Multimodal approaches to the delivery of radiologically active compounds have created a fertile environment to for players in the space to put on a precision medicine clinic, so to speak. What’s more, Radiopharmaceuticals create a unique business opportunity given the closely-related and necessary companion diagnostic arena. On today’s episode of the Business of Biotech, recorded in San Francisco, we sit down with Dr. Mark Hoppin, CEO of Ratio Therapeutics, a company that’s well-positioned in the space with a fresh Series B and the foundation of a tunable radiotherapeutic that Dr. Hoppin says addresses the delivery, safety and efficacy challenges long associated with radiopharmaceuticals in the treatment of solid cancers. We also discuss how this mathemetician-turned biotech CEO has navigated the leadership of boards, employees, and investors on his journey.
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!
Multimodal approaches to the delivery of radiologically active compounds have created a fertile environment to for players in the space to put on a precision medicine clinic, so to speak. What’s more, Radiopharmaceuticals create a unique business opportunity given the closely-related and necessary companion diagnostic arena. On today’s episode of the Business of Biotech, recorded in San Francisco, we sit down with Dr. Mark Hoppin, CEO of Ratio Therapeutics, a company that’s well-positioned in the space with a fresh Series B and the foundation of a tunable radiotherapeutic that Dr. Hoppin says addresses the delivery, safety and efficacy challenges long associated with radiopharmaceuticals in the treatment of solid cancers. We also discuss how this mathemetician-turned biotech CEO has navigated the leadership of boards, employees, and investors on his journey.
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 cellenginecom. When it's time to map out your clinical course, let clinicalleadercom help, and if optimizing outsourcing decisions is what you're after, check out OutsourcePharmacom. We're LifeScienceConnect and we're here to help.
Matt Pillar:Today's radiopharmaceuticals aren't your daddy's chemotherapies. Multimodal approaches to the delivery of radiologically active compounds have created a fertile environment for players in the space to put on a precision medicine clinic, so to speak. What's more, radiopharmaceuticals create a unique business opportunity, given the closely related and necessary companion diagnostics arena. I'm Matt Piller and on today's episode of the business of biotech recorded in San Francisco, I'm sitting down with Dr Jack Hoppin, ceo of Ratio Therapeutics, a company that's well positioned in the space, with a fresh series B and the foundation of a tunable radiotherapeutic that, hoppen says, addresses the delivery, safety and efficacy challenges long associated with radiopharmaceuticals in the treatment of solid cancers. Let's give it a listen.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:We did and Ratio Therapeutics is interesting to me personally and to the podcast. I mean we're 180 plus episodes deep into this thing and I maybe have had one or two other radiopharmaceutical companies on, maybe, and it was like early days because I couldn't tell you who they are. So I'm not intimately familiar with what's going on in that space, so give me a lay of land before you get into like ratio and why it's better than all the other reasons. We're cheering for our own. Yeah, well, that's good.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I hear that a lot Tell me a little bit about what the space give me a little landscape, sure. So the notion of injecting a radioactive drug for the purpose of killing cancer cytotoxic effect is not novel.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Right and it's not novel or new. No, like I don't want 31 radioactivity, I don't want to prove by the FDA 1951 and it's still a standard care for thyroid and cancer and even hypothyroidism. There was a couple of good drugs that came out in back at the turn of the century and it for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and they were good drugs but were not economically successful somewhat controversial.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:And then Bayer came to market with SOFIGA, which is rigged chloride for metastatic bone cancer, very akin to the radioactive iodine which is injecting an isotope and it just goes, in the case of iodine, to the thyroid and in the case of radiative chloride, it goes to osteoblasts, the interface of the tumor and bone and metastatic bone cancer. So it is efficacious to a point. It's also very good in a palliative care sense. And then what's happened? Then?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:the boom really has been the last decade, most of the who has five years with Novartis making acquisitions and then getting approval for Lutithera for their end-com disease. It's targeted to somatostatin, and Pluvvicto was approved for castrate persistent metastatic prostate cancer and that targets PS and megacrostate specific membrane antigens. They're very good drugs with very little side effects and that's why people just got really excited. We've seen the big players come to the market for the last five years.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:There's been some recent and exciting acquisitions in the space. So I was really interested as I mentioned in that previous life working with Sony, ready with drugs of being in this space. But there really weren't the big players in the market and that's what's needed, I think, for the supply side, for the distribution and the commercial side. We've watched a lot of players come in. Just in the last year you only made a big acquisition.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:First of all, we've just announced a big acquisition to join the likes of already present Novartis buyer, and we see other big drug companies doing some trials and looking in the space. So that's a big change for the market. Yeah, positive, really positive, because the drugs are good and they're a very you know, I think supply chain was an issue in the past. Manufacturing is always a topic. You're making something that's decaying, so it's another level of complexity. As your shelf life is very short, you're making each batch and releasing it. But those two drugs Luzera, lito really have been a big changer and now we see a huge pipeline of other companies and drugs in the space. So now let's zoom out a little bit and give me some perspective on where radio pharmaceuticals kind of fit in the landscape of small laws, traditional biologics, even cell and gene therapies.