Latest / The BioHub - by Avetix / Episode 05 - Dr Paul Peter Tak, CEO & President Candel Therapeutics

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Episode 05 - Dr Paul Peter Tak, CEO & President Candel Therapeutics · The BioHub - by Avetix

0:07
Welcome to another episode of the Bio Hub.
0:10
I'm really excited about our guest today from a professorship
0:14
in his native Netherlands to the SVP, Chief Immunology Officer
0:18
and Global Development Leader at JSK and from leading small
0:22
biotechs such as Tempero and Kentai to enter in the venture
0:26
world as a flagship partner. And now he is the CEO and
0:29
President of Candle Therapeutics, A promising
0:32
clinical immunotherapy company in the fight against cancer.
0:36
Here we are with Doctor Paul. Peter Tack.
0:39
Welcome Paul. Peter, how are you?
0:41
Thank you very much. It's great being here.
0:43
Thank you for inviting me. Now, honestly, it's a it's a
0:46
pleasure. It really is really is Let let's
0:50
just jump straight in. So yeah, let's just start a new
0:55
journey. Can you discuss a particularly
0:58
memorable or rewarding project that you've been involved in
1:01
during your career and the impact it had on you personally
1:04
and professionally? Yeah, there are many.
1:07
So I need to think now which one.
1:09
I've had a long career in academia, then big pharma, then
1:13
in biotech, and there's always great new experiences that you
1:17
need to learn from and that you can learn from then Maybe I
1:20
should start with the first one in.
1:22
Well, I was still a pH. D student.
1:24
I was a delayed in University Medical Center in the
1:27
Netherlands. I was a physician trained as an
1:29
internist and I did many of the experimental medicine clinical
1:34
trials in rheumatology at the time with new antibodies.
1:37
This was a whole new era in rheumatology 1996.
1:42
Seven right And we tested many antibodies that all failed but
1:47
we deeply understood why. So these were very well
1:49
conducted trials. But I remember key experts at
1:53
the time telling me, Paul, Peter, an antibody therapy will
1:57
never work for diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis,
2:01
inflammatory bowel diseases, etcetera.
2:04
And then we tested for the first time in the world in
2:07
collaboration with the Kennedy Institute in England, a molecule
2:11
that we knew at the time as CA-2 which later became known as
2:15
infiximab or Remicade. That changed the whole field
2:18
because that that started was the start of the field of TNF
2:22
inhibitors, anti TNF antibodies that really transformed the life
2:27
of many patients with rheumatoid arthritis that would stop
2:30
progressive joint dystructures and therefore prevent
2:33
disability. So I've seen a true paradigm
2:36
shift in my life and this is probably important because this
2:41
reflects the history of medicine.
2:43
It always goes like that. People don't believe in a new
2:45
modality, in a new approach, everything fails until something
2:50
works. And the same has been true for
2:51
cell and gene therapy for immune checkpoint inhibitors for CAR T
2:56
cells. And actually we are now at the
2:58
cusp of showing I think transformation of patients lives
3:03
with solid tumors in the field of viral immunotherapies or
3:07
multimodal immunotherapies. And that's exactly what we are
3:10
working on at Condell Therapeutics.
3:13
Nice. That's really cool.
3:15
I think that's right actually. You know, and I think you've
3:19
probably seen that a lot Modern day with with VCs as well with
3:22
new ideas not necessarily being heavily invested in you know one
3:29
of our other guests that's we said something where VCs don't
3:34
invest in the first trip to the moon, visionaries do.
3:38
I think that's that's a great example.
3:41
Of it, it is true. There are of course visionary
3:44
investors as well, but also many people are part of a kind of
3:47
echo chamber and their risk appetite may be relatively low.
3:51
They want to look for the next new big thing and they say,
3:54
well, these modalities have been around for several years and
3:57
they can lay out all the failures as I could lay out all
4:00
the failures in the late 90s in rheumatology.
4:05
And then everything changed and nobody would ask the question,
4:07
do you believe in antibodies? And the question would be what
4:10
kind of antibody again, which molecule for which indication,
4:14
what is your development plan, what's your vision for the
4:17
medicine, What's the power of the study?
4:19
It's the same with the viral immunotherapy.
4:21
We've even broadened this concept that we speak now about
4:24
multimodal immunotherapies that we can really change the tumor
4:28
microenvironment that we can basically achieve in situ
4:33
vaccination against the patient's own tumor at the
4:37
injected site, but also against uninjected distant metastases.
