Business Of Biotech
The Business of Biotech is the pod dedicated to leaders of emerging biopharma firms. SUBSCRIBE to our new newsletter at www.bioprocessonline.com/bob. We bring you insight into organizational, finance and funding, HR, clinical, manufacturing, regulatory, and commercial challenges you’ll face as you navigate your company from an idea to success in the clinic and beyond. Each episode features guest commentary and best practices from accomplished founders and biopharma industry luminaries. The Business of Biotech is produced by Life Science Connect.
Business Of Biotech
Big Pharma Insights For Building Biotech Startups With Uniquity Bio's Brian Lortie
We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message.
On today's episode I'm speaking with Brian Lortie, President and CEO of Uniquity Bio, about his "no jerk" policy and how his experience building teams at GSK, Endo Pharmaceuticals, and Onspira Therapeutics informs his leadership at Uniquity, a clinical-stage immunology startup backed by Blackstone Life Sciences. Lortie also walks through the formation and launch of Uniquity and provides detail on the company's business model and strategy.
Access this and hundreds of episodes of the Business of Biotech videocast under the Business of Biotech tab at lifescienceleader.com.
Subscribe to our monthly Business of Biotech newsletter.
Get in touch with guest and topic suggestions: ben.comer@lifescienceleader.com
Find Ben Comer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencomer/
Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, ben Comer, chief Editor at Life Science Leader, and I'm pleased to speak today with Brian Lortie, president and CEO of Uniquity Bio, a startup focused on immunology and inflammation that emerged from stealth in May of 2024. I'm excited to talk to Brian for a few reasons. One is his experience building teams and driving growth at companies large and small, including 14 years in various roles at GSK, seven years at Endo Pharmaceuticals, where he rose to president of branded pharmaceuticals, in addition to company formation work and team building at Ons pira Therapeutics, which was acquired in 2019. Now Brian is back to lead and build Uniquity, a clinical- stage company backed by Blackstone Life Sciences, which is currently developing solrikitug, a monoclonal antibody, in-licensed from Merck. Thank you for being here, Brian. Great to be here with you, Ben. Thank you, I'm glad to have you. I wanted to start with this idea of building and managing teams, large and small, and I'm curious you know what you've perhaps learned from your experience about what makes people, and thus businesses, successful.
Brian Lortie:It's a great question and it's one I reflect on because, as you pointed out, and even listening to you there, it's like, oh yeah, I remember those things because we tend to get focused on the target right in front of us. But we're all a product of our experiences right, good and bad and I can say that I've got scars from mistakes made along the way, but we learn from all of those. I think for me, the common theme, whether it's a huge team or a small team, is the quality of the people on that team that I always refer to as our varsity team on the field, because your podcast is titled the Business of Biotech and, as you and your listeners know, it is not a business for the weak of heart. But one way you can try and sway the odds in your favor, I guess, is by putting the very best team around you, and that's what we've done here. And just to speak a little bit more about the current day in this company, which is clinical stage, very well capitalized by our very good partners at Blackstone, we're in three clinical trials right now, with readouts later this year and early next year. Those are all hard jobs. We've staffed a team that just about universally, began their careers in large, or at least large mid-sized pharma companies. Right, but everyone has the wiring or the internal DNA to find what we do in a more entrepreneurial, nimble company environment very attractive.
Brian Lortie:And it's that combination of those two things that I think is so important for us, for two reasons. One is coming. You know, having grown up myself and many of my colleagues grown up in a large farm environment, we get used to the levels of rigor and the scientific practice that's so important to get things right. We don't like to cut corners. We've seen the landscape littered with the uh, the wreckage of companies that try and do things too fast or uh, or on the fly, or on the cheap, or outsmart the regulatory realities, and it just doesn't work.
Brian Lortie:We like to put together a program that a you know, ultimately a large farmer acquirer, for example, will find to be, um, impressive and attractive. And we know what that looks like, cause we've all sat on that side of the table. I mean, I've bought companies sitting in a big pharma environment and I've sold companies sitting in a small company environment and I understand what works in that and that is universal. So you know, I guess, long answer to your question, which is whether it's a large team or a small team, and almost regardless of what they're doing, it's the quality of the people and the alignment to the mission at hand that really, I think, separates the successful companies from the ones that aren't as successful.
Ben Comer:I think it's interesting that you mentioned you know your staff at Uniquity, having experience at mid and larger companies. Are there different team dynamics in a large team versus a small team or, if not, dynamics, different things that can be learned may be easier, or that you just will have experience in with a large team that maybe you wouldn't in a small team.
Brian Lortie:Yeah, there certainly are, and first of all, we never stop learning right. So, you know, I learned things today that I didn't know yesterday and hopefully that process will continue. What people often find when they join a small team from, like, a large pharma team is that there are very few places to hide, and I mean that literally, or the result sort of your work product. Everything is out in the light because we don't have layers and layers of management and bureaucracy, and that's, by design, right. But it also means that everybody's work and everybody's efforts and the way we work together is right out there for everyone to see and experience. So people have to be comfortable with that.
