Mark Farmery's Team at Anocca Built a Tech Stack to Fight Pancreatic Cancer. What does yours do?

This episode is part two of our show with Mark Farmery, founder of Biotech Bikers and Chief Development Officer at Swedish biotech firm, Anocca. In part II Mark tells us about how his urge to apply scientific education led him from academia into pharma and biotech business development. Mark also explains biotech venture basics, as well as the T cell therapies his employer, Anocca, is pioneering to address pancreatic cancer, which is usually fatal. Stay tuned to learn quite a bit, as the subject matter ranges far from our well worn topics, and check out part I to hear about how Mark founded an international network of Biotech Bikers.

Mark Farmery:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfarmery

Anocca:
https://www.anocca.com/

Chapters

• Mark's Journey: From England to Sweden
• Understanding Microbiology and Biochemistry
• Transitioning from Academia to Industry
• The Role of Pharmaceuticals in Healthcare
• AstraZeneca: Navigating the Patent Cliff
• The Power of Collaboration in Biotech
• Transitioning to Business Development
• Understanding Pharmaceutical R&D Challenges
• The Biotech Venture Model Explained
• Innovations in T Cell Therapies
• Anocca's Clinical Trial Milestone
• Role of Chief Development Officer at Anocca

Hill Climbers is more than just a podcast, it's a growing business network for cyclists. You can tap into our event by following our Linkedin and Instagram, and subscribing to our newsletter.

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Theme Music: Summer Vibes by Rizik

Transcript

Sam Huntington (00:01)
Mark Farmery, thank you so much for joining us on the Hill Climbers Show, calling in from Stockholm. Man, it's great to have you here. Thanks for being with us.

Mark Farmery (00:12)
No, absolutely. Thanks a lot, Stan. Really, really excited to be here. You know, been following what you guys have been doing over the past few months. Super exciting. We've had a couple of chats in the background and offline preparing for this and I'm really, really happy to be here tonight.

Sam Huntington (00:32)
Yeah, well, the feeling is mutual and Mark represents a couple of very exciting categories for us as far as the shows content today. You can see behind Mark, Biotech Bikers is a networking group for cyclists that are in biotech that he started six years ago. So we'll be delving into that. But I think what Franco and I got really excited to talk about was

biotech and how basically how products and treatments are kind of incubated and then brought to market. It wasn't something that Franco and I were familiar with at all and we haven't had any biotech guest or anyone even remotely like scientific in this category on the show yet. we love to provide

a guest like Mark, who's a subject matter expert in something new and novel so that our guests can learn a thing or two during the hour long show. So Mark, guess, why don't we just like dive right in here? It'd great to know a little bit more about you yourself. You're an Englishman in Stockholm right now. What's your story? guess, where'd you grow up and maybe let us know how you got into cycling too.

Mark Farmery (01:56)
Sure, yeah, yeah. So yeah, as you said, I'm English, come from the north of England, originally grew up there, lived pretty much all of my early years in that kind of neck of the woods. If you've not been there, beautiful, beautiful part of the world. thinking about Yorkshire up into Northumberland and that kind of.

Sam Huntington (02:18)
some cycling tradition there I've heard.

Mark Farmery (02:21)
There is certainly some cycling tradition there, absolutely. I mean, we haven't got the long alpine serpentine climbs there, but there's some pretty, pretty brutal short, sharp shocks.

Grew up there, ended up getting really excited about biology, chemistry, science in general.

and then moved

moved then to university, so around 18 and studied biomedical sciences. Really, really broad education. kind of always had the view of keeping as broad as I could for as long as I could. then eventually, I got really, really into science, into research. And at that point, you have to kind of specialize. You have to dig deeper.

Sam Huntington (03:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Farmery (03:15)
I focused in the area of microbiology, biochemistry. That took me into a PhD, so biomedical sciences degree at Bradford University in the UK, PhD, Leeds University. So stayed in Yorkshire, bit of a theme going on there. And this was a really, really exciting time as well from it.

we'll come into this as well in the chat. So from a kind of biotechnology and a kind of bioscience point of view, sort of as we went through the 70s, 80s into the early 90s, there was a lot of really, really exciting things happening things like the human genome project was ongoing around then. So cloning of the human genome.

