's doing towards human biology. And you can recapitulate a lot of that in vitro.
So good assay development over, investing in good assay development early on can save you a lot of pain and suffering later.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Good advice. Yeah, that's really important.
[00:15:06] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Isaac Stoner, CEO of Mind Immune Therapeutics. Mind Immune is focused on developing immunology first medicines for diseases of the brain like Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative conditions.
The company was founded on the exciting discovery that many degenerative diseases of the brain are actually driven by pathological immune activation.
We've focused on studying the specific immune cell populations that are contributing to inflammation and damage in these devastating diseases.
Our lead drug candidate, MITI101 targets these pathological Cell populations in the periphery, outside of the brain.
In effect, we're treating diseases of the brain with a drug that doesn't act within the brain, which is very exciting. If you're interested in learning more about our therapeutic approach as we move into clinical development in early 2027, please reach out. Thank you.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: So what do you expect most from your clinical and your development partners right now? You mentioned some of them, but where are your expectations at right now?
[00:16:12] Speaker C: For us, it's all about we want these to be true partners, right? Not vendors, not contractors. And so we want to be in the trenches together. If things are going sideways on a piece of work, we want to know that yesterday. Right. We want to be there side by side with these groups to troubleshoot, to get things back on track.
So making sure that we do have really, really open lines of communication with these groups has been very important.
And then again, these groups need to be.
There needs to be kind of flexibility baked into the plan.
The best laid plan does not survive first contact with the enemy.
And I forget which general said that, but this is the world we're in. Everything is going to hit some speed bumps and the ability to anticipate or immediately react to those speed bumps is paramount.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Sure. Well, and we have a bias for control in this type of work and yet we have to appreciate that there are many things that we cannot control for. We have to be able to adjust. Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. Well, let's go now to advice from the CEO chair. So if you're advising a new to CEO biotech leader, what are two or three things that they should really focus on, have an answer on before they lock in their phase one strategy.
[00:17:36] Speaker C: So someone who's not done it before, huh?
Surround yourself with experts. Right. And make sure you're listening and learning all the time.
A lot of people will have opinions and a lot of people will offer you those opinions. Just because they have opinions doesn't mean they're good opinion. Right? So make sure you have trusted advisors who have been there and done that that you can go to and lean on in that situation.
Other piece would be stay humble.
You don't know what you don't know. Be a sponge, be constantly learning.
It's going to be on you to make decisions. And the more you are able to learn in a short period of time, the more you will be able to make the right decision when faced with some uncertainty or when faced with something critical.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's it. It's interesting. Humility is an important characteristic and sometimes hard to earn.
Yeah. Fantastic.
All right. Well, Isaac, I'm ready for the lightning round. How about you?
[00:18:43] Speaker C: Sure. Sounds great.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Rapid fire. What's one metric every biotech should track? Weekly
[00:18:52] Speaker C: cash spend. This is where we focus in on that in a major, major way. So yeah, I think you should know every single bill that gets paid in a given week.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Yeah, indeed. How about the most underrated lever to accelerate a phase one program?
[00:19:07] Speaker C: Most underrated lever.
You know, again, the best way to make things move faster is opening up more sites. That's a problem that can be solved with money, but also in partnering up with the right group, someone who is able to scale things relatively quickly if needed. Right. If. If things are not going as rapidly as you want, you want that partner who can, who can turn up the juice, turn up the volume in terms of that recruitment side.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: So maybe like good contingency plans.
[00:19:39] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Yeah. All right. How about the most overrated part of moving fast?
[00:19:45] Speaker C: Most overrated part. I mean, this is where, you know, you could, you could sprint ahead with a development candidate that is not your molecule. Right. Something that is not what you want to be testing in the clinic. Or you can sprint ahead with a half baked plan that gets you that gray area answer. So it's this balance between moving as fast as you can and then making sure you haven't made a fatal mistake.
So there are places where you want to be deliberate and then places where you want to go as fast as possible.