4:40
And then we also seen our examples of two oncolytic
4:43
viruses that are also successful.
4:46
So we are now at a tipping point in this field.
4:48
I think I was really pleased to hear from Carl June who's one of
4:53
the leaders in the field of immuno oncology in academia, the
4:57
father of the CAR T cells. When he got the question last
5:00
year at city in San Diego, big immunotherapy meeting.
5:04
As you know he was there on stage, somebody asked him how do
5:08
you see the future of immuno oncology.
5:11
And the first thing he mentioned said, well, we will see more and
5:14
more combinations of therapies to induce remission to cure
5:18
patients. And the first combination that
5:20
he mentioned was actually the combination of CAR T cells and
5:24
viral immunotherapies. And that's what we are working
5:26
on. And actually we have a
5:27
collaboration with him which is also validating I think from for
5:31
our company Condell from a scientific perspective.
5:35
No, that's so true. That's so true.
5:37
I mean, I work with a few. I've never had the pleasure of
5:41
meeting Carl Jun, but I work with a few companies who who
5:43
have him on the scientific Advisory Board.
5:45
And when I'm working a role that, you know, it just
5:47
validates it, doesn't it? Especially for, for a guy like
5:50
me, the, the scientists had come naturally.
5:56
Yeah. Could you share the origin story
5:58
behind Candles Discovery Platform and what inspired its
6:01
development and how it is evolved to contribute to the
6:04
company's success so far? Yeah.
6:07
So I joined this company in September 2020.
6:10
So I've been leading Condell in for a little bit more than three
6:13
years now and it has become a whole new company.
6:16
We call it Condell 2.0 basically.
6:18
And at this moment, this is a period where we have so much
6:21
data and so much inflection points coming up this year 2024.
6:26
But we have basically 3 platforms.
6:28
The 1st is a clinical platform that's can 2409 that's actually
6:32
a virus that we use for in situ vaccination.
6:35
We expect top line overall survival data.
6:38
So we're inpatients based on the Phase 2A clinical trial in
6:42
therapy resistant non small cell lung cancer and we've shown in
6:46
the past that we are able to stop tumors from growing in
6:50
patients who have filled everything including
6:52
chemotherapy and immuno check, sorry immune checkpoints
6:55
inhibitors. So that's not a placebo effect
6:57
right in these patients that's real.
6:59
So now the question is we have shown that we can change the
7:02
biology of the tumor. Does that lead that to patients
7:06
living longer with a good quality of life.
7:08
We will be able to answer that question next quarter in the
7:11
second quarter of this year. Same is true for borderline
7:14
resectable pancreatic cancer area of huge unmet need that we
7:19
have presented initial data HCHC, we just got fast track
7:22
designation from the FDA. Actually for the first time
7:25
people started to pay attention. There was a big increase in the
7:28
share price, big volumes as still too low we believe based
7:33
on the value that we created. But we see now that people are
7:38
starting to pay attention and then we'll have to read out of
7:41
two phase two and phase three clinical trials in early
7:45
localized non metastatic prostate cancer.
7:47
Also this year in Q4 we have a fully involved phase three
7:51
trial, 711 evaluable patients. So this could be a
7:54
registrational trial. So that's the first platform.
7:57
The 2nd is what we call CAN 3110.
8:00
That's a true oncolytic virus in HSV, herpes simplex virus that
8:05
replicates specifically in the tumor while sparing the healthy
8:09
tissue. We are testing it in again
8:12
completely therapy resistant disease, recurrent glioblastoma,
8:17
brain cancer. These patients have a poor
8:18
prognosis, but this specific population has already failed
8:23
neurosurgical resection surgery and chemotherapy and
8:27
radiotherapy. So they've run out of options
8:29
and we've just presented data based on the 1st 41 patients.
8:34
So this is not a small trial anymore in nature.
8:36
So again, great validation I think of the quality of the
8:39
science and the promise of the medicine.
8:41
We've now another nine patients basically completely confirming
8:45
what we have presented before. And that was all after a single
8:48
injection, very encouraging survival data.
8:50
But now we've started to ask the question, what happens if you
8:54
give multiple injections, Could it be even better?
8:57
That work has started is now completely funded by a very big
9:00
grant from the Breakthrough Cancer Foundation.