Sam Huntington (03:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Farmery (03:57)
That was all.

Sam Huntington (03:58)
And was

that the 90s or what years are we talking?

Mark Farmery (04:01)
Yeah,

so we're kind of talking about later late late 80s, early 90s, know, lot of really, really exciting convergence of technologies around that time. So very exciting time to be a student. Exciting time to be getting into into academic research at that point. And as I say, PhD in microbiology, biochemistry.

That opened up then a world of basically getting into research and continuing a scientific career. By that point, I pretty much decided that's the route that I wanted to take.

Sam Huntington (04:42)
For

all of us laypeople, and we talked about this before the show, there's going to be a lot of laypeople listening. How do you define microbiology as opposed to biochemistry?

Mark Farmery (04:52)
Yeah, really good question. So microbiology is the study of microbes. So these are bacteria, viruses, living organisms that are really, really small, very useful in many ways, harnessing microbes as a species, as human beings, we've been using

microbes to do really useful things for centuries. So things like fermentation, beer making, wine making. Yeah, well, exactly. then cheese making, making bread. That's all based around the use of yeast, fermentation, and so on. And through the years, we've kind of, as we've understand the

Sam Huntington (05:26)
As I drink my kombucha here, right? Yeah.

Mark Farmery (05:49)
genetic code, we've understand how to manipulate the genetic code. We've been able to harness microorganisms and do really interesting things with them. They also on the flip side, bacteria viruses, as we know, as everybody knows, they cause a lot of problems for us, a lot of health problems. So microbiology was really all about

know, my PhD was really all about studying microorganisms, how they become resistant to antibiotics, you know, right, so that's a big problem in society that we have a lot of antibiotic resistance, working out why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics helps us to develop better medicines, better antibiotics and so on. So that was kind of

the broad focus of my PhD. And what I was doing in that time was to look at the biochemistry then of antibiotic resistance. So why did that particular species of bacteria become resistant to antibiotics? So that sort of took me into learning about the biochemistry of a

cell of a cellular organism, so of a bacteria, and all of the cells in our bodies, know, the fundamental mechanism behind how they work is driven a lot by the biochemistry with, so there's a lot of mini, mini chemical reactions going on in all of our cells all of the time to make us who we are and what we do.

Sam Huntington (07:32)
Maybe we could

do a separate show on mitochondrial strength and how that improves your cycling speed. Has that been something you've kind of taken an interest in over last couple of years? It's all the rage in the Peloton.

Mark Farmery (07:36)
Fished.

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, for

sure. yeah. mean, and funnily enough, later, you know, now we're jumping forwards nearly 15 years or so. But later in my career, I actually worked for a biotech company whose focus was really all about mitochondrial health and what happens when mitochondria go wrong. There's a lot of

diseases that are kind of linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. But as you say, mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell, if we can understand how they work, how we can improve mitochondrial health and make them work better, for sure in endurance sports, as we know, there's big gains to be made there. So yeah, exactly.

Sam Huntington (08:19)
Mm-hmm.

Well, that's a

great explanation on microbiology and biochemistry. So thank you for that. And then you began to talk about how you started to specialize. And yeah, guess how did you end up choosing your path?

Mark Farmery (08:50)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Yeah.

Sure, sure. Yeah. So following on, know, but by the time I'd finished my PhD and kind of got into this research track, I followed a fairly typical academic career. after my PhD, I moved on and did a postdoc. And actually, this is kind of where the Sweden connection comes in, because I moved to a lab in Gothenburg here in Sweden and did my first postdoc there.

related kind of to what I was doing in my PhD. So I talked about biochemic, cellular biochemistry. You can kind of apply what goes on in bacteria to human cells. And I kind of sort of made a jump there to working more with more with human cellular biochemical mechanisms, if you like. And that kind of, you know, as I that took me down a research path.

I ended up settling in Sweden after a stage I met my partner.

during that time who's Swedish. She convinced me to stay here. We settled here.

We've been really happy. We brought up two really nice kids here.