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:So for blood-borne cancers those two drugs I mentioned or lymphoma, for not hyphens lymphoma, those were antibodies. But for solid tumors, while people have tried with antibodies, realistically it's a small molecule sport. You need something with high capillary permeability, tissue diffusivity. You want to get something up and into the tumor quickly and small molecules best find themselves in that. And you don't want. You are injecting a radioactive material, so you don't want long circulating radiation in the body. So people are really going after small molecules and peptides another small molecule and so we're a small molecule company with a platform that hitchhikes albumin. So we have very weak binding to albumin. It's actually very reverentially very strong binding to the tumor antigen.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:You're looking for targets that are specific to solid tumors that are highly expressed in that environment and with very little off target. The efficacy is very predictable. It's really a function of how much radiation absorbed dose you can get to the tumor in a given dosing cycle as compared to what would be your off target dosing treatment. So it's that ratio, the area under the curve. Yeah, those relative regions of interest are working, hopefully defining your therapeutic efficacy or therapeutic window, and so the great hope of this class of drug is very often as a replacement for chemotherapy. The side effects are much lower, little to no impact on the immune system, depending on the drug. So not born out yet, but as we've really been focusing on single agent efficacy, but the great hope is that these in combination with other things that are pretty disruptive because most people don't feel much of the effect of the drug there can be if you know they don't have a ratio.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Well, radioactive is not selected. We used two types of emitters beta or alpha. Beta is like on and off. They're in the nuclei. One is literally 8,000 times bigger than the other. They have different properties and different isotopes. They can be used, but then from that you can calculate what is the right isotope for that drug.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:We're really learning now what one of the tradeoffs of all of these products so Novartis is Novartis, an emerging biotech, a small biotech. It's a small biotech. That goes without saying, one of the differentiators being you've got to raise money, not that they don't, but the resources are a little thicker. Novartis is a different economic position than Frasier. That's a very eloquent way to say what else to write, and it's, as we all know, super competitive and difficult for a couple of years now. So I guess that's my next line of question. I'm curious about what the investment appetite looks like. It's easy for a person in the position of industry observer to get spun up in anything RNA or get spun up in anything ATMP, cell and gene therapies or get caught up in the excitement around ADCs.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:So I know what the investment appetite looks like there. What does it look like for radiofarm? So it has been really strong. It's been the last two years of VC investing in the space have been somewhat frozen. Now radiofarms are just our space in general. 2023 being down here with forecasted thawing Lots of market economics have got us into that position. We've yet to have an institutional investor in the company. The company was founded following a transaction with buyer pharmaceuticals.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:And part of that was a strategic alliance to start work on one drug that they had acquired when they acquired Nouria and PSMIT therapeutics, which, I should add, was really the trigger of the founding ratio. Who was the founder of that company had enriched out to me to study the fabric of kinetics of this platform which I immediately fell in love with fit for purpose radiocomps, and so we really seeded the company through the speculative deals and then just some seed gap over the series A last year all large scale family offices and with insiders and then we just closed the series B, which we're going to announce until next week. So it's not only playing this podcast, but it'll be after next week. That's what I figured, and so at that time you will have heard the name. It'll be known that we closed the series B at the end of last year for $50 million, about half existing shareholders, half new. We did not have any classic VCs in that round either. We did have a strategic and another large scale family office. So it's been going well.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I think the appetite for radioflon of pseudotrophils is high in the marketplace. It's always hard to know what kind of what kind of company and free money valuations are. I would say we got. I think we did. We were very rational and got very fair. I think it was a fair deal for all parties. That's a fair Wednesday day always I would always suggest that.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I mean unfair is one of the things that got us in this mess a few years ago. But unfair leads to it always goes wrong Not always, but it usually goes wrong. And so we felt good about we feel very good about shareholder rates. We felt very good about rates we what's? Another unique aspect of radioflon, of pseudotrophils, is we inject incredibly small amounts of drug. So these are injections of 100 or so micrograms of drug and radioactivity is only on about one in a thousand. So it's an incredible thing a little over a hundred to be so scientific. So there isn't an anxiety of the toxicity. Is the radioisotope there isn't. You're at such a low mass of drug that you're not going to have drug effects.
