Latest / The BioHub - by Avetix / Episode 101 - Jason Cole - CEO of ZagBio

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Episode 101 - Jason Cole - CEO of ZagBio · The BioHub - by Avetix

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Biohub today we're delighted to be joined by the newly appointed
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CEO of Zag Bio, Jason Cold. Jason brings over 20 years of
0:13
experience in the biotech industry, guiding companies from
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early discovery all the way through to clinical development
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and commercial readiness. Zag Bio recently announced a
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major financing which takes them to 80 million raise to date.
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And this will support ambitious plans to push Zag One one into
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the clinic and build out a pipeline for multiple autoimmune
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diseases. So join us today as we'll
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discuss the diabetes space and why this is so important to
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Jason, an insight into Zag's pipeline, as well as Jason's
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transition from a lawyer to CEO. So Jason, look, it's a pleasure
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to have you on. How are you?
0:51
I'm doing great, Tom, Thanks for for having me on the Biohub.
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I really look forward to sharing, you know, my story and
0:58
Zag's story with, with your listeners.
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I'm coming from the suburbs of Boston around the holidays.
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We got a little Christmas village behind me here in my
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Home Office. So looking forward to the chat.
1:09
Yeah, for sure look forward to hearing about your journey and
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and zag. So look, let's just start with
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with your story. So you began your career in law
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before transitioning to biotech leadership.
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Can you just walk us through that journey in detail and what
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motivated you to make such a significant shift into the
1:30
industry? And were there any particular
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experiences that shaped your trajectory as well?
1:37
Sure, Tom. Yeah, I know, happy to.
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And you know, I think my path to being a biotech CEO is a little
1:43
unconventional, but one thing that's great about the biotech
1:47
industry is there are many paths to leadership, whether it's
1:51
through a scientific, medical or kind of business path.
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And I think I've benefited from that flexibility in the space.
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But, you know, as a little boy, oddly, I was really interested
2:03
in the law. And, you know, how it was just
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this set of rules that could shape societies.
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I was really into, you know, like government and, and the
2:12
Constitution and things like that.
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So I majored in government, you know, in college at my
2:16
university and knew I always wanted to go to law school.
2:19
But as I headed toward law school, I actually started to
2:22
gravitate toward corporate and securities law being sort of the
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area I wanted to focus on. And that's because I started to
2:30
get a better understanding of business and you know, that that
2:33
world. And so, you know, I, I learned
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once I started practicing law at Ropes and Gray here in here in
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Boston and the corporate group, how valuable lawyers are as
2:44
trusted advisors to business leaders, right?
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So, you know, senior lawyers, whether they're at a law firm or
2:50
whether they're in house, always have a seat at the table for
2:54
some of the most sort of fundamental decisions businesses
2:57
make. And I thought that was a great
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sort of place to, to sort of be, to start my career.
3:03
Being at Ropes and Gray in Boston, we had lots of life
3:06
sciences clients. So I cut my teeth on IP, OS,
3:10
financings, M&A, venture deals in the life sciences because
3:15
that's one of the things we do a lot of here in the in the Boston
3:18
area. But then I realized as my career
3:20
was progressing that the folks who were having the most fun
3:24
were my clients, right. They were these cross functional
3:26
teams who were really trying to make people's lives better.
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They were developing therapies to, you know, help patients.
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And I saw that sort of mission and I saw those really
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interesting teams and I decided I'd like to join them.
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And so, you know, my first biotech job was at a company
3:47
called Combinatorics. I worked on the IPO while I was
3:50
at Robeson Gray and Alexis Borisi.
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And the team there offered me my first general counsel job.
3:56
And it was a chance to be, you know, on the executive team at a
4:00
public company when I was in my early 30s, which was which was
4:03
really great. And you know, what was neat
4:06
about combinatorics is we had this interesting platform that
4:09
could quickly generate programs into the clinic, these
4:12
combination therapies. And I had to quickly learn all
4:17
sorts of things about being an executive, how to be a sort of
4:21
peer and a leader, how to manage people and to also learn legal
4:25
disciplines outside my training, right?
4:28
You know, there is a lot of specialization in law.
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But then even in my early days at Combinatorics, I started to
4:34
attract sort of different operational responsibilities.
4:38
You know, groups like IT. We had a software development
4:41
team, facilities, alliance management.