Sam Huntington (10:20)
can you share with us a totally different topic, kind of how you got into cycling and where the passion came from?

Mark Farmery (10:28)
Yeah, know, cycled pretty much all, all my life, you know, always had a bike. I've got my first racing bike, probably, early, early teen years and, and, know, just, just love, just love getting out on the bike really, and, and, and the freedom and it didn't really get into sort of cycling as a sport until a little bit later on, but always had a, you know,

big interest, followed the Tour de France every year, you know, had heroes back in the day, Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon and these kind of characters. One of my best friends at school, was actually a club cyclist, so it was really interesting following his exploits.

Sam Huntington (11:03)
And did you? Sorry, sorry, go ahead.

Mark Farmery (11:17)
you know, he got us interested and excited in pro racing and kind of following that.

didn't really follow the passion or follow the hobby that much other than to use a bike to kind of commute around on or whatever. And I guess it was through friends a little bit later on in middle age life who were, they were into mountain biking and I kind of joined them, joined up one weekend and really enjoyed it. And then also discovered, now kids are getting a bit older.

Sam Huntington (11:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Farmery (11:50)
a lot more time on my hands and that kind of took me into, first of all, actually mountain biking. So was doing that a lot more than road biking, but I did, I bought myself a nice entry level Bianchi around that time.

Sam Huntington (12:08)
One of the themes

on the show is how you have a different relationship with the bike at different phases of your life. So you have more time to ride right now. I just started my family with, I've got a one year old. So I'm kind of on the very opposite end of the spectrum. lot of time on the trainer right now, just eking out what I can.

Mark Farmery (12:14)
Yeah, yeah, sure.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Sam Huntington (12:33)
We talked about academia and how did you end up transitioning into into pharma and biotech.

Mark Farmery (12:36)
Yeah.

so this goes back to, I remember, you know, during my undergrad days and kind of having this, it's a bit of a cliche now and a bit of an obvious thing, but the sort of, as a,

18, 19 year old having this kind of epiphany moment where one of the tutors was talking about understanding the reason why. Why do you do anything? Why is that important? If you followed Simon Sinek, he's talked a lot about this. So understanding the reason why. And as a young kid, as say, as a young guy, was kind of fairly new thinking to me at that point. And that sort of triggered something.

that I've always, I've kind of used that as a guiding star since then basically. And I guess during that academic period, doing a lot of really, really interesting applied research, it was grant funded, oftentimes sort of limited fixed term contracts, quite hard to get into tenured positions and all of that sort of thing. And I always had this desire.

during that period. mean, it wasn't only the getting into research and understanding biology for the sake of doing research, if you like, but it was really a lot about how do we apply this data? How do we apply these results? How do we apply this knowledge that we're generating?

Sam Huntington (14:14)
It wasn't enough for you to

be purely academic and theoretical. You wanted to start applying what, you know, your knowledge to the real world.

Mark Farmery (14:17)
Right, yeah,

exactly, exactly. the way to do that, the obvious way for me to try and do that that point was to move into more applied industrial R &D basically. And yeah.

Sam Huntington (14:36)
I think that's a really great insight that I

think for Franco and I, that's the first time we heard about that part of your life and your decision to move into kind of commercializing these treatments and drugs. One of my questions was how you feel about working in pharmaceuticals when not all of the drugs and treatments are for pancreatic cancer, which has a...

Mark Farmery (15:03)
Right.

Sam Huntington (15:05)
wildly high fatality rate, you know, some, and especially right now, we won't go into a tangent, but there's a big movement for preventative care around, you know, diet and the simple things you can do day to day in your lifestyle to be healthier as opposed to, you know, having the bandaid that you put on with the medications. So did you ponder kind of where pharmaceuticals

lays almost from a moral perspective as you were getting into it?

Mark Farmery (15:40)
there's absolutely been a driver for me. Every day I feel it's privilege and really grateful to be able to do what I'm doing and work with all of these great people who are focused on these types of goals.