Brian Lortie:The other dynamic is kind of an obvious one, but even though I consider us, you know, very nicely staffed I mean, we've got about 30 full-time people now on the team at our just about our third year anniversary and that's probably about right for us with one program to manage. But that means everybody on the team, from the leadership on down, has to be comfortable wearing a number of different hats, has to have the ability to sort of look around corners and see where things need to be done, and if there's nobody doing it, we do it right, and that starts with me and goes throughout all of the company. That's something not everybody's comfortable with. They might say that they are, but it's actually learning. That is often an experience for them, but it's good and I will say that. You know, I'm very, very happy and very pleased that we've got a team of people that roll up their sleeves every morning and get figure out a way to get the job done.
Ben Comer:You are president and CEO at Uniquity and I'm curious about what you see as the kind of key talents that you bring to the organization, and I'm also curious about what you enjoy doing the most professionally.
Brian Lortie:Yeah, so maybe I'll take that in reverse order. What I enjoy, what keeps me coming to work every morning, is, you know again, it sounds a little bit corny, but it's the people I work with. My people will tell you that I have a no-jerk policy and we really try and adhere to that. What does that mean? It means that in many cases, we're spending as much time with the people we work with as with our families. In some cases, I hate to say, it could be even more right. Some periods of time just get so crazy. So you better be working with people that share your value set, that share, you know, a viewpoint on the world. And then certainly the, you know, the interpersonal skills are so important. This is a place where, you know, we don't tolerate disrespect and we insist on quality of work and we insist that everybody work hard but work together, and we try and make sure we're enjoying that and having fun too. And there's a lot of different things we do there. So that's that's kind of the second question. What, what do I bring? I am not the scientist, right? My background is is company building, team building, commercial. You know, I ran big commercial businesses, at GSK and at Endo. I did run a global biologics development organization for a few years at GSK. That was part of my career development. It was super valuable and I draw on that experience every day.
Brian Lortie:Here, where the team and I are so focused on clinical development and not on commercialization, my job and I see my job is providing resources and opportunities for the team, making sure we've got the right team on the field and then to some extent getting out of their way and let them do good work.
Brian Lortie:But that doesn't mean I can't be involved or shouldn't be involved at the minute detail. So what I learn along the way from the team is the ability to ask the right questions. I may not have the answers In fact, in most cases I will not have the right answers but I hope I bring to the team an ability to catalyze arriving at those answers and then I'll lead the team in executing on those plans but also lead us to be aware when those plans might need adjustment. Right Mid-course adjustments are part of the game here. So it's that kind of managing and governing the company. As I said resources, working closely with the board, working closely with our investment partners and strategics that's a big part of what I do, but I hope to leave my fingerprints on all aspects of the business too, by at very least bringing on and leading the right people business too, by at very least bringing on and leading the right people.
Ben Comer:Are there things that you learned working in commercial functions that and I know this is not your first rodeo working on, you know, clinical development in a smaller company, but I'm just curious about that experience at GSK, at End, endo and more commercially focused functions. Are there things that you learned from that that can translate into leading a company that is, you know, very much focused exclusively, I would say, at this point, on R&D?
Brian Lortie:Yeah, this is a development operation full stop.
Brian Lortie:But the answer is yes, and I'll step back and say you know, at the end of all of these activities, all these processes, whether it's early discovery, whether it's preclinical clinical development, all the way to commercialization, we're trying to satisfy something that ends up with a patient right At the end of all of this work, as a patient and everybody involved in that value chain large company, small company, commercial, pre-commercial development we're trying to improve somebody's life at the end of it.
Brian Lortie:It really is what draws us all, I think, to life science as part of this business and that we don't lose sight of that, because you know you can get target fixation in any one of these jobs and forget that at the end of this clinical trial or at the end of this manufacturing process that you know, ultimately we're trying to bring important differentiated medicines that will improve the lives of patients.
Brian Lortie:This past year I will say that we did an exercise which was fun and, I think, very rewarding to the team, in that we brought in patients and physicians to come talk to us as part of our team week. We do a team week every year where we bring all the company together for a week and we strategize together, but we also have some fun together and we make sure we're all on the same track and aligned behind objectives and mission, and in this case, we really centered that on the patients that we serve. And listening to a patient, in this case, who suffers from COPD and lung disease, and the physician that treats them was really very valuable for us. So at the end of the day, whether it's commercial or development, we are here to solve that problem and it's good to just continue to keep that in mind.
Ben Comer:I mentioned that Onspira was acquired in 2019. Uniquity emerged from stealth last year, but I think you were a part of the original company formation a couple of years before that and I'm curious what you would say about your approach to just helping get the company off the ground, thinking through the business model. You know how you sort of, I guess, eventually made the case to Blackstone.
Brian Lortie:It is a very interesting story. It's one that we're proud of, and part of the reason is because it all worked out well. Yeah, we sold Onspira at the very, very end of 2019, you know, literally the closing dinner, I think, was just as COVID-19 was popping up on everybody's news feed and we were very nervous coming out of that because we had been in a packed restaurant in New York City. And then, of course, what happened? We all shut down for a long period of time.