9:03
It's also supports and validates our science, but I call this a
9:06
platform because the activity of this virus is driven by a
9:10
molecule called nesting. And we found nesting is also
9:14
overexpressed in other cancers outside the brain.
9:18
So think of triple negative breast cancer, sarcoma etcetera.
9:22
So you can imagine that if it's safe and well tolerated and
9:26
doable to inject this into the brain of a patient and probably
9:30
it's going to be relatively straightforward to inject it,
9:33
for example, into a lump in a breast, right.
9:36
So we could expand into other indications at the right time if
9:40
you have security resources. And then we can again build a
9:44
pipeline in a product. In other words, I see this as a
9:46
platform. And then the platform that we
9:48
created recently is a true discovery platform built from
9:53
scratch, it's called enlighten, it refers to the name of the
9:58
company Condell. It's about light, we light up
10:00
the tumors, we inflamed the tumors, we activate the immune
10:04
system. And this is based on the
10:06
following pillars. The 1st is we start with human
10:09
biology for drug discovery based on my extensive experience at
10:13
GSK, whereas global head of development, we've given a lot
10:17
of about probability of success of a molecule during different
10:20
stages of drug discovery and development.
10:23
And what we and others found that is if you focus as a
10:26
starting point on human biology, you have a much higher chance
10:31
that you will have a medicine that will change the life of
10:34
patients at the other end of the process.
10:36
So that's the starting point. So think of deep
10:39
immunophenotyping of human tumors.
10:41
So that's the first pillar. The 2nd is we got an awful lot
10:45
of data and we analyzed it in a systematic way using artificial
10:49
intelligence approaches, AI that leads to systematic decisions
10:54
about which genes do we want to deliver to the tumor micro
10:58
environment to solve a specific problem in oncology, like how do
11:03
you get CAR T cells into a pancreatic solid tumor.
11:07
That's exactly where we have the collaboration with Upenn, but
11:10
just one example. And then let's say we can
11:13
deliver 5 tons genes to the tumor microenvironment and as a
11:19
vector that's the third pillar. We use HSV therapy simplex virus
11:24
because of its large DNA capacity.
11:26
We have all the IP and all the know how and technology to play
11:30
with all the aspects of HSV to optimize it to address a
11:33
specific problem. So that's the third pillar.
11:35
So that's together the enlightened discovery platform.
11:38
We are very excited. We just presented the data at
11:41
Sidsi was a lot of interest and we just submitted an abstract
11:46
based on another molecule that came out of this platform, which
11:49
will be presented at another scientific meeting this year.
11:53
Nice. That's so exciting, honestly.
11:57
There's a lot of excitement in the company at this time, yeah.
12:01
What a year? Yeah, goes on nicely.
12:06
So how does that compare to other companies and what
12:11
distinctive qualities, you know, do you guys have that shape in
12:14
the future of biotech? I know you touched a little bit,
12:17
but more specifically. There are other companies that
12:22
develop vital new therapies and as I said, this is now a new
12:25
paradigm and I think we, we are at or beyond the tipping point
12:29
showing that this modality can change the life of patients.
12:32
And so other companies that work in this field are, for example,
12:35
CG, Oncology. They actually did an IPO today,
12:39
first IPO of the year. They develop an adenoviral gene
12:42
construct for bladder cancer. They're in phase three and the
12:45
data look very encouraging and the IPO looks extremely
12:50
successful. So I think this is all the
12:52
validation. I don't see them as competitors
12:54
at all. I think we write the same type
12:56
that would be us saying well and also I'm focused on an antibody
13:00
and another company also has an antibody.
13:02
It's not necessarily. Do you speak?
13:03
With them or or not, their CEO is Arthur Kawan, isn't it?
13:07
So do you speak to him on or not?
13:10
Yeah, I met him and it was a great conversation.
13:12
So that was great. Other company that's active in
13:15
the field of viral immunotherapies but with a
13:17
different virus, again with a different indication is
13:21
reptilian. I think they've shown
13:23
encouraging data. So we see these companies as
13:27
colleagues that also help to change the paradigm and to
13:31
improve the life of patients potentially.
13:33
That's the goal. But so where do we see the
13:36
differentiation of our programs? We are the only company that I'm
13:40
aware of that's in phase three in early localized non
13:44
metastatic costate cancer area of huge unmet need.