I've worked across many different disease areas and focusing on a lot of different healthcare problems. A lot of that has been related to big problems in terms of what's going on in neuroscience, in oncology, a lot around immunological diseases, rare diseases, for example. I talked about mitochondrial

diseases, you know, they are oftentimes, most often caused by, you know, very rare genetic mutations. So they're, so they're very rare, they don't happen very often, but really, really devastating diseases and often oftentimes affect, you know, young babies and young, young kids and so on. So I've put, you know,

conscious choices in terms of the types of disease areas I've worked in. A lot of my early days research was focused on Alzheimer's disease, was, you know, that's obviously a huge societal healthcare problem and one that is only gonna get, you know, it's only gonna get more and more prevalent as the population ages. And what actually, just a little,

side parenthesis here is that whilst I was doing that very early stage research in the Alzheimer's area, there were groups around me at this was at the Karolinska Institute here in Stockholm, know, groups very local around me at that time whose research has now gone on to be, you know, part of these disease modifying

the disease modifying drugs that have been approved in recent years. you know, that's been absolutely fascinating to see that progression of that research going from something extremely early to then actually being a marketed product that is helping people suffering from that disease. And it also talks to the point of just how long that process takes as well. So you can start from very, very early research.

Sam Huntington (18:02)
Mm.

Mark Farmery (18:29)
and to get to an actual approved product, can take up to 20 years or more.

Sam Huntington (18:36)
want to know about how you transitioned into AstraZeneca.

Mark Farmery (18:41)
Right, yes, yeah, yeah, we kind of sidetracked quite a bit there, right? a big driver for what I wanted to do and to kind of get into at that early stage of my career was to move into a role where I'm really applying my skills and my knowledge and my experience

in something that is very, very focused on actually developing novel drugs to solve serious healthcare problems. And like I mentioned, I've worked in some really high unmet medical need areas, neuroscience, oncology, and so on. But I wanted to take the step from academia into

into the pharmaceutical industry basically They are very, very different worlds. mean, the process of research and development, of generating data, of analyzing that, of running experiments, of answering questions is

the principles are more or less the same, but the difference in a kind of pharmaceutical industry context is that it is so much more applied and it is so much more focused on an end goal, which is developing and having approved novel new medicines that answer an unmet medical need.

Quite often academic research can contribute into that. We can find out some really, really interesting things about how disease mechanisms function.

Sam Huntington (20:22)
think one main difference is a return on investment. You're kind of working with a fixed amount of capital on a timeline as opposed to academia where they're probably less sure they're going to be budgets, but there are less constraints like having investors that you're constantly answering to.

Mark Farmery (20:38)
show.

Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's very, very, it's driven by markets and it's driven by market demands. It's driven by commercial forces. But as you say, if the model works and it's successful and you develop a drug product that solves a problem, people are going to pay for that, that feeds money into the system. That money can then be distributed into

early stage research and you can broaden the pipeline of programs and projects that you're actually focusing on. it's a very different system in that sense, whereas academic research is, it's project driven, it's problem driven, it's all about grant writing.

it's saying, you we need this amount of money to answer this particular question. And that's highly competitive. But, you know, that is how academic research works because there's more freedom. can answer different types of questions. It's not driven by the same commercial forces that, you know, the pharmaceutical industry is, for example.

Sam Huntington (22:09)
So you ended up taking what kind of role at AstraZeneca initially?

Mark Farmery (22:15)
Right,

yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to sort of test my, know, test myself in an environment where I was a manager, where I was a leader. I had responsibility for direct reports in a team. I,

Sam Huntington (22:26)
He

Mark Farmery (22:34)
built up some contacts. I already had a network within AstraZeneca here in Sweden. A role came up, which I applied for that and interviewed successfully and then joined the R &D organization as a team leader in a very specific research area in the company.

So I was kind of doing two things at that point. was, you know, was leading, leading R and D. You know, we had a very specific role, very specific function in the company in terms of contribution to different types of projects. And then also having, you know, having, this was, this was kind of my first step into being a, into being a manager, being a leader.

Sam Huntington (23:26)
really interesting sort of, I guess, period you could say in, in AstraZeneca's life cycle was they, they were in need of basically commercializing new, new products, new treatments, new, new drugs, because I think you said the patents were expiring on, on some of their

more lucrative money makers and that I think was part of your push into business development. Can you give a little bit of context there? I thought that was really interesting.