The planning stages are where you should be deliberate once the plan has been enacted. It's all about moving quick.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Yeah. So I guess the overrated part is the actual speed itself versus all the planning that goes into it.
Yeah, I love that.
What's a red flag that you see in early childhood?
[00:20:36] Speaker C: Too many bells and whistles, right?
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:20:40] Speaker C: People kind of fishing for signal. We're going to add this piece of technology, we're going to add this imaging readout, we're going to add this and we're going to add that.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Two things.
[00:20:50] Speaker C: First, that adds a tremendous amount of cost. And second, you might actually learn something that you don't want to be learning. Right.
So no, too many bells and whistles is a big problem.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Okay. What's something people would be surprised to learn about you?
[00:21:07] Speaker C: So on the Internet, I'm actually best known not for biotech, but for high altitude adventuring.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[00:21:16] Speaker C: And yeah, so a buddy of mine and I decided years and years ago, sitting on the couch, that we were going to go try and find the black boxes from an airline crash from the 1980s in Bolivia. And we actually managed to do so, which has got us all sorts of press. So if you Google me, this will be what comes up probably before mind immune, which is still a little bit frustrating.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: I love that. That's so fun.
Hey, how about a habit or a ritual that you rely on to stay sharp?
[00:21:46] Speaker C: Well, I've got all sorts of bad habits, good habits, let's see. So, you know, ritual, especially when it comes to, you know, big meetings or conferences or pitches, that sort of thing running, like to get my miles in before that. You know, let's get the cortisol levels down, let's get the heart rate up.
So. So that's a kind of key ritual or key habit that I have, especially when faced with stressful situations.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. And some people might feel that is almost sounds contradictory, but I get it from the mind clarity and the focus it brings. Yeah, love it. All right, what's one piece of advice you find you give over and over again?
[00:22:31] Speaker C: So especially the people who kind of want to be building a biocheck piece of advice that I give all the time is like, you should be pursuing almost an apprenticeship model. You should spend time working under someone who's really, really good at this.
Learn the trade. Treat this as if you're learning plumbing or being an electrician. Go work for a master for a few years, and you will learn so much in that compressed period of time that you can take with you going forward.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Those models have worked for generations. There's no reason why it doesn't work well here, too. All right, last question.
What do you want my domain to be known for, like, 24 months from now?
What's the signal that you want people to know about my domain?
[00:23:13] Speaker C: I mean, if we are right, which all evidence that we have says that we could be, people are no longer going to be fixated on Alzheimer's as.
As a disease of the brain. Right. So we actually have a peripherally acting drug. We're targeting an immune cell population outside of the CNF in order to treat this disease. And the results we've seen in animals have been really, really exciting. So in 24 months, we anticipate that the field is going to get on board with this notion that, hey, you can really, really dramatically impact diseases of the brain by correcting defects of the immune system outside of the brain.
And this will extend beyond Alzheimer's. This is going to be ALS, potentially Parkinson's, Parkinson's, other rare diseases.
So within 24 months. We hope to be carrying that banner and having other people getting on board.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Profound. Well, I'm excited for the journey ahead, and we'll certainly be following along closely. Thank you, Isaac, so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been a real pleasure.
[00:24:13] Speaker C: Thanks so much for having me. I had a blast.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Hello, Adam.
[00:24:17] Speaker D: Hey. So it was great to have Isaac back on the podcast.
It's been a few years, but still a lot of great info information.
Let's start with his insight about Alzheimer's disease. Moving causation from brain disease to immune disease definitely offers a new outlook, right?
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Incredibly, yeah. And I really appreciated the way that Isaac described it, that it's not just a different label. He was really reframing the problem. And in fact, we're so used to thinking about Alzheimer's as a disability disease that starts and ends in the brain. Fair. But his point was, what if part of the damage we're seeing in the brain is actually being driven by the immune system? So he describes it as an immune response with amyloid plaques causing damage to neurons, but essentially an immune disease that presents in the brain. It's a big shift.