Brian Lortie:But my you know my founding, original founding partners and myself, you know Steve Tullman, who is our executive chairman, Kelly Copeland, who runs our corp dev and product strategy team. We had all been together at Onspira and in other places and we said, okay, well, let's do this again, but let's figure out how we want to do it, learning from each process. And I will say, you know, on behalf of Steve and Kelly, they had done this several times more than I had, so they had a lot of experience in the company formation piece. But, you know, hopefully I had something, some dimension to the thinking, and we decided that it would make great sense to solve the capital part first, if we could right. In other words, we know that there are interesting programs out there, but getting the capital first really allowed us the freedom to operate and find the kind of quality program that would be worthy of building a big company or building a company around. And so you know we had had, we'd had relationships and connections into the Blackstone team and other large private equity groups. We we worked those connections. We very, very rapidly found that we and the Blackstone Life Sciences team in this case Nick Simon and Kiran Reddy shared our view as to what we could do together. Right. So Blackstone has deployable capital at scale to invest with life science companies. We have operational capabilities and company building track record and it was just a very obvious combination.
Brian Lortie:So we set out together you know in that you know 2019 period of time to say, okay, we're going to build a company, should be an I&I company, because that was the you know the depth of the experience on our team and it's an area of the scale of opportunity that makes sense for a Blackstone. And we set out to find a program to build a company around. We did that very thoughtfully and, again. We did that together, being able to leverage the you know, extraordinary scientific capabilities of the Blackstone team and our own people.
Brian Lortie:Came upon TSLP as a very attractive target the classic pipeline in a product. We were able to license a program that Merck had had and advanced it to a certain point and then paused its development for strategic reasons. It's a good program, had excellent patient data, but they paused it for strategic reasons at that time, made a deal, founded the company in early 2022 and off to the races. We went and building along the way. But you know, I can't overemphasize the value of having the capital partner with us along that journey right from the start as excuse me, as a founder in the company and having that it just opened doors for us, not the least of which was the ability to get such a high quality program in our hands and take it forward. So that's that's kind of the origin story here and you know, three years plus in, it's been a great experience and I'm super proud of the of the work that the team has achieved along the way.
Ben Comer:It strikes me as a kind of chicken and egg problem in terms of getting capital support starting, you know, a development program or particularly with it, within licensing a program. And correct me if I'm wrong about this, but it it seems like over the last few years it's been more difficult for companies to get money without having, you know, announced an initial candidate for development. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but how do you, I guess, how do you manage that? And you know you mentioned relationships at Blackstone. You have, you and your, your co-founders, had a record of success which I assume really helps grease the wheels in those kinds of conversations. But I guess, thinking about, you know, aspiring biotech builders who you know maybe have a great idea, maybe haven't landed on an asset yet need money to get started, whether it's an internal development discovery program. Or, you know, in licensing a drug in for development, you know, in licensing a drug in for development, Is there anything you know you would say about kind of how to think about that and how to manage it?
Brian Lortie:you know, at those early stages, yeah, there's several elements in your question, so let's unpack that a little bit. First of all, I'll just say anybody venturing into this needs to realize that it's very difficult and in many ways, the cards are stacked against us all. Right. Now we came in focusing on late stage development. It's an area of expertise for our team. We knew how to build a team around that, having done that before and look, what you said is very, very practical. Capital partners, whether it's a large private equity group like Blackstone, or whether any of the numbers of large and small venture capital funds are going to be most comfortable with a team that's done it before. Right, that is huge.
Brian Lortie:But everybody starts somewhere, and oftentimes you end up starting with, you know, an earlier stage program that doesn't require as much money. It's still the same process, though, of getting some level of capital behind you and alongside you, and I just want to underscore the point that you know. Money is not, uh, just cash, uh, your, your source of capital in the best case, brings along expertise, brings along science, brings along their own sets of connections, and and brings along, um, the the sort of intellectual tension to make sure that, at each step along the way, we're making the right decisions right. So you know, one of the great things is you. You know, let's put it this way Blackstone didn't just sign a $300 million dollar check and say to us, send us a postcard when you're done Right. I mean, of course, the money gets tranched out appropriately on a milestone basis, but along the way we work so closely with them to to help solve the scientific and other problems and challenges that come up. But we've got that huge capability you know capability behind us, not just the ability to dip into the checking account, and so that's super important. You can.
Brian Lortie:But you know, many entrepreneurs and biotech company builders, you know, have to start out small and start out with earlier programs that might require a little bit less capital and build that way. That's often the story that ultimately leads you to be able to do something larger. There are also, you know, a lot of people who are on the bleeding edge of discovery and it's fantastic. It's certainly a good thing for human health that that's happening. That just isn't where we're focused and that's not where, you know, blackstone's focused either. We we tend to want to back um programs with a lot of inpatient clinical data where a lot of the clinical risk has been discharged and then you're getting down to just smart development strategy and operational excellence along the way to to get the program to, to where it needs to be. So, um, but it's, you know it's hard work and it takes uh, it takes a lot of grit and that you know that DNA to be comfortable in uncertainty, but it's so rewarding when you can make it happen.
Ben Comer:Walk me through how you landed on on that specific model for Uniquity and maybe you can just give us a sense of. You know at what stage or what stage that you are looking for candidates to end license and then you know what your exit looks like and how you. You know how you decided on that particular model.
