From his vantage point as an independent biotech journalist, Luke Timmerman has been watching the expansions and retractions of the industry for a couple of decades now. His unique perspective is hard to equal, and that perspective is, despite tough markets and tepid public sentiment, decidedly bullish. Luke's optimism is fed by sound logic gained from a career spent in observation mode, watching the development of purpose-built tools matched to address the fragility of human biology.
Luke's tireless advocacy for the industry also stretches well beyond his professional coverage and punditry. Through his Timmerman Traverse initiative, he's figured out a way to weave his personal and professional passions into a tapestery that serves some of the philanthropic initiatives our industry cares about most. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we'll get to know Luke personally, we'll learn about his philanthropic work, and we'll give you a healthy dose of optimism as we look ahead to the next decade in biotech.
You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!
From his vantage point as an independent biotech journalist, Luke Timmerman has been watching the expansions and retractions of the industry for a couple of decades now. His unique perspective is hard to equal, and that perspective is, despite tough markets and tepid public sentiment, decidedly bullish. Luke's optimism is fed by sound logic gained from a career spent in observation mode, watching the development of purpose-built tools matched to address the fragility of human biology.
Luke's tireless advocacy for the industry also stretches well beyond his professional coverage and punditry. Through his Timmerman Traverse initiative, he's figured out a way to weave his personal and professional passions into a tapestery that serves some of the philanthropic initiatives our industry cares about most. On this episode of the Business of Biotech, we'll get to know Luke personally, we'll learn about his philanthropic work, and we'll give you a healthy dose of optimism as we look ahead to the next decade in biotech.
You've listened along for years -- now you can watch along, too! Go to bioprocessonline.com/solution/the-business-of-biotech-podcast, where you can put faces to voices as you watch hundreds of interviews with the world's best biotech builders. While you're there, subscribe to the #BusinessofBiotech newsletter at bioprocessonline.com/bob for more real, honest, transparent interactions with the leaders of emerging biotech. It's a once-per-month dose of insight and intel that you'll actually look forward to receiving! Check it out at bioprocessonline.com/bob!
The business of biotech is produced by LifeScienceConnect and its community of learning, solving and sourcing resources for biopharma decision makers. If you're working on biologics process development and manufacturing challenges, you need to swing by bioprocessonlinecom. If you're trying to stay ahead of the Cell or Gene Therapy curve, visit cellandgene. com. When it's time to map out your clinical course, let clinicalleader. com help. And if optimizing outsourcing decisions is what you're after, check out outsourcepharma. com. We're LifeScienceConnect and we're here to help.
Matt Pillar:If you listen to the business of biotech regularly, it's a safe assumption that you're in the business of biotech or want to be. And if you're in the business of biotech or want to be, you really need to know Luke Timmerman. Luke is one of the more colorful characters on the scene, a talented and prolific content creator. His decades-long coverage of the space gives him a really important perspective. But even more importantly, at least from my perspective, is the way Luke has managed to mash up his personal and professional passions to do extraordinarily good philanthropic work for some of the organizations our industry cares deeply about. I'm Matt Pillar, this is the business of biotech, and on today's show I'm honored to welcome Luke Timmerman, who I've been courting to be my guest for quite some time now. Luke, it's great to finally get you on the show. Welcome and thank you for joining me.
Luke Timmerman:Good to be here. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, and I want to say we're going to get into some business stuff, we're going to get into some market stuff. You know we're going to talk shop a little bit. But I'm going to start with your what I'm assuming to be your original passion, because it's going to dovetail nicely, I think, into this mash-up that I referenced the professional and personal mash-up. And the personal passion is your mountaineering. You're an accomplished mountaineer and, from what I understand, you just returned from a big trip. So I want to hear about that, I want to hear about the trip and I want to hear about this passion, like where it's rooted, how long you've been doing it, that kind of thing.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah Well, thanks for having me, Matt. I just got back from Monoslou, which is the eighth highest mountain in the world. In Nepal. It's a little over 8,100 meters high, or 26,000 in some feet for those of us on the English system, and so that was a personal climb that I've been wanting to go back to Nepal since climbing Mount Everest, which more people have heard of, five years ago. So you know there's that COVID thing happened and you know it was kind of harder to travel around to mountains around the world for a while, and so I set that goal of going back to the Himalayas and climbing a great and beautiful peak and was fortunate enough to go and have great weather and good climbing conditions and a great group of guys, and I just had a really fun time.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, you were telling me before we started to record that the adjustment, you know, not just like the adjustment getting back to work, but the physical adjustment upon return, is something to be reckoned with. Tell me a little bit about that.