Matt Pillar:Yeah.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:And so this is a long-winded way to say common in the space, and certainly in the origins of glutathera bupicto, is compassionate use casework in Germany, austria, it's also done in some other countries where patients that have failed standard of care can be prescribed by local, locally produced and locally manufactured radioactive drug products. Even if it's not approved yet, it has some safety understanding to it. So we have, with our research collaborators in Germany and Austria, have been able to do and investigate our drugs already in patients, and so that, I think, really is an accelerating decision. Go, no go. It was a very unique aspect of this drug image where the drug is and then you can treat the patient.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:So yeah, it's a very quantitative sport, so to speak, and so that I think, even though the company's only not quite three years old, we come, we came with a big IP position to start, and we you know John Babich was at Cornell, his IP portfolio is fully in the company, other than what we had sold to Bayer. And so you know, in that sense there's it's a different sport. You know, it's not like we said, we have a new, we have a new platform or we have an idea. We're going to raise a large series A and just try to get going on it. We really showed up with. We have a fair bit of. We filed two INDs or any. We put up a fair volume of knowledge around that. Yeah, that low I guess low ratio of radioactivity.
Matt Pillar:Yeah.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Does that play favorably to like one of the biggest problems in biologics right now, from a patient access perspective, is cost of development, cost of manufacturing. Is there an advantage there? I would say, unfortunately no. I do think that society as well, yes and no, it depends in the spectrum of things I'd say we, the upside is we have synthetic organic chemistry and visual chemistry that can just make the precursor.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:But there is, there is significant expense of manufacturing of the radioactivity on the drug. So just that process is expensive. In the scheme of things, compared to many gene therapies, for example, it's still a lot cheaper than a lot of. I think society's gotten pretty good at scaling up on it Right. So it's not prohibitive cost wise. But I can't say it's cheap sports and as you know, it's still any manufacturer right now small allular they're still. But cogs for the colds drug aren't cheaper here, no question. Yes, the radioactive part that's expensive, right Okay.
Matt Pillar:I'm sorry, no, no, yeah, you were saying you're based in Boston and then yeah also last year, in addition to that series, they opened an R&D facility. We did so that was interesting to me. I'd like to hear about what goes on there with that R&D facility.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, so it's funny how they witnessed both insourcing and outsourcing realists. With radioactivity it's a lot easier to insource, you just making decisions. In general, it is.
Matt Pillar:Because no one in the outsourcing community wants to deal with radioactivity.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:That was my background. The old company, if you grow, is like the primary outsource service providers and they're a great company. But it's also speed. You still want to use them for certain things, but just quick speed is a big issue and there's a lot of assays with radioactivity. Just having a lab that can't always have a piece inherently different than having all certain classic ADVD and PK that might be easier to outsource. It's always a time and money conversation. So we built a 19,000-square-foot headquarter lab in the Cport District. Boston's about 45% lab, 50% in the office. So true discovery facility medicinal chemistry, radiochemistry in vitro, x, vivo and formicology yeah, what is that?