Brian Lortie:Sure. So we, you know, we built the model in a way that really works for us. We're not the only ones who have done it this way. But you know, at the moment the way we're structured is that the management team, all of the people sort of the intellectual capital and the operational capability sits in a C-Corp and the asset at the moment we have a single program or a single program with a couple of spinoffs they all sit in their own capital and intellectual property containing C Corp. That's separate. And then we have a very strong iron linkage between the two because the management team exists for the sole purpose of developing the program but the capital goes into that asset containing C Corp. The board is mirrored, the company officers and the management team are mirrored. But that gives us some flexibility so that we could, in the appropriate situation, of course you could transact an individual program without transacting the team along with it.
Brian Lortie:Right now, I know I get every situation is going to have its own requirements and we're also flexible along the way. But that's the way we structured it and that's been working really, really well. But it's important to say that you know whether it's one program or two or three programs. You have to make sure you've built a team that is so highly focused and dedicated and gives each one of those programs all of the effort that it requires. We can't, you know. I talked before about not cutting corners or trying to outsmart the laws of development physics. You have to make sure you're putting the right focus and the right team behind each program. So that's the way we built that. We built it to give us some flexibility. That's what's working now. Whether that works forever we'll have to see, but that's what's working for us currently and it's been a good model currently and it's been a good model.
Ben Comer:So it was model first and asset second, not selecting an asset and building the model around that particular asset. Is that right?
Brian Lortie:Yeah, I mean, we were doing these. You know we were walking and chewing gum at the same time. So we were building the structure, you know, working through the structural considerations again with ourselves and with Blackstone and our various advisors, while we were seeking to find the right program to serve as the core of the company, to build the company around. So as that all came together, we enlist the product, we funded the company and we were underway. All sort of happened simultaneously.
Ben Comer:What can you say about that program hunting process? You know how did you, how did you go about doing that, what were the kinds of things, I guess that that you were looking for? You mentioned, you know, pipeline in a product that seems like maybe it was a piece of it. But what else could you say, just maybe, about the process of of identifying, I guess, a short list of candidates? You know before making that, you know ultimately the decision.
Brian Lortie:Yeah, and it wasn't such a short list, I will say, you know, we combed the world quite a bit as we were in the process of, you know, really fine tuning our approach. And I said before we had we became quite interested in the TSLP target. Back then there was only a few. Right, there was tezepelumab, not even yet on the market, but uh, and a few others to follow. Now there are quite a few development stage TSLP or even pre-development stage TSLP has been a lot that have come across from from Chinese uh developers and, and you know, each one can, can live or or not proceed on their own merits, but at that time years ago there's really only a few.
Brian Lortie:So we were fortunate to find, you know, this just outstanding program that had been developed by, you know, a world-class company, right, I mean, this had all of the phase one, preclinical work, some great patient data. So that worked for us. But you know, we took maybe 20 programs through, you know, fairly deep diligence and many of them didn't meet our threshold Threshold's pretty high. The mesh of our decision filter is very tight because, again, our capital comes from a company that wants very solid clinical proxy, wants patient data. But also together we wanted programs that were big enough to put capital at scale to work, right. So that naturally points you towards big chronic conditions high in met need, and that's where we landed.
Brian Lortie:So, you know, fast forward to now we're in the clinic for, you know, asthma, COPD, which is huge in unmet needs, the third leading cause of death around the world eosinophilic esophagitis, which I think will be a real star for us it's almost complete white space and these are patients that really really suffer, right? This is a very terrible disease and there's really not much that works for them. But the promise of biologic therapy, like an anti-T slip program, is huge and really changing their lives. You know I spend a lot of time visiting clinical trial sites talking to investigators. That is a condition that the investigators are really very, very personally interested in, because they're treating these patients and they don't have much that they could do for them. So I'm excited about COPD. It's a huge opportunity we're going to, you know, I think, change the world there as well. But EoE, I think, is going to have a very interesting personal dimension to it. So it's what makes this business interesting, right.
Ben Comer:Yeah, and I have some questions. I want to ask you about your development candidate. But before I get to that, I'm curious about just how you got to the you know, the list of 20. Were you out there, just you know, pounding the medical journals, talking to physicians? Did you, you know? Were there other tools that you use to help you evaluate? You know the world of potential candidates out there. What can you say about that?
Brian Lortie:Yeah, it's more just hard work, as you said, scoping through the journals. We came upon the Merck program actually by doing some research to see who had advanced TSLP into clinical, and that was work done with our Blackstone partners. It's also an area where the network comes to play right. So we've all been involved in this for a long time. We have connections and it's reaching into the companies to see what programs either they need help with or have potentially stalled for the wrong reasons. You know companies like ours we're not the only one who does this, but I think we do it pretty well and we hope to continue to do it.
Brian Lortie:I think serves a very good purpose.
Brian Lortie:There's no pharma company out there I don't care how big they are that has resources to do everything they should need to do right.