13:47
There's basically no competition and we did very extensive
13:51
commercial analysis in the, in the US, in the EU including
13:55
market access, pay, research, all of that.
13:57
So this is a multi billion at least opportunity which could
14:02
have a huge impact on patients lives with a simple procedure,
14:05
simple therapy that's well tolerated by patients.
14:08
You only need to inject them twice or three times in a
14:12
patient's life because again you vaccinate against a patient's
14:16
own tumor and the ultimate biological medicine are actually
14:19
the CD 8 positive cytotoxic tumor infiltrating lymphocytes
14:24
that the educate in vivo in the patient that how to recognize
14:29
the patient's own tumor. That's why you get these long
14:31
term pharmacodynamic effects. In fact we had the cancer, you
14:36
know this is also an area of huge unmet need.
14:39
It's shown very encouraging overall survival data based on
14:42
an ongoing randomized clinical trial.
14:45
There's no real competition there, right, because nobody has
14:47
been able to really substantially extend the life of
14:51
these patients. Same is true for non small cell
14:53
lung cancer. I spoke briefly about that these
14:55
are patients were filled all standard of care including
14:59
immune checkpoint inhibitors. They have a median overall
15:01
survival of 12 to 14 months with optimal therapy at this moment.
15:07
If we are able to demonstrate next quarter already that we see
15:11
better overall survival than 14 months, then this is very
15:16
encouraging. We know already that this is
15:17
safe and well tolerated. We've dosed it now to to around
15:20
1000 patients. So we have a huge safety
15:22
database. So I feel quite confident saying
15:25
that, but I also believe that the data may actually look much
15:28
better than 14 months based on initial case reports that you've
15:31
seen and we see that also the uninjected lesions disappear.
15:35
Hi, Greg. Lioma, by definition I spoke
15:37
about that and if you need no competition.
15:41
So we have actually chosen to go really after the most difficult
15:44
to treat cancers and that's I think well why we will be really
15:49
differentiated if we are successful.
15:51
For each of the indications that I spoke about, we have initial
15:55
proof of concept not only in mice but also in patients in
15:58
humans. Yeah, amazing.
16:03
Honestly, I yeah, I love sitting and listening to this.
16:09
Yeah, I mean it's all been you know so positive what we've been
16:11
talking about. You know on the other hand you
16:14
you recently underwent 50% layoffs which you know across
16:19
the last year or so has been a pretty unfortunate trend.
16:22
Can you can you just share some insights into the reasons behind
16:25
the decision and how it aligns with with your future of candle?
16:29
Yeah, absolutely. So it's always very painful to
16:31
let people go, especially because we deeply invest in
16:34
talent, we develop our people, we deeply invest in creating
16:38
high performing teams with a very strong culture with the
16:41
right behaviors, where people are real team players and and
16:45
work together. Dr. driven by the best science
16:47
and innovation and have fun at the same time, right.
16:51
So we built a very strong team and then it's very difficult to
16:54
make a decision to let people go.
16:56
But it happens in every business and it's definitely in biotech,
17:00
but also on the large scale in pharma.
17:01
So I've been in exactly the same position in pharma.
17:04
There may be different needs in a company over time.
17:06
And here our goal was to really extend our runway during a very
17:11
difficult global economic time, right.
17:14
Last year was still extremely difficult. 2023, I think now we
17:18
start starting to see some improvement in the early days of
17:21
2024. But we thought the best way to
17:24
extend our runway to get to multiple value creating
17:29
inflection points this year in 2024 is by reducing the fixed
17:33
cost, by reducing the headcount and by trying to help these
17:37
people to find other jobs where we can and be well networked.
17:41
And of course that's the beauty of an ecosystem like Boston and
17:45
many other biotech A pharma company.
17:47
Hopefully these people will all find another good job.
17:50
It has strong references but that was it was truly a business
17:54
decision to get through the value creating infection points
17:57
and extend extend the runway and that's what we did and actually
18:00
being I was just at JP Morgan and spoke to many people
18:05
including many investors and investment banks and we got
18:09
consistent positive feedback about this that this was the
18:12
right decision from a business perspective.
18:14
OK, yeah, I mean, that explains it massively.
18:17
You know, there's no, I don't know, maybe there is.
18:21
I don't think there's any mystery like biotech where you
18:24
know you're up and down and you know you you have your needs of
18:27
the company at certain times and and therefore the the the
18:30
certain people's expertise and so on so.