Matt Pillar:Give us, to the best of your ability, an illustration of what that looks like and how those different disciplines are situated physically and encouraged to work together.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, when giving me a lab tour, which I'll happily give you, yeah, it'll happen, I promise. Yeah, you can start. You can think we do. There's four medicinal chemists making compounds. We do use CMOs as well, so sometimes they'll be building part of the molecule during some of the syntheses. That's a classic med-chem lab. And then, in order of operations, next we order the radio chemistry lab. They're unique in that you have probably 30 metric tons of lead in that lab.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:We're in a really cool building in the Cport called the Design Center, which was the largest building in the US when the Pentagon was built in the 30s, so it was really for storage of arms. So it's 18 inches. It can handle that weight on the 6-4. Usually radio chemists are in the base enough, yeah, but they have buildings specifically that. And then we have a vivarium for mice and rats and there's a lot of procedure rooms in there as well. The most common ass idea would be to do a virus distribution study and get an account or just count the radioactivity performed and understand the virus, the bio-D of the drug. And we have a somatocametry lab. We sell ultra lab and a biochem lab. What we can do in vitro and ex vivo work. You have to take special precautions in terms of like the I mean like if I walk around your lab on the Geiger meter, would I get real concerned.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, so there's Geiger counter. We would give you a dose meter of visiting dose meter, just to come into the lab, and then there's Geiger counters to on the way in and out to make sure you're not radioactive. These are very serious things, but openly not. Like you know, if you were at Los Alamos there would be more stressful radioisotopes. These are all that isotopes using medicines or have rational half-lives of decay.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:You know, yes, there's a lot of precautions. Everyone has to be trained. You have it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to have a bond. You know there's a lot of licensing and safety that go into that. But it's, and, depending on the day, absolutely the Geiger counter would light up Now, hopefully, at the end of the day it would not Right so happily, wherever it was going from the lab there wouldn't just be radioactivity out. It's part of the rules. Yeah, you do white tests and you know, just to make sure. Yeah, I was just curious. You know we cover a lot of companies that have biologic. Yeah, exactly, high-polycea biologics is sort of different animals. Yeah, this would be, you know, nothing as stressful as a BSL3, that's certainly a piece of work, but there's a you have to be careful. The biggest among them is the safety safety for our co-he's, safety for everyone who's working there and also the safety. I think you just have to be really diligent to not get you know their special ventilation radioactivity iodine, for example, to be volatile.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:So you have stacks with monitors and so on, but you know you just can't let radioactivity out of the facility. Yeah, what might the future hold in terms of building that space out as you get closer to?
Matt Pillar:you know, manufacturing as you build you know the need for manufacturing capacity.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Is that in the?
Matt Pillar:work in the plans or?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, we decided to go on a partner strategy for manufacturing. We've we have a really good partner which will also be press releasing the Alliance this quarter in North America, and another partner in Europe. Many companies in our space have decided to integrate their manufacturing. We just saw how strong these CDMOs are in this space and felt we should partner in the make by partner conversation. Yeah, I think our core competencies really discover any translation and I think our capital is better spent on that and we'll we'll file an ID this year for our first therapeutic. The first two IDs were for imaging, so this will be the first therapeutic ID.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, yeah, so this is an interesting as you started to kind of go down that path, explaining why it's rational.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yes, you know rationalism, but now I'm understanding it's more necessary than even rational. Yeah, and it's pretty hard. It's not impossible. If, let's say, you were working on a target for which there was already an established diagnostic, that, like PSMA or some other staff, even FAP, which is our lead program we did appeal for our FAP diagnostic with Lanteus and we finished the phase one and they'll develop it. But there's a couple other groups making FAP diagnostics. But if you're going after a target, that for which there is in one, you're going to have to. People are going to want to see the inclusion criteria that this person is. You're going to want to know that you have high enough concentration target to put that patient on a radiotherapy yeah.
Matt Pillar:Are there advantages beyond like? I mean the obvious advantages, if you identify a new target.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:You can create the diagnostic. You're well equipped to move quickly and be agile. Are there other advantages? I think that it is the one of the big advantages can be with while you're working on the diagnostic, you're going to really understand if you have a therapy, so just that, and some people would even differentiate them. I want to understand what are the pharmacokinetics of my portfolio for this target. Yeah, and you need to understand if you have a drug, the correlation to antibody drug conflicts and having an OBT or something like this. You really the concentration seen in the PET scan is very predictive of the outcome of the therapy. So if you have a really high concentration in the PET scan, your likelihood of response is higher. It's specific to the drug and the target, right, okay, and you know, when you do a PET scan, you inject and then scan someone.
Matt Pillar:And here for the therapy it's really about the residence time over.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:You know you want a half-life of residence of 100 hours. You know that's the kind of residence time you need, so they don't need to be the same molecule. Our diagnostic, for example, is half of the day of our therapy. Stays on target, yeah. So you mentioned that you know there are compassionate use cases where locally sourced radiotherapeutics are being used. You know, as I said, compassionate use examples.
Matt Pillar:But yeah, you say it's not insignificant to manufacture these therapeutics in terms of cost.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:So it's interesting to me like I'm struggling to. Those sites have a radiopharmacy, they have radiochemists. Okay, they already have the infrastructure, gotcha, so and that's really a one-off. It's really when you think about scaling something across a continent for supply of all patients, you know, I think no artist has done a great job of scaling up their manufacturing. They've been growing these because the demand is outpacing the supply, but they're addressing them.