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These groups started to sort of come under my oversight during
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my time at Combinatorics, which I think was an early sign of
4:51
maybe potential to expand my, you know, impact.
4:56
Unfortunately, Combinatorics had a challenge translating in the
5:00
clinic. So a number of our therapies
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didn't get past phase two, but we'd signed up all these
5:06
collaborations with large pharma companies that was providing a
5:09
nice sort of cash flow into the business.
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So we ended up doing a merger with this company in Canada
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called Neuramed. And so Neuramed was advancing
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therapies in the voltage gated sort of calcium and sodium
5:23
channel space as novel therapies for pain.
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So non opioid therapies for pain.
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And so after that merger, I was one of the few combinatorics
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people to stay on the executive team.
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We renamed the company Xalicus and under the leadership of Mark
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Corrigan, who you know was had a long career in in drug
5:44
development, actually took on the head of corporate
5:47
development job. So I had my legal
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responsibilities. I stayed on the executive team,
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but then I was responsible with others who reported to me to
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continue to sign up collaborations around that
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original combinatorics platform to provide the financing for
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advancing our therapies into the clinic.
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Many folks are familiar with the vertex therapy that goes after a
6:09
voltage gated sodium channel. So they got there.
6:13
Zalicus didn't get there. Our molecules didn't make it in
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the clinic. But again, that phase of my
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career was instrumental in understanding I could do more
6:24
than the legal side of things. And it also taught me a lot
6:28
about the discipline necessary to advance, you know, research
6:32
and early non clinical programs in challenging spaces like pain.
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And so after Xalicus, I joined Bluebird where I was, you know,
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worked for 8 1/2 years and Bluebird was an incredible ride.
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So I joined after the IPO again with primarily a legal job,
6:55
right, general counsel, but that the time I joined Bluebird, we
6:59
were just starting to get positive clinical data and that
7:03
set us on this path of hyper growth.
7:06
And you know, we were at the cutting edge of science and cell
7:09
and gene therapy. Everything we were doing was
7:12
novel, right? The science, the clinical
7:15
development, the manufacturing, the commercial model, and then
7:19
trying to figure out how to finance a company that was
7:21
advancing for therapies successfully at the same time
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doing BD deals to build the pipeline and to support the
7:29
oncology side of the business. And so that was just a
7:33
tremendous place to work. Nick Leschli, you know, brought
7:36
me in again, you know, almost 11 years ago for that role.
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But then what happened again at Bluebird is I developed this
7:46
reputation as a good manager and operator and somebody who could,
7:50
you know, match this scale we were, we were going through.
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So there are about 100 employees when I joined.
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We got up to 1200 in my time and what happened is I started to
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form and attract these new functions and teams.
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So we set up a government affairs function to start
8:10
engaging with, you know, policy makers really on the commercial
8:14
side in the US and in Europe. Again, the facilities and IT and
8:19
operations teams came under my oversight.
8:23
And basically at Bluebird, I changed my major, you know, to
8:27
more of an operations and business role.
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Because I think I figured out, and I think the board and, and
8:33
other leaders at Bluebird figured out that what I was
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really best at was getting teams of people together to accomplish
8:39
complicated things. Sometimes that's a business
8:42
development deal. Sometimes that's a financing
8:44
things that are more legal. But also that is sometimes, you
8:48
know, buying a manufacturing plant and getting it set up in
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North Carolina or doing an acquisition to start a gene
8:54
editing business in Seattle. And so about you know, four or
9:00
five years into my tenure, I became the COO and started
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getting more strategic groups under my oversight.
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So that's things like portfolio and program management, business
9:11
development, etcetera. And so as most folks know,
9:16
Bluebird made the strategic decision to split in two to have
9:19
the sort of gene therapy for rare diseases business stay as
9:23
Bluebird and then to create 270 which was focused on ex vivo car
9:28
T therapies. So I was responsible for the
9:31
surgery to split Bluebird in two both from a legal perspective
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and operational perspective. And then I stayed with Bluebird
9:40
as the Chief Business officer and then eventually the head of
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Strategy and Chief financial Officer.
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And that gave me the opportunity to take on roles that were
9:50
further external facing. So communications business
9:54
development strategy along with finance and and operations.
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And I was very happy to stay with Bluebird until we had our
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first two rare disease approvals in 2022.
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But then I decided to leave to see if I could be ACEO myself.