Luke Timmerman:Well, yeah, so climbing 8,000 meter peaks, these are the ones that require supplemental oxygen for all but the very top 1% of all mountaineers. So you're entering what they call the death zone above 8,000 meters, where body really cannot exist for very long. So you're on supplemental oxygen. It's very stressful on all of your systems, so you know it takes a little while to recover after you go up and summit one of those. So you know about a week or 10 days at home it took to get just feeling back to normal.
Matt Pillar:Back to normal. Yeah, when did you start mountaineering Like in earnest right, like in an intentional way?
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, so this started about 20 years ago, 2004. I was living in Seattle and, like a lot of Seattleites, you look out the window on some clear days and you can see Mount Rainier, this glorious volcano in the distance, and the Cascades. And a couple of old college buddies had proposed like hey, come out to visit me in Seattle. We had talked about doing various things outside and one of them actually suggested let's go climb Mount Rainier. So we did it for fun, for camaraderie, as like a guys trip and you know, exploring this great peak and seeing how we would do physically. So it combined, you know, a number of things like the aesthetics, the camaraderie, the physical challenge, and I found right away that I was hooked, like I just I really enjoyed the mountains and wanted to get out and climb more and more.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, so that was 20 years ago and that is, if I'm not mistaken, that's somewhere right around the time that you started covering the biotech space, right? Has it been about 20 years since you?
Luke Timmerman:started.
Matt Pillar:It's a little more.
Luke Timmerman:I started covering biotech before discovering the mountains. So I mean to rewind a little bit. I, you know, originally from Wisconsin, upper Midwestern maybe you can even hear it in the accent at times but I moved out to Seattle after graduating college, got my first kind of big city newspaper job at the Seattle Times in let's see, this was 2000. And I started out just like a lot of beginning reporters covering general assignments all around town, and then it gravitated toward business general, like variety of business stories I got to write about. And about a year in the opportunity came to me to do one of two things, which was either cover the biotechnology industry for the local newspaper or retail. And I look back on this sometimes as a kind of a fateful decision, because I could have covered Starbucks, even ultimately Amazon, and like really big, prominent companies that have a national following.
Luke Timmerman:I thought that was kind of interesting. But then I looked at biotech and I knew nothing about it. I mean nothing at all, but it had science, human health implications. There was business and it was a strange kind of business, like you have to raise money first and then it's very speculative before you would ever like have a product and generate revenue. So what's that all about.
Luke Timmerman:And then we're interesting people. I just thought, wow, there are a lot of interesting ingredients for storytelling, and it just so happened that in Seattle we had a little bit of a cluster of interesting companies working on cancer drugs and immunology, and particularly we had an anchor company called Immunex which developed Enbrel, and Enbrel is a household name, now one of the biggest selling drugs of all time. It's now marketed by Amgen, and that was making a big difference for patients, and so I had something tangible that I could report on. And they had a whole set of issues manufacturing wise and business wise, and so there was a set of circumstances there that really got me hooked on biotech and trying to learn the science and the business as best I could so that I could then explain it to a general interest audience in greater Seattle.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was the beginnings and I agree with you wholeheartedly. There's so much material and the people are great. I mean, I've only been in the space for a few years now. It's been, I think, three years since I've been covering this space, but through this podcast and other opportunities, I've had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of biotech execs, emerging biotech execs and I've been a journalist for a long time. This is my favorite coverage area. I've covered a lot of spaces retail, by the way, being one of them. This is way better. You made the right choice. So, from there where you eventually I don't want to skip ahead, I want to hit fast forward, but I know you eventually ended up in the biotech press I mean specific to biotech, right? Was that the next move?
Luke Timmerman:Well, sort of yes. So this was again the early 2000s. I worked at the Seattle Times for about, let's see, six years, and so I learned a lot. I got to cover a lot of different companies and different therapeutic areas. The people, as you mentioned, were terrific. They really took me by the hand and explained okay, here's what a cancer vaccine is and here's what we're doing. They like talking about what they do and educating people, and I was an eager student, so I found this just really interesting and at some point I had to decide okay, I'm going to commit myself long term, like this is really going to be my specialty, rather than work in a general interest newspaper.
Luke Timmerman:People will often rotate from one area to another, like I could have gone and covered Microsoft, say, after five years, or Boeing or something else. I decided not to do that. I was going to double down and make biotech my long term commitment. And so well, a bunch of things happened. I did a fellowship year at MIT for science journalists, which was fantastic, and we can talk about that if you want. But after that, well, newspapers were struggling with this thing called the internet in the mid 2000s and I thought maybe it's a good idea for me to think about electronic media being a part of that in some way. So I went to Bloomberg News and I actually moved to San Francisco, which did a couple of things. It got me into this different style of journalism, a little faster tempo, more suited to the internet, but also feel about that?