Matt Pillar:And so it just gets harder as you scale. No, it's good.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I'm glad I asked, I'm glad you cleared that up for me, because when I hear you know back to use locality and think, oh, that may let itself.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:To scalability and distribution of therapeutics globally. And in this case that's not the case and there's a little bit different. Those are really. They'll have release criteria and QC, but you know, they're just scale, you know, and so I think part of the excitement that the big players come to market is now real dollars and of really good companies are putting real effort into making sure that this is a scalable enterprise and it's already being done. That makes sense. So you know there's many ways isotopes are produced, and both through public channels like the DOE, but also through virtual processes. So, historically, where there's a will, if there's a man, society will make a difference. You mentioned earlier they are undergrad, is in mathematics, I'm PhD's and that PhD, I'm sorry.
Matt Pillar:Yes.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Well, so that's always my yes, yeah, and you gave me a little bit of an accent right on what brought you to Ray Scho. Yeah. But the life sciences space in general, like what was the motivation to say? Was it just kind of fortuitous? Were you following the? Yeah, I would say that I came from an imaging lab and so I was working on imaging problems and we did a postdoc at a German national lab where we developed this. You know the research lab developed a technology a nuclear imaging technology for rodent imaging?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, a huge rodent. At the same resolution as people.
Matt Pillar:Was that experience like?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I guess the question I wanted to get to is like was that experience a revealing of a passion or were you sort of the mathematician who would apply as mathematical skills to any problem presented to him? Yeah, so because you stayed right, you stuck around. Now you're leading a biofarm suit. Yeah, the turn of events was after that, an American company in Lysotsit. I moved to Hungary where we made the product and I took a right-hand turn and really worked on that product and saw and really traveled, lived on an airplane effectively as we sold the product and got into it, with a lot of universities and pharmaceutical companies using this technology in their research, with a passion of doing quantitative analyses writing software and then build a company based on that.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:as a software and service, I saw I really gained respect for pharma companies and how solid they were at adopting technology and being very thorough.
Matt Pillar:I just gained a lot of respect for pharma.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I was really impressed with how, when you say biotech, I'm listening to you and I'm like pharma. The pharma super industry is making big bios like notorious for being laggard in terms of tech adoption. You're talking biotech. You're talking like there's a new age of biotech. I would say no, I'm talking all pharma. Yeah, big biotech and pharma, so both big and small. So small typically couldn't afford this infrastructure, so they were outsourcing, which is why you started a company, but I was very impressed with how many of them would?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I don't want to be critical of universities, but some universities would have been great but others would have built out of facility, not necessarily be putting it through its paces where pharma decided to go after and deploy a technology for use in their discovery programs. They were impressive. Yeah, all right, good stuff. So what if we had a productive pharma or huge? If I could shift your paradigm? Yeah, they are. Well, maybe you can try. In my experience they are absolutely willing to make significant investments in new technology if it serves their purpose to make a go-no-go decision in their discovery business.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, yeah, and I make a sweeping generalist.
Matt Pillar:Yeah, yeah.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:You look at the past 10 years where this wave has been building around AI and machine learning and the age old conversation about innovation, that kind of innovation, even scientific innovation, coming from biotech and feeding up into big biome yeah, I think having bills and running informatics company in previous life, but I would say that at ratio, we are very dedicated to a data management platform where all data are coming in and they are being adjusted. We put good effort into the gestion and evaluation Throwing. Ai is another tool and obviously with chatGPT we have now a language model tool. Right, but you have to have well structured data to clean insights. We certainly have made it easier as society to use those tools, but the effort is, if you look at data science, it's not 3% management and 10% analysis.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, yeah, and the super heavy AI center companies I talked to you compare and contrast what they're doing to the company that's just playing the AI no we played your game because it's sexy right now. Yeah, those fundamentals are key in the understanding right.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, this space does land at imaging radiology. In general, it lends itself very well to machine learning. So people, so reality, has had the most AI FDA approvals in terms of readouts. We put our medicine less so in our lifetime. It was a lot of machine learning on these types of data. Yeah, and we're seeing, obviously, movement in digital technology as well, but it's a harder problem. Yeah, but it's right. Yeah, so I could talk about that all day.
Matt Pillar:Oh, another episode.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, yeah. What's next for ratio? What's the next big step on the continuum? You know, finally, the science, the continuum. Now we've seen success with this platform making fit for purpose molecules, having this tunable nature of being able to immediately kind of look at what is the right form, and it's been impressive how quantitatively tunable the platform is by modifying the album binder and so turning our focus on to a couple of the targets where we think we can make an improvement on existing bodies. I don't know that we today have not gone after completely novel artists who have worked on artists that are well characterized.