Mark Farmery (23:59)
Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. So generally, any biotech company, any pharmaceutical company, the crown jewels of that company are around the, know, the technologies or the products that they're commercializing. These are highly innovative.

products that are protected by patents, know, so patenting of technologies and products in the pharmaceutical industry and the biotech world is, you know, is super important. Like I say, your patent portfolio is essentially the crown jewels.

this is why you need a pipeline of programs in a, you know, in a, in a pharma company. This is why you need to do early stage research and development, because you've got to constantly fill that pipeline and be ready for when, you know, your, products, which, you know, which are oftentimes billion dollar products, you know, they are the, they are the cornerstone

of profit margins and of generating share value. Strategically, you've got to be ready for when those patents finally expire and then what is going to come online behind that that you can commercialize. And there's a whole industry out there as well of companies that are getting ready for patents on blockbuster drugs to expire and then produce generic versions of them and sell them for, you

a lot cheaper prices. so to be sustainable, companies need to be constantly filling the pipeline. Back when I started in AstraZeneca, so this is the early 2000s, there was a so-called patent cliff approaching, you know, where everybody analysts, everybody on the outside could see, you know, this company.

there's this pattern cliff approaching, what are they going to do to rebuild the portfolio and to ensure sustainable growth and all of those things. again, opportunistically to an extent, I got the opportunity to move into the business development organization at AstraZeneca.

And the reason that I wanted to make that move was kind of, again, it was sort of motivated by the power of collaboration and power of bringing people together, bringing ideas together, the realisation that in this type of research environment, you can't...

everybody can't invent everything, but you can bring communities of people together, you can bring ideas together and then generally find synergies and do things in a better way. all through my academic career, all through that early career, was working, collaborating with external partners.

you know, calling people up if I needed a solution for something, know, so who knows how this technology works, you who has this technology that can help with this particular question. So I was always very, very collaborative. And then as I say, I got the opportunity a few years after I joined AstraZeneca to move into the business development organization and actually kind of, you know, move

Sam Huntington (27:25)
to.

Mark Farmery (27:45)
back to my sort of academic scientific areas of interest. And that was working with neurology, so Alzheimer's disease business development. So I sort of cut my teeth in the BD world in that environment. I was very, very much thrown in at the deep end, given a lot of responsibility very early on.

Sam Huntington (27:57)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Farmery (28:14)
I'd realized that I'd been in part of the business that was very kind of narrow but deep, working on these very, very specific technical problems, technical contributions to projects, a very, very small part of the business. And kind of overnight, I got this kind of really eye-opening experience of then being very, very close to...

Sam Huntington (28:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Farmery (28:39)
you know, what actually it is that makes a company like AstraZeneca function and be so successful. you know, being very close to higher level decision makers, being very close to the, you know, the big strategic thinkers in the company, working with bringing in, you know, new opportunities to, as I say, to re-

to build the pipeline, to give the company growth and a sustainable future.

right, exactly. Yeah.

Sam Huntington (29:15)
strikes me as a really important inflection point in your career, almost like an awakening where you've

been working on a very focused segment and then the curtain is peeled back and you realize there's so much more going on as far as I think how our corporation functions and

Mark Farmery (29:34)
sorry for another sort of slightly aside thing here, but there's a huge amount of attrition in pharmaceutical R &D. So a really quick statistic is that it's really only about 10 % of projects that are started actually get through to being an approved product.

You've got to have a diversity in the pipeline. You've got to be prepared for that attrition. You've got to be prepared to put the dollars into the R &D. again, this is another podcast. But that whole model is built around the probability of success of a project actually going from start to being an approved drug.

Sam Huntington (30:24)
And we talked about this

a little bit. It's a similar percentage rate to the typical venture model where you make 10 bets and one of them makes you all your returns. However, what I thought of immediately was the 10 % in biotech and pharma is commercialized and goes to market. It then has to be a commercial success in the market in order to return everyone's capital or investment.

Mark Farmery (30:31)
Right. Yep.

show.

Right. Yep. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

absolutely. is.