Matt Pillar:Let me just ask you real quick how did you feel about that at the time? Like, did you feel like you were letting go of something important within your, your own ability, like your creativity, your thoughtfulness?
Luke Timmerman:Yes, that's a very good question. There was so much pressure to move fast on a wire service on the breaking news that it was, there wasn't as much oxygen and space to do those longer form, deeper dive pieces that I like doing at the newspaper. I found that out later. But also, well, on the good side, I got to expand my repertoire to national coverage so I got to cover Genentech and Amgen and Gilead and from a different audience, financial in nature. But I learned a lot. But I also learned that I missed covering the startup world, like where I thought a lot of the innovation was happening and I wanted that flexibility to do some quick twitch breaking news but also have that slow twitch fiber where I could do deeper dive features, more thoughtful reporting.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Mit Science Fellowship for Journalism. This is interesting. I wasn't aware of that.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, so it's actually called the Night Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT and named after the John S and James L Knight Foundation of Knight Ritter Newspapers, fortune. And so I took a sabbatical year with the permission of my bosses at the Seattle Times, moved to Cambridge, worked with a group of a dozen or so science journalists from around the world, and we had twice weekly seminars where famous scientists would come in and talk to us about what they were doing. We could audit classes. You get a student ID card. You got access to the whole candy store of MIT and Harvard too. Go to the library, go to the gym, be a visiting fellow with no real responsibilities other than learning. It's a pretty good gig if you can get it.
Luke Timmerman:But that year gave me some time and space to think about what I really wanted to do long term, and it really was chronicling this biotech revolution. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn more about people doing other things in different parts of the country, different parts of the world, learning about different disease areas like Alzheimer's and diabetes. What are the pertinent questions in these fields? What are scientists really stumped by and what are the humps they got to get over to develop more effective therapies and diagnostics. So yeah, made that commitment about a little more than 15 years ago.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, and I know there are at least two more stops on the journey to where you are today. You went into the trade press, so you moved into the at some point. And again, I don't want to miss any important parts in between, but I know at one point, at some point you moved into the trade press and then from there capitalized on Timmerman himself.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, so there's a couple important stops. So I was at Bloomberg in San Francisco and actually one of my former fellows from the MIT program called me up and said hey, we're starting a new startup called Xconomy and it's going to be all about the innovation community. So high tech, biotech, clean tech, all these companies that are in startup land, let's say, in geographically undercovered areas, so companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. We're getting a fair bit of coverage. But there's all this activity happening in places like Boston and Seattle and San Diego and points in between, and our idea and we've got a little bit of venture capital funding is to start a company that covers the most innovative things in these areas. And I thought, wow, I kind of like to move back to Seattle, start a bureau there, give it a go on the wild and woolly internet of the late odds, and we'll try to figure out our business model on the way. But I ended up.
Luke Timmerman:I was there for six years thereabouts, opened up five or six bureaus around the country or collaborated with colleagues. So I was the biotech guy working with tech journalists and I just learned a ton at this stop about entrepreneurship. As a journalism entrepreneur, what does it take to build an audience, build a sustainable revenue model. And meanwhile, in my journalism, I'm interviewing biotech entrepreneurs asking them about well, how do they create sustainable revenue models and raise capital and hit their milestones. I'm editing tech journalists so I'm learning a little bit about how technology instruments can influence life sciences, like the development of new drugs and diagnostics. Just a fabulous experience in many, many ways. But just to fast forward, I had this itch to write a book. I took some time off after X economy to write that book, which was a biography of Leroy Hood, the developer, the leader of the team that developed the first automated DNA sequencing instruments. So there's that nexus of technology and biology sparking the genomics age, precision medicine that we're seeing today. So I was really passionate about that project. I took some time off.
Matt Pillar:I thought a book hang on before you go any further, I'm going to help you plug that. But I mean the book is I'm assuming it's still available on Amazon right? You can see it on Amazon. It's called Hood, trailblazer of the Genomics Age, luke Timmerman 2016. Look it up.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, yeah, there's your plug, it's available. Yes. So during the book leave I thought hard about I come back to that business model sustainable revenue, what was going? What did I want for that next stage of my career? And I thought about starting my well, I thought about the advertising kind of click through based free content models really struggling. I mean, we struggled with that at X economy, Others did too. In those years we ended up at X economy settling on events, conferences, organizing conferences as a big part of the business, and while I learned how to do that and enjoyed doing that, it also was exhausting.
Luke Timmerman:At some point I was running events all around the country and it wasn't.
