Acknowledging the People Who Plant the Forests

There's an old Greek proverb that says "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in". The mistake that we often make is not acknowledging the inspiration and guidance (the "shade") that people give us along the way. So I wanted to take the time in this week's post to acknowledge some of the people in my life who are responsible for that shade.

Inspiring Entrepreneurs

Let me start with Richard Apodaca and Brant Cooper . Rich is a former medicinal chemist at J&J who was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug midway through his career and founded Metamolecular to create new tools for chemists. And it was he who pointed me to the work that Brant was doing in helping to grow and encourage the local innovation community here in San Diego through the San Diego Tech Coffee meetups. Rich also pointed me to Brant's books:

• Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value, Drive Change
• The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
• Entrepreneur's Guide To The Lean Brand: How Brand Innovation Builds Passion, Transforms Organizations and Creates Value

Rich showed me how you could put into practice the concepts that Brant was talking about in his books, to create a successful scientific software company. You often need to "see it, to be it", and Rich really showed me the way forward.

I was saddened to learn last year that Rich was diagnosed with terminal glioblastoma and has been blogging about that journey. Having watched both of my parents take that final journey, it has been eye-opening and inspirational to watch a scientist who has spent his career working on new medicines, apply those years of experience and that perspective to those final steps.

Recently the local San Diego innovation community was surprised and saddened to hear of Brant's Esophageal Cancer diagnosis and notes of encouragement and gratitude have been flooding in.

The Power of Community

When I moved to San Diego one of the first people I met outside of work was David Palella. We were at a networking meeting, and he stuck out his hand and said "Hi, I'm David, who are you and what do you do", once he had his answers he proceeded to introduce me to the 5 people I needed to know in that room. David taught me that it was the power of your personal network, that made it possible to do incredible things.

I first met Rebecca Beattie at one of the LaunchBio events that she was putting on. Becky invited me to demonstrate our biotech business intelligence platform, Pharm2Market. And whenever I needed marketing advice or a pointer in the right direction, Becky was there and I was always happy to return the favour. Becky really demonstrated the power of a connected community to get things done.

Mary Canady has been a fixture in biotech communities throughout the US for as long as I've been in the industry, and when I first came to San Diego I was surprised at how her Biotech Network meetups really helped connect large numbers of people throughout the industry. The cyclic nature of the industry, always meant that new companies were forming and looking for talent, and if you wanted to find those people, the Biotech Network meetings were one of the key places to make those connections. But perhaps one of the first lessons learned though was that networking is like social exercise. It's something you have to do as regularly as any other exercise routine, because you never know what next opportunity will present itself -- and it usually comes when you least expect it.

Finding & Using Your Rocket Fuel

I met David H. Crean at Becky's LaunchBio event, and I think what impressed me most at the time was the advice he gave me about connecting to the wider San Diego financial community. It was only later over subsequent meetings that I learned about his passionate advocacy for the Alzheimer's community and how he was using his expertise to help biotech companies make a difference in the lives of Alzheimer's patients. He was (and continues to be) a great inspiration through his outreach and his Innovation Wave podcast which highlights the work of local San Diego Biotech companies.

As much as David's rocket fuel is Alzheimer's disease, my personal rocket fuel has always been cancer since the loss of my Mom to pancreatic cancer and my Dad to lung cancer. I met Anggie Becorest at a Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) meeting where she was giving a talk, and I was struck by the fact that she was the first person I had ever met who had survived their bout with the disease. It was Anggie who introduced me to Cosimo Commisso and the C3-PCRG (Pancreatic Cancer Research Group) that he was co-founding. The group draws on the work being done at the NCI-Designated Cancer Center at Sanford Burnham Prebys , Salk Institute for Biological Studies and UC San Diego Health - Moores Cancer Center (the 3 major cancer centers here in San Diego, and hence the C3 in the group's name). The group usually meets monthly at the SBP and brings together people with basic research, and clinical perspectives on the disease. If you're working on new drugs for pancreatic cancer, this is a great local resource.

The Power of Planning

Nine out of every 10 drugs fail to make it through the pipeline to the approval stage. That one statistic has been the bane of most biotech companies for the past 30 years. Finding ways to chip away at that statistic has been the life's work of innumerable people that I've met over the years.

When I first started at Pfizer many years ago, it was our site head Catherine J. "Kitty" Mackey, Ph.D. who emphasised the importance of acknowledging people who made a contribution to advancing our drug discovery programs, and it was she who provided some of the initial inspiration for our Pipeline Drug Discovery Platform.

While I was at Pfizer, I met Ian Popoff, and Kevin Matchett . It was Kevin who realised that we needed a way to help drug discovery teams plan and manage their projects more effectively, and it was Ian who became the guinea pig for that discovery PM effort and who provided a lot of the initial design ideas and feedback for Pipeline. Ian later created his own PMO at Poseida Therapeutics, Inc. and created a lot of the guidelines and training for both discovery and development PMs.

And it was Joe Stalder at Mirati Therapeutics and later Zentalis Pharmaceuticals who provided a lot of the inspiration for Pipeline's new Planning Module through his book Project Management for Drug Developers and over the course of numerous conversations. Joe showed us how some of the tools used to manage Drug Development programs could be adapted for use in Drug Discovery.

The Power of Doing

When we set out to design our Protein Production module in Pipeline it was through conversations with Jose Santos , Hao Zheng and Isabelle Lehoux that we began to realise the power that having a configurable workflow-oriented system would have for protein scientists. And it was these conversations that inspired us to make metadata, request management, and workflow management part of the DNA of Pipeline in a manner that now pervades everything from Assay Request Management, to Chemistry, Registration and Inventory.

Similar conversations with others like Bill Sonnenburg , Bill Smith , Bill Shirley and Philip Cheung , helped us understand the importance of having a configurable system that consistently organises the project information, and uses notifications to keep drug discovery teams on the same page. Moreover by making systems that were easily extensible and integrable by informatics teams, we were creating a system that could be easily adapted to fit the needs of a wide variety of drug discovery companies.

The Power of Persistence

I want to thank my team here at Aspen Biosciences ( Traci Murrie , Eric Robbibaro , Himal Karmacharya , Chris Sprague ?? AWS reInvent , Yaju Pradhan , Devak Pradhan , Kiran Mandal , Shirish Sigdyal , Dristi Dugar , Er. Pradip Puri , Dipankar Ratna Shakya ) and the rest of our development team for helping us realise our dream of bringing Pipeline to fruition.

Lastly, I'd like to thank my wife Diane for being an endless source of encouragement. Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint, and she's been inspiring and encouraging me at every step of the way.