Brian Lortie:And so companies like ours can come along, pick up a program in its mid-stage development, take it through proof of concept, take it through clinical programs and get either ready for commercialization or ready for phase three pivotals and then, at the appropriate time, return it back, either return it to the original home or move it to a more appropriate manager, right? So a company that's well-placed to do the 3,000 patient trials or, even more importantly, to commercialize globally. Right, we need to be able to take a program all the way through those points. But it becomes logical that at certain points the program is best managed back by a larger player, and you're seeing some really good examples of how that's starting to become really part of the model. That makes a lot of sense, right? Nobody no big pharma, I don't care how successful or well-capitalized they are can do everything they want to, but many of them have promising programs that a company like ours, a capability like ours, can help advance and then and then, you know, potentially put it back in those hands.
Ben Comer:Right, yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, I wonder you know if there are investors that you run into, who you know, who kind of have this, maybe a knee jerk response to well, if Merck didn't develop it, you know it couldn't be that valuable. I think most of us who certainly who cover the industry and work in it know that there are any number of reasons why you know a company will decide not to develop a given asset, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the science. But do you run into that people questioning whether you know a drug could be a meaningful new product after you know Merck, in this example, decided not to pursue it?
Brian Lortie:We get that question a little bit. We don't get it as often as you might think, but again, we're talking with pretty sophisticated investors and partners. They kind of understand it right and they're seeing the model of how this works. And remember, companies change their focus too. Strategic focus is a dynamic thing and companies come in and out of various areas of interest and focus and that's perfectly understandable because it creates great opportunity for companies like ours. But yeah, I mean, and the answer is, you know I'll use our program as an example you know Merck had spent a great resource and great time advancing it to a certain point, paused that for very good strategic reasons. You know they didn't pause it because it had safety issues. It didn't pause it because it didn't, you know, didn't work. They paused it because they had other areas of strategic focus.
Brian Lortie:And companies make portfolio reprioritization all the time. I mean there are truly seasons to that activity, right. But then for a program to then find its way into the hands of a company like ours, we can develop it, we can take the development risk through that next stage using someone else's capital. If we do our job well and we increase the value well, then a potential acquirer has the chance to come in and take the program, either take it back or acquire the basis of the work that we've done. So there's no loser in that. Really, the loser is if the shelves get filled with programs that gather dust and never advance, and that's when it's a real shame, right? So you know, our goal is to find promising programs that have stalled and do our very best to bring them ultimately to, you know, to serve the needs of patients.
Ben Comer:Following up on you know what you've said previously and just now about developing it up to a certain point and then finding a partner that can take it to the next level, conduct large trials, exercise their network strength in various ways and even into the commercial realm. Do you anticipate that being kind of inbound inquiries people watching the program externally, kind of inbound inquiries, people watching the program externally, you know, seeing it perform, getting in touch with you, making offers, or is there kind of? Is there an outbound component where you know you're evaluating the companies out there where it might be a fit and you're kind of proactively reaching out?
Brian Lortie:Or maybe it's both, it absolutely is both. And I just want to clarify one point, because you know, we have to make sure that we can take a program as far in our hands as we need to right, because external market, the you know the mindset of potential acquirers, their capital abilities. You know we're never guaranteed that when we meet a milestone that we're going to be able to transact a program and in some cases we won't want to right. I mean, there are many cases where somebody could say, look, we think we'd like to take this program and we say, well, actually we're still in the value creating part of this and we're going to hold onto it and continue to do that. And it's where having, you know, just this high quality capital and access to that really makes a difference. So you know we fully have plans to take this program as far as we need to, all the way through phase two, all the way through phase three, right up to and if we had to, we would work to solve commercialization. But it's also logical along the way that there's a very nice fit to be had with another company. So, in answer to your question, it is both.
Brian Lortie:We get increasingly now, now that we emerged from stealth in the middle of last year. We get lots of inbounds. I can say we came out of stealth mode last May, not quite a year from now, but we're pretty well known out there and we're well known by any potential acquirer and we have informal, ranging to formal, conversations with multiples of those. They're smart enough to want to stay on top of what we're doing. We're smart enough to ask for their views on what we're doing. Ask for their views on what we're doing and you know, at the end of it there may or may be a deal to be made, but you know we're. We're faithful to the program and making sure we're exercising what we do as best we possibly can and then confident that the right thing will happen.
Ben Comer:Right, solrikitug, I believe, is a bispecific antibody. Is that correct?
Brian Lortie:No. So just to clarify. So solrikitug is a mono anti-TSLP inhibitor. We also in our pipeline have two bispecific antibodies that use solrikitug as the backbone right. So in other words, TSLP plus cytokine A plus cytokine B.
Brian Lortie:We've kept the selection confidential right now but we're advancing it pretty, very quickly and we expect candidate selection by the end of this year, very excited about those programs. Because what that does is if you step back and you look at what we have as a pipeline now, you have the mono agent, solrikitug, which you know we fully expect has the very strong potential to be second to market in the MOA behind tezepelumab and will serve a huge market and we think will perform very well as a differentiated molecule and then as a lifecycle follow-on capability. We have these two programs that take solrikitug, add additional cytokine blockers to it and have the potential to either expand into different indications or to access and fulfill the needs of different patient phenotypes. So bispecifics are becoming really quite exciting now, but they're quite a bit earlier. We like to think we've got the best of both worlds and they're all based on what we think is best in class or at the top of the class for the, for the backbone. So that's how it.