Sam Huntington (30:54)
Yeah, it's

thin margin of success and failure there.

Mark Farmery (31:01)
For sure, yeah. And so you need world-class commercial organizations to be able to do that successfully. There's a huge amount of challenges that you need to overcome to successfully market a drug.

Sam Huntington (31:17)
While we're on this topic,

you lay out how biotech venture works and the process by which a biotech starts with an innovation and then the treatment or product goes to market?

Mark Farmery (31:33)
Yeah, yeah. the basic model, I would say, is that somebody has a really great idea or there's some research that you've done in a university environment and you think, yeah, this has got really great commercial potential. you could spin something out of a university. could start something off as an early stage program based on an idea.

But essentially, a company will start with some kind of seed funding. They'll do some early stage proof of concepts.

This is often done in the lab, it's done in what's called pre-clinically. So they'll maybe use cell models or we hear about animal models being used for this type of research. But they'll relate that research to the problem that it is that they think that their idea can solve. And then as that validation increases through this value chain,

the program is de-risked more and more, it attracts more and more money because the probability of success gets higher each time until eventually they've raised enough money to maybe start a clinical trial and go into human beings with their drug product. And then the idea is to take it all the way to market. But most often a biotech company would

maybe take a program up to a proof of concept in human beings. So actually showing that in this particular disease, drug, our candidate drug does what we think it's going to do in terms of curing the disease or changing the pathway of the disease, improving the outcomes and so on. There it's been de-risked so much that it actually then becomes a very interesting proposition for a pharma company.

like AstraZeneca then to come along and say, okay, look, you you've done all this de-risking, you've done all this validation. We think this has got a great probability of success. So we're going to invest this money into this program to take it then through into bigger clinical trials. You know, it's all about statistics, bigger clinical trials.

Sam Huntington (34:00)
And one thing I didn't

realize was there are ever increasing sizes of clinical trials. So you get past the first sample, then you increase it. And I guess that's regulated, So that's part of what the big pharma company needs to bring it to market is getting through those trials.

Mark Farmery (34:07)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yep.

For sure, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Yeah, so first of all, it's about safety. Is this drug a safe drug to take? So that's kind of the first step. And then you start looking then at the efficacy in the disease that you're actually trying to treat. And as you say, then need to do it in more and more subjects so that you get the statistics. And you can actually say, yeah, this is

you know, this is a drug that's going to have an effect.

Sam Huntington (34:53)
Another thing I thought was interesting just as comparing and contrasting with kind of typical tech venture capital is the various different outcomes for a drug or a biotech company that's showing promise. So it sounds like a pretty traditional model is that a pharma company strikes a deal with them, licenses the drug.

Mark Farmery (35:19)
Yeah.

Sam Huntington (35:20)
But then based on the promise of that biotech and what they've incubated, it could go any number of ways. So they could strike a really what could be a very lucrative deal, licensing deal with the big pharma, or they could just go right to something like an IPO or like you were saying, there's a lot of &A in the space. it's just, there are more

Mark Farmery (35:35)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Sam Huntington (35:49)
potential outcomes than the typical tech VC, is, know, seed series A, series B, etc.

Mark Farmery (35:56)
Yeah,

sure, sure, sure. Yeah. And for a biotech that is pre-revenue as well. So remember, if you don't have, as a biotech company, if you don't have a product on the market, you're not making any revenue. So you're basically, any money that's invested in the company, you're spending money every day and you're investing that in building the value of the company.

where a biotech monetizes itself then and realizes the value of that investment is exactly as you say. So it's through, you know, it's throughout licensing of a drug program to a pharma company who is then going to, you know, invest more in it and take it to a commercial product. But, and this comes back to kind of the role that I had.

on that side of the table. So out licensing programs, you you put a deal in place where there's a premium upfront payment made so that the partner, the pharma company can have exclusive access to that IP. So, you know, oftentimes you'll see upfront payments of

10, 50, 100, 200 million dollars, depending on how de-risked that particular opportunity is. And then as the pharma company then licenses that product, invests in it, moves it along the value chain for each inflection point, they're gonna pay a milestone payment to the biotech company. And then ultimately if that...

product does get to the market, then there'll be a royalty payment as well that goes to the biotech. that's kind of a fairly typical model for how a biotech kind of might exit a program in its pipeline. Sometimes, like you say, there may be an acquisition. If a company has several programs in its pipeline, a pharma partner.

might be interested in acquiring all of them so they just go for it and acquire the whole company.