18:35
Yeah, absolutely true. Yeah, yeah.
18:37
And then you you mentioned it briefly there in terms of the
18:40
struggles of last year, what, what what do you think going
18:45
into next year 2024 and and beyond?
18:49
Well, at some point things will get better, right.
18:51
We went through a few very difficult years.
18:54
We did the IPO in 2021 in July just before the whole thing went
19:00
downhill and it was already difficult and we were, we were
19:03
unknown at the time. So we did a straight to market
19:05
IPO without a strong financial basis before the time.
19:11
But we thought it was the right thing to do because actually we
19:14
did not go back to the market. Since then we worked in a very
19:17
cost effective way and we've got too many inflection points.
19:20
You've done everything that you promised to the markets and
19:22
we've consistently over delivered.
19:24
So we plan to continue to do that actually.
19:28
But it was already a difficult time.
19:29
The last few years have been brutal I think in in the in
19:32
biotech. I do believe that at some point
19:35
things will need to get better because there's still incredible
19:38
unmet needs from clinical, patient and societal
19:44
perspective, but also enormous opportunity for very high
19:47
returns over time if you get it right.
19:49
And it should all be driven and be based on data, data in
19:54
patients. If you can show that you can
19:57
really stop tumors from growing and patients live longer, they
20:00
have the right quality of life, that's what really matters.
20:02
And these are multi billion opportunities over time.
20:05
So I think probably, I don't want to sound cynical, but in a
20:09
way there's also a positive side effect of the brutal times that
20:12
we've seen. Because there will also, I think
20:15
it may help to select the patients who are focused on real
20:18
medicines and on real science. So during JP Morgan just a few
20:24
weeks ago, I got consistent feedback that everybody felt
20:28
that things were improving. In a way it's a self fulfilling
20:31
prophecy because it's also a collective psychological element
20:34
to this. If everybody believes that
20:36
things are going better in the biotech, it will get better, but
20:40
also other factors that we do not control like inflation will
20:44
probably improve and of course we will need to see how that
20:47
develops. But so I'm cautiously optimistic
20:50
about the whole field. I think we will continue to see
20:53
that companies fall over, especially those that have no,
20:56
no data that suggests that it could be transformative.
20:59
We need to focus on things that will really move to needle, not
21:03
another meat to medicine, but really innovative science that
21:07
also delivers real data, not just immunosophical approaches
21:13
as I call it, but things that are revealed.
21:15
So I'm, I'm optimistic about Condell.
21:19
We have 6 inflection points this year.
21:22
So it's a very rich pipeline including five based on clinical
21:26
data including phase three trial that could be a registrational
21:29
trial. Yeah.
21:31
I mean you mentioned CG oncology earlier now if that's anything
21:34
to go by, I mean I think the IPO was 300, three, 180 million or
21:39
something like that, you know, it's pretty impressive.
21:43
So yeah, I mean if you look through like the eyes of, you
21:47
know, when you were at Flagship and you know, maybe the venture
21:50
capitalist side, what would you be thinking now?
21:53
And you know, does your strategy change in any way?
21:58
I think our strategy would not have changed.
22:00
We've been super focused on on the real creation of data and
22:07
we've been cheap where we could be cheap, right like
22:09
breakthrough Cancer Foundation supports our high grade glioma
22:15
program with the valent of 16,000,001 six million U.S.
22:19
dollar for the extension of a Phase 1B clinical trial.
22:23
And this goes to the Pi Nino Kiyoka who's the head of
22:26
neurosurgeon. We get the victim of Women's
22:28
Hospital very, very close collaborator and an outstanding
22:32
scientist and neurosurgeon. So we've been, we don't pay a
22:36
lot of money for that. We are our own CRO, so we do 5
22:40
clinical trials, but we don't work with the CRO.
22:43
I don't say that it's wrong to work with the CRO.
22:45
At GSK, I made different decisions and I said, well, we
22:48
should probably be 50% outsourcing because you won't
22:51
have flexibility. But here it's different.
22:53
We have continuously work in clinical development.
22:56
So we hired our own Cras Clinical Research Associates and
23:01
for us that's much cheaper, actually much cheaper way than
23:04
outsourcing it in manufacturing. We did exactly the opposite.
23:08
There were plans before I joined to build our own manufacturing
23:11
facility. I thought that's going to be
23:14
huge fixed cost producing manufacturing HSV and adenoviral
23:19
gene constructs is relatively straightforward nowadays.