Ben Comer:That's how it works now, if sol rikitug is picked up by a partner, uh, for for late stage development, commercialization or, you know, bringing it across the, the finish line, does that uh jeopardize at all the, the earlier stage um bi specific programs? Or do or is that just worked out as part of the contract where you know you would out license it to a provider or you know another company to, to get regulatory approval, commercialize it and then, I guess what you know, pay a certain amount of as part of the you know your next stage, your bispecific programs. How does that work?
Brian Lortie:Well, ben, if I had the answer to all of those questions, I would have it all mapped out, wouldn't I? No, I think, like always, any of the above right, and we'll always be faithful to value creation, to what's best for the medicines that we're bringing forward, and you know there are ways to solve all of those opportunities. I'll say right. So you know, right now we don't have a. You know this is the one size fits all, or this is the only way to approach, that we're focusing on developing, as I said, selecting the candidates and keeping those, moving on the two bispecific programs and generating high quality, outstanding, differentiating data on the core program, and that is our best path to generating value across the whole portfolio.
Ben Comer:There is some, some general excitement around bi specific, multi specific antibodies. I'm curious if that has any meaningful business impact for for Uniquity, one way or the other. Does it, I don't know? Does it give you you know, give you a lift? Does it make it more difficult to kind of raise your programs above the noise? What would you say about that?
Brian Lortie:It doesn't make it. Let me just say we're not having any problem getting engagement on our story right. Okay, and part of that, I'm sure it can be attributed to the fact that we do have these interesting bispecifics coming along, but they're much, much earlier. We're finding that, you know, the true engagement and the near-term value is in this, the mono agent that you know will be on the market, in these big, significant indications, in this sort of 2029 time point, which not incidentally or not coincidentally is exactly when many big pharma partners will need to be replacing huge amounts of revenue that they're losing for LOE reasons.
Brian Lortie:So yeah holes in the pipeline. Right, absolutely. So we'll have this. I mean, this is a multi-billion dollar revenue program, many multiples of that, that will be ready for market in that kind of timing. So that alone is generating a lot of inbound interest. But we're not rushing to that right. Again, the job here is to get the product developed and developed. Well, let the data tell the story and then we'll make the strategic decisions that make sense then. But I think I think we've got really good opportunities. Uh, and you know the bi specifics are part of that. We, we do get inbound interest because somebody hears we have a bi specific and then when we show them the whole picture, they say, okay, well, that's pretty compelling and we take that conversation forward.
Ben Comer:It's not going to rush the development, but Uniquity is set up to be a very efficient mid to late stage drug developer. You know we we spoke briefly just in a pre introductory call about time you know as a, as a scarce resource and what that means for business leaders and I'm curious about. You know how you set priorities for your teams, how you hold them accountable, how you make sure that you know that you're flexing that model of efficiency to get the development done. You know not too fast but not too slow either.
Brian Lortie:It's a very important point. You know, if you talk to my team, they'll tell you I probably say too many times that you know I can probably raise more capital tomorrow, but I can never raise more time. Right, yesterday is gone, we're not going to get that one back. And in a competitive environment like we talked before, there's, you know, I and I is an attractive place and there's a lot of TSLIP and a lot of competing products becoming, you know, working their way through various stages of development. So we can't just sit back and say, well, we don't pay attention to the timelines. So getting that balance right is very important. It's one of the reasons why we think we've got kind of like the Goldilocks approach here, where we're big enough to do this work really, really well, with a high degree of rigor, doing it, as I said before, in a way that a partner, an investor, will be impressed and will not say, oh, these guys cut corners right.
Brian Lortie:At the same time, we can be very efficient in our decision making and we can, in fact, in some cases, pivot and make changes in real time. And I'll give you an example of that. Over the last 12 months, there's been outstanding efficacy data in COPD from tezepelumab , the on-market TSLP. We were at the ATS meeting in San Diego when that was happening. As we listened to and participated in the conversations around the release of that data, we pulled our decision makers into a conference room five minutes from the conference center or from the convention center, rapidly interpreted what we heard, made some decisions about how that would impact our thinking for our development program, made those changes and implemented them in days and weeks, not months and years right. So, again, having come from larger organizations, it just takes longer for that to happen. And if we can turn around smart decisions and these aren't knee-jerk reactions, these are still thoughtful decisions with a lot of a lot of rigor and and again, you know ourselves and using our external resources as well but if we can do that with speed and efficiency, we can take slack out of the system. And we can take slack and we're responding in real time to opportunity.
Brian Lortie:So that's that's an example of what we try and do here every day In terms of tracking and keeping everybody aligned. You know it's hard because we're not a. Let me say the other part of my argument. We don't have extra people and we don't have extra time and we all have a lot to do. So we just have to be rigorous and smart about what we bite off, about focusing and, you know, aligning our efforts towards the highest priority things. Be willing to step aside from the lower priority ones, the highest priority things, be willing to step aside from the lower priority ones. Understand that not everybody needs to attend every meeting, not everybody needs to be part of every single decision, but work together as a team efficiently and effectively to advance the ball. And that's been working great and we think about that every single day as a team here.