10:11
Because as as you can tell, in that little career trajectory, I
10:15
had managed a lot of different teams.
10:17
I'd learned a lot both in small companies and in scaling
10:21
companies, learned from our successes, learned from our
10:24
setbacks. And so that led me to my first
10:27
CEO role, which was at Sally Agent Therapeutics here in the
10:32
Greater Boston area. And that was really exciting
10:35
because it was a chance to apply my experience in cell and gene
10:39
therapy around what was next. So that means in vivo nonviral
10:44
genetic medicines. And so when I joined Sallyagen,
10:47
we really focused our R&D efforts where we were most
10:51
differentiated, which was large gene insertion.
10:55
And that meant moving into Stargart disease and quickly
11:00
declaring a development candidate and moving it toward
11:02
the clinic while moving on research around other really
11:06
important diseases like cystic fibrosis.
11:09
So 2023 is a challenging time in the financial markets.
11:14
But as we were moving our lead program forward, we did
11:17
encounter talks in our Ind enabling talk studies for the
11:20
Stargardt program, which made it near impossible to further
11:24
finance the company. And so sadly we had to to shut
11:27
down Salyugen. But for me, that was a great
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experience in terms of understanding that I could be
11:34
ACEO and I could sort of set a strategy, a focus, motivate a
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big cross functional team to do something hard.
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And in biotech, you know, most things we try don't make it.
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That is the nature of the scientific method.
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That's the nature of this industry.
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And I've been fortunate in my career to work on therapies that
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get to patients, but I've also worked on a lot of therapies
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that don't, often for, for scientific or clinical reasons.
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And so that whole journey got me excited about doing it again and
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and leading a new company. And that's how I got to zag
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earlier this year. Nice.
12:10
Yeah. But look, congratulations on the
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new gig as well. It sounds exciting and I'm
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excited to hear a little bit more about it as well.
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Was it specifically about Zag's mission, culture or science,
12:23
scientific approach that that resonated with you and you
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thought that this was probably the the right CEO to take on in
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the next stage of your career? I'm going to guess that you
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probably had multiple different options available to you, but
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what was it about Zag specifically that thought you
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could really come in and make an impact?
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Yeah. So, you know, this is this has
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been a challenging time for for the biotech industry in general
12:48
and sort of early stage, you know, preclinical startups.
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And so I wanted to really keep a high bar for what I was going to
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do next with my career. And that meant having a
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combination of great science, right, great people and good
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funding. And happily Zag had all three.
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So and the most importantly, it is about the science.
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You know, we have this really elegant solution to drug the
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thymus with an antibody to create the central immune
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tolerance. And as you heard, I've been
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working in cell and gene therapy for 11 years.
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I love the impact that cell and gene therapies can have for
13:28
patients, but they're pretty darn complicated to develop and
13:32
manufacture and commercialize. And so getting back to a
13:37
bifunctional antibody, which is a much more known and tractable
13:41
modality, was attractive to me. And then on the people side,
13:47
right, the founders of the company, so Alan Crane from
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Polaris, who started 10 or more companies, John Kuhlmann, who's
13:57
our CSO, who has deep experience in, you know, early development
14:03
and moving, you know, products into the clinic.
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Joe Viney, who's this, you know, expert in immunology, who's also
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had a long career of success in in this space.
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Plus Diane Mathis, our sort of academic Co founder who is
14:19
really a visionary and whose insights were the foundational
14:21
to the company. Getting a chance to work with
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all those folks plus the existing team got me really
14:27
excited. And then the syndicate that you
14:30
know has put together the $80 million you mentioned is really
14:33
a great syndicate. Venture capitalists, the T1D
14:37
fund, you know, which is a mission driven investor from
14:41
breakthrough T1D plus three, you know, big strategic investors at
14:46
V Sanofi and Regeneron. That was a nice combination to
14:51
really set a foundation for our success as we now want to move
14:54
toward the clinic. Nice.
14:57
And just moving on to I get to diabetes, metabolic is a
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diseases that affect millions globally.
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I know this is something that you wanted to talk through, but
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why is why is this particular therapeutic area so meaningful
15:11
to you both, both professionally and personally?
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Yeah, no, great question. So, you know, professionally,
15:26
right? You know, what's interesting
15:27
about type 1 diabetes is the first biologic medicine
15:32
developed a synthetic insulin about 40 years ago, right?