Luke Timmerman:I thought it was taking away some of that time from some of that reporting. Coming back to something you said earlier that I really wanted to do, that I enjoyed and I knew that the readers valued. So I thought can I come up with a subscription based model, a low priced subscription where readers are paying me directly for a month, a quarter or a year at a time for high quality biotech journalism that they can count on? And I didn't need to reach 100,000 readers every story in order for that model to pencil out and pay for my mortgage and support my family and all that. So I crunched some of the numbers and I thought this is what I think I need to do I need to get 1000 paying subscribers in the first year to convince myself that this was a worthy venture. And sure enough, I was able to do that. And gosh, that was almost nine years ago. Now I've been able to run the Timberman Report covering lots of interesting stories, like I have always wanted to do.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, no, it's fast and it gives you the opportunity. I asked that question earlier about, like, because I lived through the same, a very similar story, through, you know, the dawning of the internet. I wasn't a newspaper guy but we were a magazine guy, magazine people, like we're, our publishing company, published magazines and boy, that change came on quick and hard and caused us to do some, you know, really significant realignment, I'd say, of our business proposition. But with that came sort of that, you know, a loss to me at one point where I felt like the depth was lost to the speed and quick hit kind of stuff. Now what you're doing, you have the opportunity to scratch both those itches right, like I mean you cover. I mean I know you cover like financial news and deals and sort of daily you know almost daily stuff. But you also have an opportunity to dig a little bit deeper with us, with personalities and people who are leading, leading in biotech right now.
Luke Timmerman:Yes, I don't have a comprehensive breaking news approach. I do not try to be readers one-stop shop for just everything that happened every day of the week. I don't think that's really sustainable as a sole proprietor operator.
Matt Pillar:It would kill you.
Luke Timmerman:I try to be selective.
Luke Timmerman:I pick my shots a couple of startups each week that I like to dig in and on and highlight and provide some greater context, a little more reporting than you would get off of.
Luke Timmerman:Just here's what crossed the wire in a press release today. I also do some aggregation with a weekly column that actually does compile a sort of an executive summary of what I think of as the most important news for busy biotech executives each week, along with some commentaries that I think I can bring about where I think things might be going. The one avenue for this in-depth reporting that you're referring to another newer one is my own podcast, the Long Run Podcast, where I will often pick entrepreneurs or scientists, or sometimes venture capitalists, who I've had occasion to get to know through my daily writing coverage and who I think have deeper stories that can be told in this highly immersive form of medium. I get them to tell their personal stories, their backgrounds, where they come from, how they decided to do what they do, and then dig into what they're working on in a way and try to get them to speak in a way that makes the science accessible to somebody who's not a specialist in that area.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, yeah, that's a fun medium, but I already I plugged your book, so you're not allowed to plug your podcast anymore. Fair enough, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I feel like you and I could talk about the publishing industry with just as much passion, insight and fond and not so fond recollection as the biotech space. But I want to be conscious of our time here and I want to get to the mashup that I mentioned and talk a bit about the Timberman Traverse. So this mashup, you have created a thing. I'm going to let you explain it. I'm not going to try to do it, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you've created a thing that marries this personal passion with industry, called the Timberman Traverse. Tell us about it. What's your Timberman Traverse elevator pitch.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, so it goes back to my background in journalism. So by about, let's see, origins are in 2017. I had started Timberman Report and had reached that threshold of viability and getting a company started, it's an all-consuming thing. So for two, three years, that's just all I really had time to think about and do. But 2017, I started thinking and I had made one of these influential people in biotech lists and I was writing columns. I have opinions. Sometimes people agree with them, Sometimes they don't right.
Luke Timmerman:And I thought okay, well, you know what, if this is really true, if I actually have this influence, maybe I can channel it in a more direct way to encourage this audience of people who I've built over the years the reputation track record. Can I encourage them? Can I use what I have to encourage them to give back in a big way to something that I care about and I know a lot of these readers do too, and at the time that was cancer research. It still is, so now in parallel. So that was sort of where I was professionally at that point.
Matt Pillar:It hadn't crossed your mind. It hadn't crossed your mind at this point. Like you thought like how can I exert my influence to good effect? But it hadn't crossed your mind at that point to like I guess you hadn't formed up what it was going to be. Like you want to do something but you don't know what it's going to be yet.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, well, in journalists, you know, we're taught from an early age to kind of be detached and not really get involved in causes. So I kind of had to get over that and recognize that I think I was in a little different place and that I really could and should use this influence. There are journalists who get involved in things that they believe in that are good causes. So I had the freedom and independence to do such a thing. So I had to figure out what would that be. Now, you had mentioned earlier the mountaineering in parallel, in the background. I had been climbing a lot and had, by this point, had climbed the two highest peaks, the highest peaks in North and South America, denali and Akangkagwa, and so, you know, pushing about age 40 at this point or maybe a little past, I had the kind of climbing resume where you could begin to think seriously, like responsibly, about potentially climbing Mount Everest. Yeah, I wasn't. I hadn't really thought ever about climbing Mount Everest, but I got thinking this is the mashup. So I thought if I were to climb Mount Everest, I would want to. That would generate a whole lot of attention. A lot of people would be very excited. I could probably electrify this audience of biotech people around that climb of the highest mountain in the world.