Ben Comer:I want to ask you a little bit more about you know good people, life science leader. You know, historically and to this day, you know we cover a lot of leadership topics. I speak to a lot of executives about the importance of culture and company values and what I find is that you know, everybody wants to have good people. It's, but I think it's a fact that not everyone with a great value statement has a great culture. And I'm curious, brian, what you might say about how you make that real. You know how you create a really good culture, not just a? You know a list of values on the wall.
Brian Lortie:I'm really glad you brought that up, because I've been a big believer in the impact of culture for a long, long time, and also how culture is the net result of a bunch of people spending time together, right, and I've had discussions I must use the word arguments but I've had discussions with people who didn't share that not in the company, luckily, but you know other leaders. We talk about these kinds of things and I once had somebody say to me well, we're not big enough to need to worry about culture. Or well, you know, our organizational structure isn't kind of fit to think about culture, and so we really don't have a culture. And I said well, actually I disagree. You have a culture, you're just not controlling it, you're not informing it, you're not nurturing it. And I think you know I think of culture as being and this is okay, I'm going to give you a platitude so guilty as charged before I say it but it's like a garden right, you can plant a beautiful garden, but if you're not nourishing it, you're not making sure it gets sun and water and protecting it from harm, eventually it's just going to wither and die and get diseased. And culture is the same thing and I we just did a lot of work on culture with this last summer, because that kind of two and a half years, I figured, okay, this is the time not to just let it roll on its own. But let's, let's. Let's first of all decide as a group what we want it to be, what do we aspire to be, are we adhering to that, and how do we mold that and form it and and maintain it? So we spend a lot of work on that, which you know a lot of small companies might not spend time on, but boy it was. It was time well spent and and I think it in, in a way, just doing that informs the culture right, it's part of our culture to do that work and and it was, and it was very worthwhile.
Brian Lortie:And we started with hearing from the people like who are we, what do we stand for, what do you think about when you think about this, this company? Because at that point we had some people who'd been here for, you know, over two years, and others that had been fairly recent. So we did a cross section and the words that came back were just really great, with the ones you would want to see, and it was a combination of you know hard work and intellectual horsepower, but being nice and having fun and being respectful and being open-minded and all of that. And we put that up on our website, we put it up on our walls, we remind ourselves, but we also check in on that. Now I do a town hall at least every quarter and in that town hall I try and be faithful to asking the team how are we doing on our culture? Right, here's what we set out to do. Here's what we said we were last time we talked about this. Are we still that? And if we're not, why not?
Brian Lortie:And one of the core tenants of our culture here is just an openness of communication, like there's nothing that's off limits, whether it be the way we're working or the way somebody is being treated or a development decision we're making, and this view is shared across our leadership team. If somebody has something that they don't feel is going right, they need to tell us, tell me, tell my colleagues. If there's something that's going really well, please feel free to share that too. Right? But it's this openness and transparency and there's no wrong answers to it.
Brian Lortie:But if we do that, it makes everybody feel like they're part of what we do and their fingerprints are all over it, because the job is big, the team is small, so we can't have people that just sit and kind of let the work happen. We all have to be actively driving the work and driving the culture. So that's the way I kind of think about it. It is something that I've learned along the way is very important. I've, you know, I've made bad choices in terms of people on a team before. I learned from those choices. Luckily it hasn't been ever been too many. For the most part I've been very, very fortunate there. But you know I learned that one or two bad people can really mess up a company really fast. So we pay a lot of attention to that from day zero, all the way through the life of the team.
Ben Comer:And no jerks. I like that as a core principle.
Brian Lortie:And I, you know. And then I say you know, look, if I'm, if I'm violating that in some way, please let me know, cause you know feedback's important right. I mean, we all need to put a mirror up once in a while, cause you get going very quickly and it's easy to think that you know you've got the answers to every question and I certainly don't. But I like to think that, collectively with a really outstanding team, which I would hand on heart, I'd take this team anywhere and put any challenge in front of them. I think we'll figure it out.
Ben Comer:Obviously, technical expertise is extremely important in a hire. You want someone who's really good at what they do. I'm curious, though, if there's anything else that you look for in a hire outside of that. You know basic fitting a puzzle piece into the right place in a company. You know they have the skills, you know they have the talent, maybe they have the experience. Are there any sort of extraneous attributes, character, that you look for in a hire?
Brian Lortie:Absolutely, and in fact, you know, you just outlined, you know, the technical skills super important. And again, we have some jobs that are highly technical, where the qualifications are very clear and it's easy to say, okay, here's the checklist, and the person does or does not have that in their education or their experience. We also spend as much time, if not more so, on the soft skills part as best we can. And what do I mean by that? Well, we use a behavioral inventory tool, behavioral insights tool, for anyone that's getting pretty close to an offer, right, sometimes we'll do it for two, even three candidates as they're getting closer, depending on what the job is, is, and that's a. That's a tool that lets us and the candidate understand, um, how they approach challenges, how they approach team dynamics, how they, you know, look at the world right, and and I've been through many of those types of programs I will say that this one is really, really strong, and when I took it three years ago or two and a half years ago, everybody in the company took it founders, and we still use it to this day and it gives insights that I didn't really appreciate about myself, right, and part of that. Then we can collect the outputs from that at a team level or at a company level, and it gives us kind of a view of are we all exactly alike?