Sam Huntington (38:16)
Yeah,

and I think with COVID, we saw this with Moderna and BioNTech, right, where they just went public because there was so much need for what they were producing at that moment. So bam, you get a big pop. But you can really, as Mark, as you go through all those different variations of deal making and business development, you can see how creative you can get with

Mark Farmery (38:26)
show. Yeah.

Mm-mm.

Sam Huntington (38:43)
you know, within your role as a

Mark Farmery (38:44)
Yeah.

Sam Huntington (38:45)
BD person at a big pharma company. So I think it would be great to spend some time talking about Anaca. that how you pronounce? How do you pronounce Anaca, which is where you currently are. This is a fascinating company and a product that really, I think a product and a new manufacturing technique that's really potentially, you know, going to help a lot of people.

Mark Farmery (38:54)
Anoka, correct.

Mm. Mm.

Sam Huntington (39:13)
that have pancreatic cancer. Can you give us the high level about Anaca and maybe your role there?

Mark Farmery (39:20)
Sure, yeah. Yeah. So I've been there for about five years now. So we're a privately owned Swedish biotechnology company. The whole kind of thesis that we're working around is developing what are called T cell therapies or T cell receptor based T cell therapies.

we talk a lot about harnessing the power of T cell biology. Now, if you don't know it,

You know, you won't, if you don't know the area and the field, you kind of won't know what I'm talking about there. But our T cell immunity is pretty much the body's most advanced and most powerful defense system. we have, you know, blood, have white blood cells. One of the class of white blood cells is a T cell. They are, they're like a really advanced radar system.

patrolling the body all the time, looking out for infected cells or looking out for disease cells, know, cancerous cells, or the start of cancer or, you know, those kinds of things. So they can distinguish between healthy cells and disease cells. And most of the time that system works really, really well. When you develop cancer or when you get a viral infection, particularly in the case of cancer, though the tumor, you know,

those cells become dysfunctional, the tumor grows, it escapes T cell immunity. what T cells do through the detection system that's built into them, they recognize signals on a disease cell surface. When that recognition is triggered, that starts like a nuclear attack on the disease cells and gets rid of them. So what we have done is essentially to

build a platform of technologies, we recreate T cell biology in the lab. It allows us to identify these recognition molecules on the surface of T cells and we can take the genetic sequences of those recognition molecules and then

If you, Sam, have developed a cancer, you've got a marker on the surface of your cancer that one of these recognition molecules will recognize. We can take your T cell, because obviously your T cells are not doing the job that they're supposed to do. They've not recognized that marker on the cancer. So we can take this recognition molecule and we can put it in your T cells.

and then that makes, and then give your T cells back to you. And then that kind of makes a very specific personalized cancer medicine that, you know, that can then, we hope, you know, eradicate the tumor because you're activating this defense mechanism.

Sam Huntington (42:21)
There were two other really interesting aspects of this that I think you mentioned. Tell me if I'm wrong. Nip it in the bud immediately. You mentioned it being an organic as opposed to synthetic process. And did you also mention that you were basically taking model cells from people that had exemplary T cells and then extrapolating that for Sam, the pancreatic case.

cancer patient.

Mark Farmery (42:51)
Yeah,

kind of. Yeah, yeah. So we source these what are called T cell receptors. We source them from young healthy donors. So we get a blood product sample from young healthy donors. We extract their T cell population. And then because they're young healthy people, your T cell immune system is in its

Sam Huntington (43:02)
RIP.

Mark Farmery (43:20)
prime, it's in its optimal form. We can then using these super, super cool, amazing technologies that we've built in the company, we can then extract from that healthy donor, we can extract the right T cell receptor that will recognize these markers that are shared across.

many people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. Right. So, and what we do is we, as I say, we use our technologies to essentially make a T cell immune system in the lab, but you do need, you know, we do need inputs from healthy donor material to be able to source the...