Luke Timmerman:But in order to do this, I've got to work really, really hard I mean physically, mentally to get prepared for this thing. I don't think I'm really that motivated to just do it for myself. It has to be attached to a cause. And so I looked and it turned out that I looked around for a good cause the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center right in my backyard of Seattle. I've known them for years and years. I've interviewed many of their top scientists. They had a program in place called Clendify Cancer, where people would climb a mountain and raise money from their friends and family to support cancer research. Now, nobody had ever done Mount Everest before, and that's a big undertaking.
Luke Timmerman:A big undertaking and it involves some risks. So I had to make a proposal. So I made a proposal to the Fred Hutch and at first they were like, wow, this is really kind of audacious. We're not sure about this. We need to talk with our lawyers. What?
Matt Pillar:if you die. Exactly, we don't want to die on this.
Luke Timmerman:That would be bad for me and for them too. So we figured this all out where we were all comfortable and, long story short, it was a huge, huge success. I had a goal of raising $175,000 for cancer research there, ended up doubling that to $340,000. And I was able to summit the mountain successfully on a beautiful day, clear skies, no crowds, and came back with no frostbite or anything. So this was just a really big success. And it spawned what came next, which we now call the Timberman Traverse, which is more inclusive of other people.
Luke Timmerman:So I thought of other mountains where people who are newer to the outdoors or with less experience could take on a good, appropriate challenge for them and tap their networks and raise money for cancer research. So I personally couldn't climb a higher mountain than Mount Everest, but if I took a team of people to, say, climb Kilimanjaro, highest peak in Africa, that doesn't require any technical mountaineering experience and I could ask each of these biotech executives to raise something smaller but still significant, like $50,000. Simple math team of 20 people, which is actually doable on a mountain like Kilimanjaro, 20 people times $50,000 equals $1 million. So that's a big step up in the amount of money that could be raised and had since run a couple of trips to Kilimanjaro, one to Everest Base Camp. There have been some other spinoffs too, but have ultimately raised, at last count, about $8 million through these expeditions, for both cancer research and a newer campaign that's anti-poverty here in the US, which we can talk about too, if you like.
Matt Pillar:For emerging biotechs, scaling the process, development and manufacturing of biologic molecules to clinical standards can be a challenge. However, you don't need to go it alone. Don't miss an episode of the Business of Biotech podcast where we offer insights on regulatory funding and other essential topics. The pod is brought to you in collaboration with CITIVA, a global provider of technologies and services that advance and accelerate the development, manufacture and delivery of therapeutics. Check out their resources at CITIVAcom backslash Emerging Biotech. I'm interested in that. I mean that's fantastic. Congratulations on the success there. I mean thank you. Thank you for the good work and the contributions you've made. Yeah, real quick, give me a little flavor on the anti-poverty initiative. Well, so the first Kilimanjaro trip was 2019.
Luke Timmerman:And then this thing called COVID happened in 2020. And so the plans to go around the world and do other things went on hold and, like a lot of people, I was kind of had a little bit of cabin fever sitting around the house wondering when can I get outside and do things again? Yeah, I'll bet a cabin fever probably hit you a little bit harder than it did the average bear it may.
Matt Pillar:I was really itching to get out of the house.
Luke Timmerman:It may. I was really itching to get outside with people and doing all these things and so in international trips for a while. As you probably remember, we're going to be especially difficult with presenting vaccine tickets, passports and all this. So I thought, could I do something domestic? And I was thinking of branching out toward life science cares, which was an organization I became aware about through my reporting. That was organizing the biotech community to give back to the most vulnerable members of the communities where we live and work fighting poverty, doing things like covering the basics like food and shelter for people in need, but also doing science education, which plays to the strength of the industry, and job training, like providing on ramps for young people to potential it to learn about what is going on in this pretty amazing industry and potentially pursue careers in it, and there are a lot of opportunities there. This whole portfolio of nonprofits, in starting in Boston but then in other hubs like San Francisco, san Diego, philadelphia and New York. Currently it's really branched out and the organizing, the executive team, the board, is an impressive group of people.
