You defied some of the laws of physics to make that happen!
Get the dog out for a walk, hop on the train or car to work or to school, put your gym gear on and tune in to find out who’s the next guest in the Republic of Insead podcast. A few of my favorite snippets are below.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
A number of crazy things happened related to the business and the growth of the business. We happened to find ourselves in an amazing position, through rapid succession, finished a fundraise, then within twelve months we managed to do an IPO which was the second largest IPO I think for biotech on the Nasdaq ever, I think next to Moderna.
GE was really my training ground where I learned a lot. I had this kind of crash course in corporate finance and financials and tax and dealing with businesses and doing diligence integration contracts that was a real learning and training for me in my career and probably where I laid a lot of the foundations because many of those skills you just need as an executive but you need in the scrappy start-up / scale-up environment as well, making sure you're doing the right contracts for the long term and having a bit of confidence and swagger, if you will, of how to have a vision for the company that you have.
ON TOPIC: Biotech, pandemic, IPO, drug discovery
Antibodies are Mother Nature's solution for fighting off disease and infection much more broadly than just around infectious disease. They are extremely safe because they're not chemicals. They're a part of biology that people have within them in their immune response and they are effective at treating anything from pain to metabolism, to neurodegenerative disease, cancer and oncology, diabetes.
The thesis of AbCellera was that lots changed since 1970s in terms of our understanding of biology – sequencing, computation, PCR, but in order to get to the next level we need to be on a different technology curve that is going to make it possible to discover these medicines. What we decided to do is, using modern technologies, rebuild the entire front-end of drug discovery with how it relates to antibodies.
When the actual pandemic hit with SARS Covid-2, we were sent the first blood sample that was on north American soil in order to put our technology in our engine to work and in what was world record speed, we went from receiving a sample to dosing a patient with an antibody drug in ninety days. Which is a process that normally takes four or five years.
Our thesis here was, we've made these investments in technology to make the previously impossible possible and here was our moment where we validated it.
Arguably the most competitive drug development project in the history of the world - we came first - this small company out in Vancouver… In the end, our products went into about two and a half million people, saving an estimated hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations. You can spend your entire career in Biotech and not have that kind of patient impact.
WHY GIVE BACK
INSEAD was a foundational moment and year for all of us in our lives. The luckiest thing is like I'm having the time of my life and my career and my family as well.
References, mentions: GE Healthcare Life Sciences, STEMCELL, lipid nanoparticle technology, Danaher, Precision NanoSystems, AbCellera, Biotech, tech-enabled biotech, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Lifespan by David Sinclair, The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Ideation, IPO, NASDAQ, Series-B, Baker Brothers, OrbiMed, Thiel Capital, Founders Fund, COVID, UBC (University of British Columbia), Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, Steve Job Think Different campaign