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So that, you know, has benefited this community.
15:37
But the thing about type 1 diabetes is it's actually an
15:40
autoimmune disease, right? You know, your own body attacks
15:44
your beta cells and wipes out their ability to make insulin.
15:47
And so happily, you know, this, this field has created synthetic
15:51
diabetes, sorry, synthetic insulin.
15:53
And through all sorts of innovation on the device side,
15:56
we have continuous glucose monitors and pumps and and all
16:00
sorts of things that have really helped quality of life.
16:03
But on the therapeutic side, that community has been waiting
16:06
decades for anything that's truly disease modifying, right?
16:10
That can either prevent the disease or, you know, provide
16:14
insulin, you know, in the body beyond sort of generally
16:18
administered insulin. And that's kind of surprising
16:21
because this disease has been characterized for decades.
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It has a very motivated patient and physician community
16:29
breakthrough. T1D is an incredibly well
16:31
organized community and organization.
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And so it's striking that we really haven't made as much
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progress in this space on the therapeutic side compared to all
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the different therapeutic areas that biotechs already advanced.
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So I was excited about about that as a, you know, business
16:49
proposition and sort of biotech proposition.
16:53
On the personal side, I actually have type 1 diabetes.
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I was diagnosed very late in life.
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I was diagnosed in my late 40s, which is similar to my dad.
17:04
So my dad was diagnosed in his mid 30s and there are, you know,
17:08
pockets of diabetes in my in my family tree.
17:12
And what actually is exciting now is there's all sorts of
17:16
screening available to families who have a genetic background
17:21
where you could track an uptick in certain biomarkers that might
17:26
indicate the autoimmune attack that's going to give you
17:29
diabetes has started. So you can identify these
17:32
patients. And so ideally with the therapy
17:35
like Zag one O 1, if we were available, right, you might see
17:39
that sort of raise in those biomarkers and say, oh, time to
17:43
intervene. Let's prevent that autoimmune
17:46
attack. Let's prevent getting type 1
17:48
diabetes at all and being dependent on insulin for a
17:52
lifetime. And so I, you know, I'm excited
17:55
about, you know, the opportunity to sort of bring this kind of
17:58
therapy forward. It's too late for me.
18:01
You know, I've had, I'm an insulin dependent diabetic, but
18:04
I think for this community it's a great chance to make an
18:07
impact. Yeah, Yeah.
18:10
Just to doubt, delve a little bit into Zach's pipeline for
18:14
people listening, could you, could you just give us a high
18:17
level overview on the pipeline, particularly the lead program?
18:22
What differentiates your approach from others in the
18:25
field as well? Yeah, absolutely.
18:28
So as I mentioned, you know, the elegant solution we have here at
18:31
ZAG is to leverage an organ called the thymus, which not
18:36
many people are familiar with. But the thymus is an organ that
18:39
sits behind your breastplate on top of your heart.
18:42
And it is basically the organ that trains your immune system
18:46
to tell the difference between self and non self.
18:49
So that organ presents all sorts of antigens to naive T cells to
18:55
teach them what to get rid of and what to not get rid of.
18:59
What is you right? And so it's this training ground
19:02
of your immune system where they clear out T effectors that bind
19:06
to self antigens. So, you know, if those T cells
19:10
sort of love to bind to things that are you, they're we get rid
19:15
of them. But if they loosely bind to
19:16
things that are you, they get turned into these T regs, these
19:19
T regulatory cells, which actually were the subject of the
19:22
Nobel Prize a couple of months ago in in medicine.
19:26
And So what we figured out is how to take an antibody and
19:30
target certain tissues in the thymus so that antibody, whether
19:34
it's through an IV infusion or maybe subcutaneously injected in
19:37
the future, gets to the thymus. And then it will present an
19:41
antigen in the case of ZAG 101 and antigen relevant to type 1
19:46
diabetes. And it will train those T cells
19:49
to not attack that antigen, right?
19:53
And it creates these Long live T rags that have this sort of
19:57
diplomatic effect in the immune system.
19:59
They tamp down the immune system's approach to going after
20:04
certain tissues. And that does it through both
20:07
directly and through something called bystander tolerance.
20:11
So the world of tolerizing therapies or antigen specific
20:14
tolerance has been an area of heavy interest for years.
20:21
In the space, but only recently have we made real progress on
20:25
approaches that can create this tolerance.