Luke Timmerman:I propose to them something along the lines of a domestic sort of Kilimanjaro, which I thought of at the time would be the presidential traverse in New Hampshire and that. So I proposed this right around when people were getting their vaccines and feeling better about getting together in groups and coming outside. So we did the first one of these in September of 2021 in New Hampshire, and the initial goal was, I thought well, this is a shorter trip. I don't know if I can ask people to raise $50,000. It's only two and a half days of hiking, but it's a beautiful part of the Appalachian Trail in New England.
Luke Timmerman:In early fall, maybe I'll ask people to raise $25,000, and a group of 20, again to get enough people to have critical mass and to raise a meaningful amount. Initial goal was $500,000, and we raised $730,000 that first year to fight poverty. So we had this same kind of degree of fellowship meaningful relationships formed on the trail, people had a great time. I knew that the model had spun off a really good alternative that was shorter, that was domestic, that was for a different cause, but also something really important to a lot of people in biotech. And we've now done three this year. That was the third year of this campaign and it's now exceeding $1 million a year.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, it's fantastic. It's also a lot of work, Like it's a ton of work. How do you reconcile or balance keeping the long run going, keeping the Timmerman report going and managing and working through all these Timmerman traverse events? I'm a busy guy, matt, I know you're a busy guy, man, a lot of balls, yeah, yeah.
Luke Timmerman:Well, but seriously, I thought about starting my own nonprofit to run this thing, but I preferred actually to partner with existing nonprofits. So Life Science Cares, fred Hutch. Actually, I have a new beneficiary organization that I'm working with this year called Damon Runyon the Research Foundation, but in this case we have an existing nonprofit partner that handles a lot of the administrative piece of this, so that I am primarily focused on the identifying of recruits, recruiting of people, motivating them to hit their fundraising goals, working with them to help tap some of the sponsors who might want to support this. But I'm trying to get better at delegating more of the work to the beneficiary organizations and they've been terrific, really really fortunate to have them helping out.
Matt Pillar:I want to talk a little bit about some of the, I guess, attributes of Timberman-Trover's alumni. I mean, they're, by and large, biotech execs, vc, biotech VC folks, folks from industry. I mean, do you take, like you know, folks from the supplier vendor community? Yes, like, are there? Is there anything? Like, are there any, I guess? Is there any? Are there any exclusions? Like, we will not. You know, we won't, we won't take X person along.
Luke Timmerman:No, no, it's a very inclusive group of people. So there's about 100 people in the alumni network now. As you say, a lot of them are biotech executives, a few basic scientists, venture capitalists, people from large companies, small companies, men, women, people of color. I'm looking for geographic diversity as well, so East Coast, west Coast, some people in the Midwest or the mountain West. So I'm striving to put together teams that are diverse and interesting in multiple ways, and that includes the type of work that you do. So there are people who work on antibodies, or there's cell therapy, or there are some high tech people working on software. So the idea is that when you've got this group of 20 or so people, we're going to have a lot of interesting conversations around the dining tent and we can learn from each other, and that's the way it's worked out and it turns out. People like they stay in touch for years, they're forming lifelong friendships on these trips and they're calling on each other for advice and making introductions for each other, sometimes doing professional work like investing in each other's companies.
Matt Pillar:Sure, it's great. Yeah, do you hand pick them? Do they apply? What's that recruitment sort of process look like? Is it an application procedure or do you just go out and say hand pick them and twist their arm to play?
Luke Timmerman:I do hand pick them and I keep a list of people who have. If I've ever interviewed someone who said, oh, I like to hike, or I was just on Mount Whitney or something, I make a note. Take a note, yeah, yeah, and I will call that person six months later and ask them to join one of these trips. So yeah, I mean at some point I might have a little more formalized application process, but right now it's very much hand curated.
Matt Pillar:You mentioned. You just mentioned sort of the value of the relationship building that happens on these trips, personally and professionally, I'm sure In fact, I mentioned from the outset that I'd been courting you as a guest for quite some time and I don't know if I mentioned this to you the last time we spoke, but I publicly on my podcast, called you out as someone who I wanted on the pod while I was interviewing Bernat Olea and Parag Shah, who are exemplary, I think, of this relationship that you mentioned. I believe they didn't know one another before they went on a timberment traverse as a result of their meeting there and, as you said, conversations around the dining tent and hiking together and having that amazing experience. Parag is now a lead investor for Venanta Bioscience as, I'm sorry, bernat's company, and I asked them. We talked about that on that episode of the podcast.