The brain causes the. Is the choice for the intervention. But if we're thinking about, about, okay, how do we target the brain? Do you ask? Well, how do we connect the immune behavior that may be contributing to the decline? And that really lines up with what mind immune is seeking to establish. But I look at this also more broadly because this is not coming out of nowhere. There's a lot of scientific support growing for looking at immune processes or neuroinflammation. There was a recent Nature Research Review immunology article that described really strong evidence for an inflammatory component in Alzheimer's. So for me, it's exciting. We are all touched by this disease. And this isn't that it's simplifying the disease, but it's opening another door. Right. It's giving us the field, another way to look at the mechanism, the biomarkers, the timing, and ultimately what signals should we be looking for earlier in the development?
[00:26:08] Speaker D: And I think that innovation is definitely needed for that particular area.
You know, such a long time focusing on, I believe, amyloid plaques and nothing else. So I really do. I really am wishing him a lot of success in this particular venture.
So one of the other things that he mentioned was about bells and whistles.
Remember, he mentioned it as a major red flag for early trial design.
Is it important? And this is something that Bayarossi talks about. Is it important to keep Studies simple at the beginning.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Yes. I feel very strongly about this topic, Adam, thank you. It is one of those points that does sound like it's a simple thing, but gosh, it takes a lot of discipline and practice. So when he said too many bells and whistles, what I heard is something that's very familiar to me in early development, especially when the science is exciting. This is certainly one of those things there's such a temptation to add, like one more endpoint, one more imaging readout, one more technology, one more just in case. And the concern which he was flagging, and I agree with wholeheartedly, is that incurs more cost, more complexity, and sometimes the data that's like, interesting is actually not decision making quality. So when you're doing an early study design, you have to be really disciplined about the decision you need to make. And not every interesting question belongs in that first clinical protocol. So if the objective is safety or dose or mechanism or the specific biomarker signal, then you have to stay disciplined around answering that question. Question.
Despite our curiosity. Science is all about curiosity.
So that ambiguity, asking too many of those initial questions is also incredibly expensive. And the worst outcome is where you get thumbs sideways, right? Not clearly positive, not clearly negative, not actionable. You know, you've got to have the discipline so you're not going to lose time or capital or confidence. So, you know, in it, I wouldn't say simplistic. I would say the best early trials are thoughtful and deliberate and of course, operationally realistic. So they are designed to produce a decision that's very different from trying to prove everything at once. Hence the bells and whistles reference.
[00:28:31] Speaker D: Exactly, exactly. But I like the way he referred to it as the bells and whistles.
But no, there is a definite need for the, like you said, a thoughtful, thoughtful protocols building up to a program that is going to be where everything is. Obviously now you're not going to be able to prepare for everything, but you'll know exactly what to expect and that lot. And like you said, a lot of that happens very early in the process. And you don't need extra belts and whistles to make that happen, right?
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yes, indeed.
[00:29:08] Speaker D: So Isaac's advice to building a biotech is an apprenticeship model, which is a very interesting way of looking at it in terms of your career. What did you learn across biotech? And do you have any advice for those new to the industry?
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So I, first of all, I love that he described a biotech company building almost like learning a trade.
We have to remember that for Centuries. That was workforce training. You got alongside someone who'd done this for years and learned how by observing, by doing, by testing, by getting feedback in the moment.
And when we get to work with good people who are really good at something, watching how they work, absorbing that, that really compresses our learning. I love those improvements, environments and I've seen incredible examples of that.
So for like, biotech is a lot of gray area and the moments where we don't have a perfect answer or a decision is tricky to make.
Having others who've done it before you, who can help you weigh risk and communicate that uncertainty is so critical. And throughout my career, like some of my biggest lessons have been when I'm really close, close to execution, like taking a protocol to a site and asking them for feedback on the recruitability of that protocol, kind of to build on the bells and whistles comment a moment earlier. You bring a protocol with too many requests, too many tests, too much burden on a patient, and having those experts sit with you and say, let me walk you through what this pro call is asking of the patient. Those are really important ways to, from an apprenticeship perspective, get feedback on your journey.