20:28
And we're one of the the companies that is really
20:31
harnessing the insights around T regs and this unique biology of
20:36
the thymus to create this antigen specific tolerance.
20:40
And what that means is you can sort of reteach the immune
20:43
system to not do bad autoimmune things.
20:47
And so in terms of a pipeline, that means our lead program ZAG
20:51
One O 1 for type 1 diabetes has the opportunity to stop the
20:57
autoimmune attack that wipes out the beta cells that make
21:00
insulin, right. And then what we want to do
21:03
after the ZAG One O 1 program is to move into other autoimmune
21:08
diseases. So if we figured out how to get
21:11
these antibodies into the thymus, then it's just a
21:14
question of what antigens are we presenting to teach these T
21:18
cells to to better behave, to not go 'cause these autoimmune
21:22
diseases and sort of tamp down our own immune systems attacking
21:26
ourselves. Which is something I'm really
21:29
excited about because the technology has potential beyond
21:33
the lead program in type 1 diabetes to go after all sorts
21:37
of autoimmune diseases. And autoimmune diseases impact,
21:40
you know, millions of people around the world and you know,
21:45
can really help a lot of folks who now are taking some pretty
21:49
heavily immunosuppressive drugs to manage their their disease
21:53
and their symptoms now. And if you just look like
21:57
generally at what you guys are doing, who would and I don't
22:00
like to use the word competitors because I always think it's
22:03
always for the patients, right. But who are the company that are
22:06
doing similar sort of work to you guys?
22:08
Who do you look at and think, yeah, these guys are doing
22:11
similar sort of work to us? Who are who are they in the
22:13
space? Sure.
22:15
Yeah. So I think I totally agree.
22:18
Like, you know, competition is good for patients, right?
22:20
Like we are all trying to help patients lives and all of us,
22:26
you know, have these different levels of of potential for
22:30
success and we all learn from each other, right.
22:33
So, you know, I think they're folks who are doing ex vivo
22:37
engineered T regs, right, who are have proven that you can,
22:42
you know, teach AT Reg to do something different and program
22:46
it and do it naturally. So a Sonoma, right, which was
22:49
founded by one of those Nobel Prize winners, had some really
22:52
interesting data and rheumatoid arthritis earlier this year.
22:56
You know, we, we view what they're doing as pretty
22:59
interesting from a biologics perspective, from a business
23:03
perspective, given my history and ex vivo cell therapy, you
23:07
know, I think it's a question how you would access sort of
23:10
broad patient communities. So we're actually keeping track
23:13
of companies who are more going after like in in vivo approaches
23:19
right to creating immune tolerance.
23:22
So Core is a company that's really interesting in our space.
23:26
They use nanoparticles to present different antigens to go
23:30
after, you know, these diseases and create peripheral tolerance,
23:35
right? They're not going through the
23:36
thymus. And so they're creating
23:38
different cell populations. And so I think all these
23:42
approaches have high potential. What I love about Zag's approach
23:46
is really the simplicity of it. I've worked in the CAR T space,
23:51
you know, in the past decade and we all saw the power of like ex
23:55
vivo cartes and what they can do in oncology and now in B cell,
24:00
you know, autoimmune disease moving into in vivo approaches
24:04
now, right, where they're getting those cells to be made
24:07
in the body. What we're doing is similar,
24:09
right? We're trying to create a certain
24:11
cell population, but what we're doing is using an antibody to
24:15
get the thymus to do its job to create those cell populations.
24:18
We're not engineering it externally and we're not sort of
24:22
trying to induce it in the periphery.
24:25
You know, we'll see if we're successful, but that's what
24:27
we're excited to do next. Nice.
24:31
And just beyond the lead program, what are sort of Zags
24:35
strategic priorities over the next few years and how do these
24:38
plans reflect the company's long term vision?
24:42
And how do you see your role evolving as the company scales
24:44
its its operations pipeline advances and potentially looking
24:49
at partnering with with with larger players in the in the
24:52
biotech ecosystem? Sure.
24:56
So you know, what's next for us is getting zag one O 1 into the
24:59
clinic, right? And we hope to be in the clinic,
25:02
you know, in less than a year from now.
25:04
And so that is an important milestone for the company
25:07
because not only will it allow us to gather data in type 1
25:12
diabetes patients and really understand, you know, if we can
25:16
help those patients, but it also validate this mechanism, right,
25:19
That you can actually drug the thymus to create these cell
25:23
populations that have this tolerising effect and that will
25:26
significantly de risk the platform for what's next.