Matt Pillar:We talked about their experience there and I asked them I was like, because we've all had like magical moments in the forest or the mountains or on the stream or whatever your magic place is. We've had magical moments with other people and I remember pressing them a little bit on like, are you sure it wasn't just sort of the high of the experience that made this relationship happen. You know, like, how do you, you know, how do you, looking back on it now, how do you gauge, like the value of that interaction? And I mean, obviously they've been working together for quite a while now and they're both seeing a lot of value in the relationship. So they fully, you know, they fully rationalized the connection they made on the mountain. But I'm sure that happens like on every trip. There are probably stories untold to you of these relationships that happen.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, that's right. I often hear about it much later. But yeah, bernat and Parag are a good example. I think that's right that they did not really know. They did not know each other prior to doing the presidential traverse together for life science cares and they did get to know each other or become familiar.
Luke Timmerman:At least you know who are you, what do you do, and I think all kinds of you know studies have shown that we do business with people who we are already familiar with. It isn't just like you don't just automatically respond with a yes to a cold call A telemarketer, right I mean. So this is providing people the familiarity I mean they're accumulating social capital in a way, getting to know lots of people and who knows where that will lead. But I do know that people have they've joined each other's boards, they have made investments in each other's companies. There have been so many more informal interactions where it's just like, hey, I need to talk to an IP attorney, who do you know? That's good, and it's just like you easily pick up the phone and call that person who you know you sweat it a little bit with on the trail. You know you broke bread with around the picnic table when you were tired. At the end of the day, you feel comfortable. There's a rapport there and it's really wonderful to see.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it is, and I mean the experiences that these people take with them when they're done, knowing not only that they did this physical thing, accomplished personal goals, made important professional relationships and also contribute to do a super meaningful cause. Like I said, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show was to just celebrate that. I mean, I know that you do a great job promoting the Timberman traverse. I see it all the time. It feeds my you know LinkedIn feed, for instance, and the people that are involved also do an excellent job promoting. But I wanted to take a minute and celebrate you and that effort as well on the podcast.
Luke Timmerman:Well, thanks, matt. I think there are a lot of people in this industry who care, who want to give back, and that this is providing a vehicle for them to do so in a fun and interesting way, and, yeah, I'm just really really thankful and fortunate to be in position to do it.
Matt Pillar:What's the next Timberman traverse project and the works.
Luke Timmerman:So currently running a campaign for the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, taking a team of 20, again 22 people, I think to Kilimanjaro in February, and so if anybody wants to check out the roster, who's doing that, and if you want to chip in and help them all hit their $50,000 fundraising goals, you can go to timbermanreportcom and hit traverse up at the top of the page and you can see that roster and that'll take you to their fundraising pages at DamonRunningorg.
Matt Pillar:It's a terrific. It's a fantastic setup. It really is. I'm talking about the way that you've presented that on the site. Would you call him climber? What do you call your participants? Thanks for walking me through. Yeah Well it's a nick name for your climbers, or?
Luke Timmerman:well, it's actually more hiking than climbing, so that's one reason why I switched to that term Timmerman traverse.
Matt Pillar:Yeah.
Luke Timmerman:Because, you know, sometimes when you hear the word climbing, sometimes people think of ice axes and hard intimidating, taking risks, and that's not really what I'm asking people to do. But they're participants. They're members of the Timmerman traverse team.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, so each one has their own. You know the bios up there. I think they have their own page and their own sort of fundraising site associated with the project. So to Luke's point, make sure you check that out. I want to in the time that we have left, are you good? You got a few more minutes for me?
Luke Timmerman:Yeah.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, okay, and the time we have. I know you're busy, you got things to right, you got ice to do, you got all sorts of stuff going on, so I want to be respectful of your time. But in the time that we do have left, I want to just get your some of your thoughts on on the space. Like you know what you're, what you're seeing, nothing in particular. I don't want you to comment on any specific financial deals or anything like that if you don't want to, but we're in an interesting, interesting time.
Matt Pillar:Your history covering the space is as far richer and deeper than mine is, like I said, I've been here for like three years. So I got to see the pre COVID like steadiness. I got to see the COVID boom, followed by the busts, you know, the bubble. The financial markets turn around to the point where everyone's still complaining about that and in emerging bio in particular, you know it's been a pretty rocky past 24 to 36 months. Where do you see that? I don't know, maybe it's an unfair question to ask you, but where do you see it going Like? What do you see sort of on the horizon?
Luke Timmerman:Oh well, I think things are going to get better. Call me an optimist.
Matt Pillar:That's an unpopular approach, for, you know, for a trade pressman, right? Our trade press supposed to be all doom and gloom, right? Well, you're not doing a layup, aren't you doing a layoff? Tracker Luke.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, well, I happen to have my own view on this, which is that I've seen this movie before. This is a cyclical business. It's really. It'll give you a whiplash the ups and downs, but we're in this down trough of disillusionment right now. It's going on close to three years of hardship for especially the early stage companies without developing products seeking to raise capital. So investors still have plenty of money, but they're being much more picky and risk averse about where they put it to work.