Sam Huntington (43:50)
Humanity. Yeah, right.

Mark Farmery (44:16)
the origins then of the T cell receptors that we're working with.

Sam Huntington (44:21)
So talk about a process. Not only did your founders have the vision for this process, but then you've also come up with the technique to kind of, you know, manufacture, engineer these treatments for folks. you know, I think you mentioned the companies raised about $150 million. I think you said they're around 200 plus employees or so.

Mark Farmery (44:38)
show. Yeah.

We're about 130 today. And as I say, I I started, was number 42 when I started. So the company's really expanded over the last five years. And again, that's all been linked with this vision and strategic plan that we've had. And it's been all about.

Sam Huntington (44:52)
Okay.

And

what phase is Anaka right now? We talked about the life cycle.

Mark Farmery (45:14)
Yeah,

so we've established the manufacturing process. So that's all about taking a patient's T cells, engineering them with the right T cell receptor.

giving them back to the patient as a product. We've built that in-house as well. And now we're about to start the first clinical trial with our first program that uses a T cell receptor that we've characterized from the platform, taking it all the way through then into manufacturing. And now we're getting ready to manufacture products.

and then go into a clinical trial that's focused on pancreatic cancer, which is really, really nasty form of cancer. The survival rate is extremely low. Oftentimes people are diagnosed and the cancer's really, you're asymptomatic for a long time, so the cancer's developed.

it becomes non-operable, there's no treatments, and it's a pretty brutal diagnosis. we've decided to focus in that single indication. We're going to run a trial in Europe. We're working with a bunch of really, really first class, world class clinical centers around Europe.

And that trial should hopefully start in the middle of this year.

Sam Huntington (46:55)
Yeah, that's

a big, I mean, talk about a milestone, right? mean, that's many years coming. Wow.

Mark Farmery (46:58)
Yeah, for

sure. Yeah, it's a really, really important milestone for us. It takes us into being a clinical phase company. As I was talking about before, it's all about the kind of value chain, to get de-risking and validating a novel medicine.

But that's the first, we hope, of many. as I say, the strategy behind all of this is around making these types of medicines at scale, being able to address large global populations, and really

opening up the power of this type of an approach.

Sam Huntington (47:47)
And as Chief Development Officer, What kind of responsibilities do you have for commercializing and growing the company?

Mark Farmery (47:52)
Sure, yeah.

No, really great question. as the CDO in the company, within the space, if you think of a chief development officer, you often think of somebody who is actually working with the development of the clinical programs and clinical trials, but kind of linked with the innovation that we have.

across our company and, and the sort of slightly out of the box thinking that we have with it, with a lot of the things that we do. CDO in the context of a knocker actually is, is all about, ensuring that we're developing the best possible products. And this is really all about leveraging a lot of the skillset that I've gotten and, and, and kind of mashing that together with other people in the team.

So it's kind of building on my BD background, building on my R &D background. And I spend pretty much all my time focusing on, how do we bring in external technologies that complement the technology platform that we've built in the company? It's a fascinating space. I often think of it as

being on the cutting edge of the cutting edge.

Sam Huntington (49:17)
like a technology stack. You're partnering with companies that are doing other interesting innovations to create a better infrastructure for what you guys are doing.

Mark Farmery (49:19)
Yeah, it is exactly. Yeah.

Exactly, yeah. Exactly,

yeah. And build better products. So it's a lot focused on bringing in those products, building the toolbox. I focus a lot on our corporate development as well. So I'm looking a little bit at the organization and how we build as a company, how we grow as a company.

An interesting area I work in as well is a lot around our corporate communication. Coming back to the investment thesis, how do we communicate as a company? How do we brand ourselves as a company to make us an interesting proposition for an AstraZeneca to come along, for example, and say, look, we love what you guys are doing. We like these programs. We want to invest in you.

Sam Huntington (50:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Farmery (50:24)
So it's a really... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,

Sam Huntington (50:26)
Broad-scope. Yeah, you're covering a lot of ground all interesting things