Matt Pillar:It's a lot faster.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:there's preclinical information and when things are well characterized we can turn our attention. So that's been a strategic decision today. Yeah, and I don't see that changing. So yeah, it should be a. We're pretty excited, we're very optimistic around the needs program because, we've already treated patients, yeah.
Matt Pillar:That's an invention.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:When you come to a place like San Francisco a big investor conference what are you looking to get out? What's sort of the end goal I have? Right after this, I will go to a meeting with potential collaborators in the farm space. We know our role in the industry and it's very often to be good to have, so I'm looking at potential licensing discussions, meeting with more B2B we just closed our series B, so I am meeting with some financiers, but we're ongoing relations.
Matt Pillar:Business development.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, I'm not like you don't have your pitch deck in your pocket. I don't. I did enough pitching last year to ask you a lot. No, that would not this year, be the focus of relationships, just good conversations about what's happening in the market. We already have some strategic partnerships with the partners, so we need to go to school. Good deal, I'm off. This conversation is a warm up for your next one. What have I asked you that I should have asked you about you and Ray Shell? What part of the story am I missing?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:It's your last chance to do something other than give me your pitch deck? I think that you asked. I have helped start and build a couple of organizations and you asked what would you say to an entrepreneur?
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:Yeah, I mean that's a I just think I will say. Some people say what would you do differently? I'm very often I wouldn't have done it. I would just say making sure you're getting people advising you who have done it and are wildly critical of what you're doing. There is just no value in people telling you that Since you brought it up, I'll ask you a follow-up question what do you find that group of people, or even the small group, what sort of form do you find yourself in where you're exposing yourself to that sort of criticism by the folks who scrape their knees? I think that could be a benefit of raising capital or just a history of doing business. It's not a single answer, I would say. The people whose advice I seek have pretty varied backgrounds and varied experiences, but they all have good experience, I would say, not necessarily just in violent tech, I think in life, but I think that I think of a few people that are either on the border, frankly observing, or coming, or have invested, whose opinion I respect, and trying to triangulate from them
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:what their thoughts are. I'm going to be a believer in always finding someone who I assume is not the point being the dumbest and most likely the most. Just finding someone who FPHD and math mechanics. So finding someone who can give, who's been there, can give you. You don't have to do everything you say, but you really need. The biggest mistake I've seen come is people convince themselves, or something that may or may not be clear. They need feedback, they need pushbacks.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:One last question on that what's a safe forum for that kind of? Is a one-to-one? I prefer one-to-one, and usually before a board meeting. I think a board meeting should really be alignment execution. I think we all like to think about strategy in a board meeting. It's good to discuss them, but I don't think there should be surprises in board meetings. I think those conversations should take place prior to you should. Consensus building is the job of the CEO. Consensus can't be built just in a board meeting as we go prior. Do you consider yourself a serial entrepreneur at this point or do you need a couple more notches? I've only done things because I thought that you had a good mission, a good purpose. Most things come from there. I think my people might call me that, but I don't know that. I think as long as you have a good mission, a good purpose, and you believe you have, a rational technology to address the mission and purpose.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:They've applied it. Exeggese ideas are cheap, they're very cheap. Execution is very hard. Very good, I know you're I'm abusing your time. You don't have another point to get to. But this has been enjoyable Jack Oppen racial therapeutics enjoy every minute of it.
Jack Hoppin, Ph.D.:I'm going to take you up on a tour of the lab in Boston. We're going to get you gowned up. We're not going to put any radioactivity on you. That's great. We're going to confirm that as we walk in. I'd like to hear it, because my wife would like to hear that as well. It'll probably be in the spring when the weather breaks. I at least wait till March For sure. That's what's going to happen. It's a great meeting. Thank you, have a great rest. Thank you for joining me. Thank you.
Matt Pillar:I'm Matt Pillar and you just listened to the business of biotech, the weekly podcast dedicated to the builders of biotech. We drop a new episode with a new exec every Monday morning. I'd like you to join our community of subscribers at bioprocessonlinecom, apple Podcasts, spotify, google Play or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to our Never Spammy, always insightful monthly newsletter at bioprocessonlinecom backslashbob. If you have feedback or topic and guest suggestions, hit me up on LinkedIn and let's chat as always. Thanks for listening.