23:22
There's overcapacity in the industry.
23:24
It's better not to to build the whole factory ourselves, but to
23:27
be able to switch it on and off where it makes sense.
23:30
So we've tried to be very conscious about our strategy and
23:33
again we did relatively small IPO because we were unknown at
23:37
the time and we didn't have all the fantastic science that we
23:40
have now with the paper in Nature and faster designation
23:43
just in one year twice for non small cell lung cancer, in
23:47
pancreatic cancer and so. So it's now very different.
23:52
So I think we have been very focused on getting value
23:57
creation, getting the science right and we even stopped
23:59
programs that we believe in. I'll give you an example, we
24:04
have the the clinical trial in borderline resectable pancreatic
24:07
cancer. We have beautiful data and we
24:09
can show that after three years in the patients who got our
24:12
medicine can 24, nine survival was more than 70% compared to
24:18
17% on seven in the control group, which is compared to what
24:22
you would expect based on historical controls.
24:24
This is still an early trial, so it's early days, but when you
24:27
look at the totality of the evidence across multiple solid
24:30
tumors that we are testing, it's consistently positive.
24:34
But we stopped recruitment because first I wanted to see
24:36
these data and also it takes a few years to get to the endpoint
24:41
overall survival if you enroll new patients.
24:43
We don't have this runway at this time.
24:45
So we just paused hopefully after securing funding at the
24:49
right time in the right way and we keep optionality there.
24:52
We will restart this program because we truly believe in it
24:56
and the same is true for lung cancer.
24:58
So that has, that has been our strategy.
25:00
We've kept it tight, which was the right thing to do during
25:03
very difficult economic times. But hopefully we will be able to
25:06
really expand into other programs to restart programs
25:10
that I just alluded to because it's a big opportunity for
25:13
patients and for investors. Yeah, amazing, amazing.
25:18
And you know when when you look at like the year of last year
25:23
and maybe recovery of this year, how do you deal with the
25:27
pressures of of such a volatile industry?
25:31
Well, it's not always easy, right?
25:32
But then I will quote Churchill here because I spent part of my
25:36
life in in England. So it's just by.
25:39
Stay calm and carry on right, ruthless, focus on data and
25:44
quality, bring the right people together, make sure they work
25:47
together in the right way. And then of course in your
25:50
personal life you always need to balance it, right?
25:52
So try, try to stay fit, right, so that you can deal with this
25:57
trust. And I try to find time to
25:59
reconnect with my family and friends, which is important.
26:02
So I take my wife and children always on the on the trip to a
26:05
very nice place every year. We live in different countries,
26:08
right? So we need to make sure that we
26:10
all get together. So we we just went to Costa Rica
26:12
together for an amazing trip. And so that's how I try to deal
26:17
with this, so that we can invest in being here in the long term
26:21
and continuing to to be resilient actually.
26:25
Yeah. I mean how do those pressures
26:27
change with, you know, like your time and big pharma compared to
26:31
smaller biotech? The pressures are different, but
26:35
I would not say more or less. That's a compared to my role at
26:39
GSK which was a very big role. They also oversaw the therapy
26:43
area units in oncology and infectious diseases and
26:46
immunoinflammation. So there's a lot of work, it
26:49
never stops actually there's no control over your life.
26:53
So that's that's that gives an enormous pressure and then you
26:56
need to not only lead in the hierarchy but also in the matrix
27:01
and the governance process. You get this massive oil tanker
27:04
almost right, move in the right direction and get a few
27:07
everybody behind it. So that is it's it's amazing and
27:11
I loved working for big company because there's so much impact
27:14
you can have but I didn't have much control over my calendar, I
27:18
have to say and compare that to biotech, that's where you can
27:22
move much faster. So our governance process is
27:25
highly simplified and streamlined but we work still
27:28
with the best people in the world.
27:29
So I'd like I've created the research Advisory Board, Rab
27:33
with people like Jim Ellison, the Nobel Prize laureate and
27:36
then Sharma one of the major leaders in immune oncology, all
27:41
the key leaders in the specific disease areas that we are
27:43
interested in. So they participate in our
27:47
internal governance process. That's the science and
27:49
investment Board that we look at decision making through multiple
27:52
lenses including what's the, what's the data telling us what
27:55
is the best scientific decision, but also how can we create as
27:59
much value, how can we work in the most cost effective way.