Luke Timmerman:There's just like the preclinical or platform kind of companies are finding it very difficult to get going. They're finding it hard to meet their milestones, they're doing layoffs and cutting back programs. You've seen all the news, but that money is still there. It is still. It is being deployed for more near term clinical stage assets that. We've seen this before with the great recession of kind of the 09 to 2012 period. It also happened after the genomics bust in the early 2000s.
Luke Timmerman:The difference now is that there's been so much progress in the enabling technologies, our ability to sequence all the multi-omic and imaging technologies. Our understanding of the biology is way, way better than in previous downturns. There's just more and more practice changing therapies and diagnostics coming out. The other side of this innovation pipeline For cancer, just for one, there is so much innovation coming through in the phase two, phase three trials that just would have been top of the fold like newspaper stories in 10 or 20 years ago. They're not really being fully recognized by the markets or the general public. I see fundamentally really good things coming out, real products coming out of this community. I think this is just a matter of time, for the interest rates situation needs to settle down. The global macroeconomic situation needs to settle down. A few more positive blockbuster releases of products from the big companies and then we'll be back in a more steady and normal financial environment.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, for some legs to grow, a couple more legs to grow, under some of these therapies and techs and modalities that are causing so much excitement right now. Which, among those without naming specific companies, I don't expect you to do that but which, among the new technologies and therapeutic approaches, modalities, are you finding most exciting? What are you most excited about? Is that a fair question to ask at your own list.
Luke Timmerman:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm sort of a pundit as well at this point. I have my opinions. I get this bird's eye view. I'm lucky.
Luke Timmerman:I think of this in a couple different categories. There are the technologies, the tools for interrogating basic biology. It's some of those things I just said genomics, proteomics, metabolomics at the single cell resolution level. In many cases there's imaging CryoEM images. There's super microscopy for live imaging of cells, the spatial biology. There are companies that are offering tools that can help us ask and answer questions about basic disease pathology at high precision, high speed, low cost. That was just absolutely unfathomable 10 or 20 years ago. I'm really excited about those tools for understanding basic biology. Now, when you have those tools available for just about every modern, well-equipped lab, they'll have access one way or another, either at their own tool or their ability to contract out to somebody else who can help. Then we've got all these modalities. You can fit the right tool for the task.
Luke Timmerman:When I started many, many moons ago, all we really had for tools were small molecules and recombinant proteins, Monoclonal antibodies being one promising area 20 years ago.
Luke Timmerman:But now we have cell therapy, gene therapy, bi-specific antibodies, antibody conjugates, targeted protein degraders, different types of small molecules, RNA interference, the whole oligonucleotide space. These were scientific ideas that were kicking around in labs 20 years ago. Now, everything that I just mentioned all those modalities have FDA approved, actual products. Those are products that are really, really helping people and making a big difference for a lot of people with disease. There's a whole lot more in the pipeline behind those first mover products in each of those modality categories. When you take together that better understanding of the basic biology along with a whole tool kit that's just brimming with different tools, the modern biotech company can figure out the right tool for the task, do what it does, run the experiments Again. This is why I'm bullish for the long term that we're living in a biotech century and we're going to get major advances in therapies. We're already getting them and we're going to get a lot more of them over the next 10 and 20 years.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, I like your outlook. It's not just bullish and optimistic. For sake of Luke Timmerman being optimistic and optimistic, you just backed it up. I love it. You heard it right here. Folks, luke Timmerman just gave you cause to be bullish investor community.
Luke Timmerman:I think it's a good time to be starting a biotech company. I really do.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, agreed, I've abused your time and I've abused the time. I don't think I've abused our audience this time, because I think this has been super enlightening and entertaining to listen to, but we're going to save the rest for another day. I'm hoping, now that I've had you on as a guest, you'll be agreeable to come back sometime and visit with us again and talk about what's going on in Timmerman's world and the greater space.
Luke Timmerman:Well, this is fun. Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, no, I appreciate you coming on. I enjoyed it too. Thanks for joining me.
Luke Timmerman:All right.
Matt Pillar:That's the one and only, Luke Timmerman. I'm Matt Pillar and this is the Business of Biotech. We're produced by Life Science Connect with support from Cytiva, which demonstrates its commitment to emerging biopharma companies at , check that out. Go to bioprocessonline. com/ bob to sign up for the Business of Biotech newsletter and make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. In the meantime, thanks for listening.