And we look more kind of more broadly right at our career development thing. If I'm working with people who are keen to develop in this sector, my advice always is get as close to the work as you can. So don't just learn vocabulary or, you know, studying what is biotech, drug development cycles, et cetera, but understand how we work. Like, how are the decisions made?
And to do that, there are all of these disciplines, all of the functional groups that have really important bodies of knowledge, clinical operations, regulatory, medical feasibility, data management, sit with those people, understand what they do, what are the drivers in how get their tactics accomplished, understand what a timeline is and what's real about it or what's not real about it. Those questions give you so much more of that applied experience that you can then build into your own, your own way of working.
And then the other thing, for me, the best mentors are those who are willing to tell you the hard truths, right? The ones who lived through the hard times, the ones that are willing to explain what actually happened.
And when you approach that with humility, keep your curiosity with you at all times, that combination can really go a long way.
[00:32:20] Speaker D: I have to tell you, for me, one of the things that I have thought about often in my career is success means different things for everybody on the team.
And learning what every department, team, individual, what their idea of a successful result is, brings you closer to a more homogenized point of view where you can actually see what's missing, what's falling behind and what's doing well. So I think that that definitely applies in that situation. And yeah, it's a, it's a great model. I think it's a great model. And I have found that the, that the CEOs that I've worked with, their ability to mix and mingle and be a part of the different departments really matters when it comes to these final and successful results.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Yes, indeed, Indeed.
[00:33:20] Speaker D: So last thing I want, want to talk about is of course, Isaac's 2015 expedition into South America looking for a.
The plane crash, you know, the, the black box for the plane crash. So my thing is, do you, do you see that metaphor there for drug discovery? Do you see that it is kind of like a, a searching for particular item and, you know, going through all of these different avenues trying to reach that successful endpoint.
Was it just me or did you see something like that?
[00:33:57] Speaker B: I saw.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: So first of all, with some caution, this. So this plane crash was a tragedy. I don't want to over romanticize that. Of course, the metaphor for drug discovery is loud and clear here. And we talk a lot in this type of work about where we're headed. A journey, an adventure into the unknown. And so those things are already quick parallels. Right. But for those who haven't yet had a chance to Google Isaac Stoner, he and his pal Dan Petrell, they set out to find the black boxes from Eastern Airlines. There was a flight in the mid-80s in Bolivia that had crashed. And the crash site was apparently at a very high altitude, like 20,000ft. And there were dozens of people lost in this crash. And there had been earlier efforts, they had failed to find the recorders. And so what struck me is back to the point of curiosity. That's where his expedition started. He was curious, but then he had to prepare. And it required things like endurance and judgment and respect for the unknown, which is an important part of the scientific journey.
So those are all, to me, beautiful metaphors. You know, biotech, we're often climbing towards something we can't quite see. It might not be there, but we have a hypothesis and we have limited resources, we have limited time.
And so, you know, we've been prepare as well as we can. We build the right team and we may have conditions that change.
I feel like we're starting to script out a movie plot here. But this is what we encounter. This is drug development. And we have to be honest about what we learn every step along the way, because that certainly influences our journey also. Adam, we see this every day, right? There's the human element, right? In an extra expedition story, they're not just chasing an adventure. They're actually trying to recover information that matters to people, right? Those families that lost those people.
There's another parallel, right? In drug development, we are working in scientific and operational capacities to get answers for patients, for their families, for the investigators, for the employees, also for the investors. They're all attached to these outcomes. And so, yes, I think we could extend the metaphor even further, but that's.
[00:36:23] Speaker D: I think that's.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: That's plenty of parallel.
[00:36:26] Speaker D: No, but yes, the. You know, every. Every drug development program is an adventure for everyone involved. And.
And hopefully in. In these situations, it always turns out for the best for everyone involved. So.
So, yes, I thought it was a really great episode.
We'll be back with another one very soon, and we will talk then.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: Until then, keep climbing.
[00:36:56] Speaker D: All right.