28:02
And then all of that is well prepared, but then the meeting
28:04
in itself takes 1 1/2 hour, then you make the decision and then
28:08
the next day we're going to do it.
28:10
So that's that goes very fast and that's very noisy.
28:14
So I love that. But of course, there's there's a
28:16
very different pressure in biotech because there's always
28:20
every day and night. The question what is my runway?
28:22
How can we use that in the most efficient way possible?
28:25
You also need to do that in big pharma because it's proper
28:28
governance, but but it's on a different level.
28:30
So the the stress and the pressure are slightly different.
28:36
Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine there was
28:39
something that Steve Jobs said it didn't he where he said Apple
28:43
were the biggest start up on the planet.
28:45
And his mindset was that you know even though no matter how
28:47
big they grow, they're not going to become corporate, they're
28:50
always going to stay start up and that was for for quick
28:53
decisions but also making sure that the great people in the
28:56
company stayed, stayed with the company and had the
28:58
responsibility and decisions to make.
29:01
You know it. That was his mentality.
29:04
Which is absolutely true, right? But in a big company, you could
29:07
organize it in decentralized units, but then you need to be
29:10
super disciplined and not giving in to the tendency to in the end
29:15
add another level of control and then you end up in a mess.
29:18
So but in the end, smaller units where you can be agile and quick
29:22
and everybody's personalized, that is visibility of the
29:25
leaders. So you can also have very strong
29:27
performance management but also reward people.
29:30
All of that is the is is the beauty of smaller biotech
29:33
companies. Yeah, 100 percent, 100%.
29:38
And just to finish this off and I always like to ask this
29:41
question, So if you could go back in time and and give advice
29:45
to your 21 year old self, what what would it be?
29:49
Yeah, that's interesting. I've always work without a long
29:53
term career planning, I have to say and I would still say that
29:57
was, I would still give myself that advice.
30:00
Follow your heart, follow your intuition, work with the best
30:03
people, best as defined as super talented leaders in the field,
30:07
but also people with the right behaviors and the right culture.
30:10
And you don't want to work for a psychopath right?
30:13
And they sometimes also appear at the top.
30:16
So I would give myself, that's advice Again, I think always try
30:22
to do your best as much as possible and do do the best you
30:26
can to deliver. I've done that as a physician
30:29
and I was proud to to get an award from the former Minister
30:33
of Health in the Netherlands for being the best rheumatologist
30:35
for my clinical skills, elected by my peer.
30:38
So I was proud of that. Most people only knew me as a
30:40
scientist, actually. I deeply care about my patients
30:44
and I practiced medicine for 25 years and then I then I moved
30:48
more and more into science and we became like a machine.
30:51
We published on paper on average per week and I became a highly
30:55
cited immunologist. But it was all driven by trying
30:59
to do my best, trying to work with the best people because
31:02
they're always people have have better insights than you have.
31:05
So you should always be modest, right, And then ask for peer
31:10
review, leverage collective intelligence, have fun at the
31:14
same time, right, because you live your life only once.
31:18
But also it helps to unleash creativity I think and build
31:21
stronger teams, build trust. So I would not change any of
31:26
that. When I look back, I've always
31:27
done exactly the same, but I've tried to improve patients lives,
31:31
but from different angles and different perspectives.
31:34
As a treating physician later as somebody who has trained many
31:37
internists and rheumatologists later, as a scientist later as a
31:42
business leader in a big pharma company and and then now later
31:47
from a venture capital perspective and as a biotech
31:50
leader. But for me it's always the same,
31:52
it's about quality, it's about getting the best soils out,
31:56
improving the lives of bases. Meanwhile, make sure that
31:59
everybody benefits and that you really create value and based on
32:03
the long term vision. Yeah, Amazing.
32:07
Yeah. Look, Paul, Peter, it's been a
32:09
pleasure to have you. I've really felt the passion
32:12
coming across the, the science and everything like that.
32:14
And if I wasn't feeling positive about the year coming up, then
32:18
you know, I really am now. So honestly, a pleasure to have
32:22
you and thanks. Thanks for the time.
32:25
Well, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure being
32:26
here. Great questions.
32:28
It was really nice to talk to you.
32:29
Thank you so much. Thank you.
32:31
Thanks, Paul. Peter.
32:32
Bye.