25:30
And so focusing on getting into the clinic and testing the
25:33
therapy in the the relevant species of human being is is
25:37
really the number one priority. But what that does is that
25:41
mechanistic understanding unlocks the potential to go
25:44
after these other diseases. So we're interested in diseases
25:48
of the gut, of the joint of the skin, some sort of, you know,
25:52
nervous system diseases. And so once we sort of further
25:58
advance our research pipeline and match it with the proof of
26:02
mechanism that we can get in the clinic that allows us to build a
26:06
pipeline that we can own ourselves or talk to, you know,
26:10
potential partners to advance. One thing that's great about
26:15
working in the, you know, autoimmune or immunology space
26:19
is you have the opportunity to go after the go after these
26:22
large highly prevalent diseases. Running pivotal pace phase
26:27
threes in those diseases is expensive and complicated and is
26:31
what large pharma companies are really good at.
26:34
And so I would be really interested in finding thoughtful
26:38
partnerships to advance some, but not all of the programs
26:43
we're working on in our pipeline.
26:45
And so over the next few years, I think it's really about taking
26:49
the ZAG one O 1 Insights mechanistically and then
26:53
expanding it into these other areas.
26:56
Nice. So that so there's the potential
26:58
to go into different indications aside from what you're doing
27:00
currently. Absolutely, Yeah.
27:03
And I think that is actually going to be a focus next year
27:06
for our research team. They've been working really hard
27:09
to figure out how to target the thymus and have the right
27:13
effects in type 1 diabetes as our first indication.
27:16
But now that we've kind of climbed the thymus targeting
27:19
mountain, the next mountain to climb is around figuring out the
27:23
appropriate antigens for these other diseases, which are less
27:29
well understood and a little more complicated.
27:31
And I think we have a great team who can help us sort of figure
27:34
that out and then have a really differentiated impact.
27:38
And a lot of these diseases where current therapies again
27:41
are pretty immunosuppressive and have, you know, some long term
27:46
sort of, you know, safety effects, You know, anybody who's
27:48
watched the commercials during like the Super Bowl or a college
27:52
football game. It's a long list of side effects
27:55
of those current therapies. And we hopefully will have a
27:59
very well tolerated therapy that could create this sort of of
28:03
immune system re education that lasts years, right?
28:07
You know that the pro target product profiles of what we're
28:09
developing ideally are a handful of doses to sort of get the
28:14
these T regs out there and creating central tolerance.
28:18
And then just watch it and waiting and you might sort of
28:21
get boosters, you know, over the course of years, we'll figure
28:25
all this out in the clinic, but it's something that I'm
28:28
certainly really excited to explore from an R&D perspective.
28:32
Yeah, for sure. And I know you're pretty knew it
28:35
at Zag Bio. But if you look into the future,
28:38
like what would you like to think that the company will be
28:40
known for in the next sort of five to 10 years?
28:43
How do you want people to to see the company and, and hopefully
28:46
where, where do you think the company will will end up?
28:50
Yeah, I know it's, it's a good question and it's, it's nice to
28:53
sometimes look up from the day-to-day like execution that's
28:56
kind of part of my job. But to also think about the long
29:00
term strategy. You know, I think our goal and
29:02
mission at ZAG is to really, you know, restore balance in the
29:07
immune system to prevent or halt autoimmune diseases for for
29:11
millions of patients. We do this to help patients and
29:15
their families and autoimmune disease, you know, has an
29:20
incredible burden, whether it's type 1 diabetes, ulcerative
29:23
colitis, you name it, rheumatoid arthritis, There's a lot of
29:28
still unmet need. And if we can figure out this
29:31
antigen specific tolerance broadly, we can help a lot of
29:35
patients. And you know, as a humble Series
29:38
A company, that's a that's a big goal.
29:40
But I think our industry is is built on teams of people having
29:46
these big goals and working toward achieving them.
29:50
Good. And then I mean you've got a
29:51
pretty interesting story. You mentioned at the start that
29:54
your transition to CEO is from a lawyer background.
29:58
I guess normally when you see CEOs, they might have come from
30:01
like an ex chief operating officer or an ex chief business
30:04
officer, chief commercial officer, so on and so forth.