Brian Lortie:The answer to that is no. Are we complementary? The answer to that is, for the most part, but also, are there holes? Are there areas where next time you hire gosh, it'd be great to get somebody on the team with a little more of this or a little less of that, because we're over-indexing. So it's just one piece of it, but it really gives us insight and what we've heard echoed back at us from candidates is they say, well, I hope I get this job, but even if I don't, but that was really cool, that was really valuable. I haven't been through something like that before I get a job and it's you know, it's a small investment. I mean, this isn't a lot of money and time. We have a really great team supporting our HR strategy and we have external groups that they leverage to do that for us.
Brian Lortie:It really pays off, right, it really pays off because we all can learn all the time about how references to talk to people and talk to people who know those people and ask them the questions, because, at the end of the day making a hire. We can't afford to make a bad hire and then take 16 months to work through that, realize it, manage the performance and then find that actually we need to part ways. That's a huge waste of time, it's heart-wrenching for everybody involved and I really don't want to do it. So we try and do the work beforehand so that when somebody joins they really feel like this is a great place, I'm enjoying it. And then you know, I and the rest of my colleagues on the leadership team we check in with people a lot. We try and spend a lot of time not just talking about the advancement of the program, but how's it going and what can we do differently? How can I help you do your job better? What do you think we're missing here as a team? It's one of the benefits of coming out of COVID.
Brian Lortie:We talked a while ago, Ben, about how do we pull the company together. We founded this company completely virtually. This was a Zoom-founded company and we didn't meet. We had known some of the folks before, but we didn't meet in the context of this company, face-to-face with our board members, until our first board meeting, which was well after the company had been founded and we had been working together for, you know, way more than a year. So the good news is that part is behind us, because we're all believers here in the value of of being together as much as we can.
Brian Lortie:We have, you know, a lot of people based in the office here outside of Philadelphia. We have a half dozen folks in a great office in San Diego, folks in a great office in San Diego, and then we do have people in different places, because, even though I believe in face-to-face interactions, I also I believe in the right fit and the right talent more. So we have erred on the side of talent over geography. But, that being said, we work hard to very frequently make sure we're getting people together and when we do, we get to have those conversations. And you know, I think everybody would agree, Zoom is great, you can get a lot done, but so is running into somebody's office and say, hey, you have a minute, I need to run something by, or I'd like to get your opinion, or haven't seen you in a while and we just finished that meeting on on chemistry but how's your, how's your area kids doing? Right, it's that kind of stuff that that is really, I think, super helpful.
Ben Comer:Absolutely. I'm curious about what's the name of that behavioral tool or program.
Brian Lortie:It's. It's called the Behavioral Insight, that we call it the BI, and I'm pretty sure it's behavioral insight and it's and it's done by one of the external groups. This is a validated tool. It's used by large companies all over the place. I hadn't used it before. I mean, you know, as you know, there's a whole catalog of programs and they're all quite useful, but this is one that was brought to us by our HR folks and I just love it and everybody's really found that it gives a, you know, shines a light on a different dimension of them, rather than just the MBTI and other things that we've all done.
Ben Comer:Excellent. Well, in our final couple of minutes here, Brian, I'd love to hear what your top priorities are for 2025 and any key upcoming milestones you'd like to mention.
Brian Lortie:Yeah for sure there are many, right, there's no problem in listing those out. Job number one here is to develop the program and generate, you know, high quality outstanding data in our three clinical trials, right? So asthma and COPD later this year and early next year, EoE also early next year. So those are going to be, you know, really, that's what we are here for is to generate impressive, differentiated, high quality data that will satisfy either our own need and desire to continue efficiently into the Phase 3 pivotals or to transact that program. So that's job number one, making sure that we've got the capital to do that. Right. So we've got a number of different options. We have Blackstone as a partner, but should we decide to go further, we'll have additional capital needs. So we're working through a number of options there. The good news is this is the feedback we are getting as we undertake that process is this is a very high quality story and it's one that really fits the needs of a blue chip investor base. So we will be able to do that and we've got optionality in doing that. So we're working that angle.
Brian Lortie:Continuing our strategic discussions, continuing to look for new programs right, you know, we talked before about the desire to have, you know, an ability to evergreen the team to some extent and to have a conveyor of opportunities so that we can continue to leverage what we've built here beyond any one program.
Brian Lortie:So you know, those are the major milestones that we're looking for. But then I'm, you know, I've been doing this long enough to realize there are things that are going to come up that I'm going to have to prioritize and deal with. There are always going to be curveballs or surprises, either internally or biologically or geopolitically. I mean, it's not like we're in a completely predictable world out there, right? So we have to keep an eye on all of that and we have to understand how might that impact the work that we're doing and making sure we're stepping back and we're prepared and we have sort of contingencies along the way. But we've got the team, the people, the capital resources to do that. That gives me a lot of levers I can pull right. So, you know, I think we're in really good shape, but now we have to keep doing the job.
Ben Comer:That is Brian Lortie, president and CEO at Uniquity Bio. I'm Ben Comer and you've just listened to the Business of Biotech. Find us and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and be sure to check out new weekly video casts of these conversations every Monday under the Business of Biotech tab at lifescienceleadercom. We'll see you next week and thanks for listening.