30:09
What advice would you give to people whose background is, I
30:11
guess very different from biotech, but wants to take a
30:16
leap into leadership in this field?
30:18
And I guess people that may have similar backgrounds to yourself,
30:21
people that want to step into a CEO role, like what?
30:23
What advice would you have there?
30:26
Sure. And you know, I think one thing
30:29
I love about this industry and why, why I think I like found my
30:32
calling in the in biotech is it is, you know, as they say,
30:37
A-Team sport or if you're not a sports person, it's like putting
30:40
on a play, right? It takes so many diverse skills
30:44
and capabilities that have to come together to discover and
30:48
develop and manufacture and commercialize and pay for, you
30:53
know, these novel medicines that we're all working on.
30:56
And so those teams with all those different skill sets means
31:01
that we can be very welcoming to people with all these different
31:05
backgrounds. And so, you know, my career is a
31:08
testament that, you know, if you're driven to help patients
31:11
and families and you're a curious person and you're
31:14
actually good at working with people, this is a fantastic
31:17
industry for you to be in. And so, and you have a chance to
31:22
work with incredibly smart scientists and physicians and
31:26
other drug developers who, you know, really understand the
31:30
biology and are trying to push the envelope of science with
31:34
detangling that biology, you know, in the lab, in animals and
31:39
in people. But then to get those therapies
31:43
to human beings, you need folks in the quality group, you need
31:47
regulatory consultants, you need commercial people, you need
31:50
finance people. And so I've met so many people
31:54
in my career, partly because I've managed so many different
31:57
kinds of groups who came to biotech the first time with a
32:01
certain set of skills like communications or accounting or,
32:06
you know, operations. And then they realize that like,
32:09
this is the place to be. And if you're a valuable partner
32:12
of that, a part of that team, you can have a tremendous
32:15
career. And so, you know, I encourage
32:18
anybody, you know, young, older, etcetera, to, you know, join us
32:23
in this mission because it is a mission to help people and all
32:27
sorts of skills are necessary to be successful.
32:30
And the greatest skill is playing well with others and
32:34
listening and figuring out how to collaborate.
32:37
Yeah. Just given that you're not from
32:39
a science background, was that something that you found you
32:42
could pick up quite comfortably, quite naturally?
32:45
Or does it naturally take you quite a bit longer to pick that
32:48
up? Like how does it work from that
32:50
side of things, just not coming from a science background?
32:53
Yeah, no, it's a good question. So there are times I think it's
32:57
an advantage and there are times I think it's a disadvantage,
33:00
right? So whenever I start a new job or
33:04
you know, I'm working on like acquiring a company or trying to
33:08
understand a competitive landscape, the understanding
33:12
curve is steep, right? But usually not doing that
33:17
alone, right? You have colleagues, right, who
33:19
have, you know, postdocs in the relevant, you know, field or,
33:23
you know, MD's and others who can really help kind of tug you
33:26
up with that learning curve. And to say, yeah, Jason, that
33:30
sounds amazing, but let me tell you the six ways that actually
33:34
is made-up and probably not going to work or yeah, Jason,
33:37
this is amazing. And let me tell you why and let
33:39
me tell you why what maybe we're doing needs to change to adapt
33:44
to that. So I think there is this kind of
33:46
steepness of getting around a lot of the kind of early biology
33:50
in medicine. But then where I think it's an
33:53
advantage is, you know, I think part of why I'm, you know, a
33:58
biotech CEO now is my ability to sort of tell a story at
34:02
different altitudes, right? So I should be able to explain
34:07
zag bio to a 12 year old and AMDPHD at a hedge fund and you
34:14
know, others, you know, in this sort of ecosystem.
34:17
And so I think the skill is to take what can be really
34:22
complicated concepts and bring them down to something that's
34:25
simple and then tangible about what the.
34:29
So what of it, right? Why are you drugging the thymus,
34:33
right? What the hell is the thymus?
34:35
Like? These are questions people often
34:36
have about Zag. And if you basically say, yeah,
34:40
that's the organ that trains your immune system, and we've
34:43
developed drugs to train the immune system to not misbehave,
34:47
people get that right. And so I'm fortunate to be
34:51
surrounded by a lot of really smart people at Zag and the
34:55
other places I worked. And those folks help with that
34:58
storytelling to make sure it's both compelling and true.
35:03
Because, you know, the stories we tell in biotech are not
35:06
fiction. They are based on, you know,
35:08
research and results and the scientific method.
35:12
So yeah, I love it. Yeah, amazing.
35:16
And just just to finish this off, a nice way to finish off, I
35:20
think if you were to sit down and and have a dinner with, with
35:24
any free people, past or present, who would you go from?
35:28
Why? It doesn't necessarily need to
35:29
be people in biotech, although it, it can be if you like.
35:34
But yeah, any free people you'd like to sit down and have dinner
35:36
with? Yeah, Tom, so I, I thought about
35:39
this a little bit when you told me this is how you end your,
35:42
your bio hub, you know, podcasts.
35:44
And so the three people I would like to have dinner with and I,
35:49
it would be interesting to see what the dinner would be like.
35:51
But you know, 1 is so they represent three things I'm
35:55
interested in soccer or since you're in England, football,
35:59
film and biotech. And so you know, the kind of
36:03
leader I am, I view myself as sort of a coach, right?
36:05
So it's like I set a vision, I set sort of the tactics, how
36:09
we're going to operate. And then I empower the team to
36:12
go do it because I'm certainly not going to do everything.
36:15
And so I'm a big admirer of Pep Guardiola, the the coach of
36:20
Manchester City, but I really started following his career
36:23
when he was the coach at Barcelona and, you know, had
36:26
those incredibly successful team, team teams, excuse me, in
36:30
the last decade. So just I would love to pick his
36:33
brain on how he thinks about strategy and tactics and getting
36:36
the most out of his team and their performance.
36:40
Because as a as a soccer football coach, during the game,
36:44
you're on the sideline. They have to go execute based on
36:47
what you worked on beforehand. On the film side, again, my
36:51
leadership style, maybe it's like a film director, right?
36:54
You know, you have a vision, and then you have to bring all these
36:58
different people together to execute your vision.
37:00
You need a cinematographer. You need a casting agent to
37:03
like, find all the people. You need those actors to have a
37:07
good performance. I really admire the movies of
37:10
Sofia Coppola. And so I think she's had a
37:13
really interesting career, Lost in Translation as one of my
37:16
favorite films. So I'd love to understand from
37:18
her how you take like a broad vision and figure out how to
37:24
visualize it, figure out how to make it real.
37:27
And that's a lot of what we do in biotech.
37:29
These companies start with an idea and then over time, we make
37:33
it real. And sometimes we're successful
37:35
and you have a hit and sometimes you don't and you have a flop.
37:39
And so I would love to just spend time with her.
37:42
And then on the biotech side, given you let me pick people who
37:46
are no longer with us, I'd love to have Henry Tremeer, you know,
37:50
the, the founder and CEO of Genzyme at dinner.
37:54
You know, I, I never met him. You know, I was pretty early in
37:57
my career when, when he passed away.
37:59
But I think his approach to patient centricity and how you
38:05
really keep that patient at the center around how you make
38:08
decisions as a biotech leader, I think is something that a lot of
38:13
us who are leading biotech companies really try to emulate.
38:17
Because at the end of the day, if you wear, if you, you know,
38:21
put your decisions through that lens, ultimately you'll be
38:25
making the right decision for the company and all the
38:28
stakeholders that depend on your company, whether they're
38:31
investors, employees, patients, etcetera.
38:34
So never met him but would love to to have dinner with him and
38:39
just understand how he was so successful.
38:42
Yeah, look, we're 3 great answers there.
38:45
I particularly like the first one.
38:46
I'm a big Manchester City fan myself.
38:48
I know, I know. I thought you might like that
38:50
one. Yeah.
38:51
So particularly like that one, it'd probably be an answer I'd
38:54
pick myself, but. I'll invite you to dinner, we
38:57
can hang out together. But yeah, look, thanks for
39:01
coming on and helping us out with this.
39:02
It sounds super exciting, your new venture at Zag.
39:05
I'm looking forward to seeing the progress that you make and
39:08
hopefully getting into the clinic within the next year.
39:11
Sounds super exciting. So thanks again for helping us
39:14
out with this. And yeah, look forward to to
39:16
following you guys closely going forward.
39:19
Yeah, thanks a lot Tom. And I really just appreciate the
39:22
opportunity to chat and yeah, tell your tell your listeners
39:25
more about about Zach. So thanks.
39:28
Yeah, cheers.