Embracing Change: Lessons from a Career in Biotech with Kyriakos Economides, PhD

You are in for a treat because we just spoke with Kariakos Economides, who is the vice president of translational pharmacology for Werewolf Therapeutics, which is the best name for a biotech company ever, I think. And he taught us so much about what a translational pharmacologist does, how important that function is within a company. Especially now that we're seeing companies move so quickly to get things into the clinic. That is really the timeline for that is getting shorter and shorter and so thinking about that earlier in the process is so important. So enjoy. Welcome to Building Biotechs, a podcast by Rekryteromics Consulting.

We've helped over 75 biotech, life science and venture capital firms strategize, hire and retain thousands of employees to scale companies that bring life saving drugs to patients.

We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground floor to the C suite.

We're your host, Karina and Allison, thank.

You so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. We always like to ask our guests about their career paths. So could we start with what you wanted to be when you were seven or around that time and what you are now and how did you get there? How'd your career path evolve?

It's a very funny question. I think I always wanted to be a scientist. I came to Crossroads as I got into high school. I started thinking about becoming an auto mechanic, actually at one point because I was attracted to cars. But I stayed with science. I did a bachelor's of science in biology at the University of Delaware. But I was one of these people who didn't have a clear path even through college as far as do I want to do a PhD, do I want to go to medical school? I just didn't know. I just wanted to finish college. That was the goal. And once I got out of college, I was looking for the next step and I was thinking about drug development or pharmaceuticals. There's a lot of lot of pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey. It seemed that's where a lot of my classmates were going. So I started exploring those avenues. But it was hard to land a job in the early 90s coming out of college. And I ended up, I was a research associate at the Rockefeller University. And that kind of opened up my eyes to basic research and I got excited about that. At the time I was working with very new technology, which was the generation of genetically engineered mouse models for various problems in biology. And I was so attracted to it that I did decide to pursue a PhD and I did my PhD at the University of Utah in the laboratory of Mario Capechi, who is the father of of knockout mice. And he shared the Nobel Prize for developing that technology with Marty Evans and Oliver smithies in, in 2007. So that was a very exciting time. I was at the University of Utah. I was in the department of Human Genetics. I was learning about genetics and I was learning about vertebrate development, which really ties into cancer, right? So as I learned more about the genes that are used in developing an embryo, how they get co opted for for cancer development. So that led me to the laboratory of Korea, Body Shen at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, where I studied prostate cancer. And I was pretty sure at that time that I would have a career in cancer, right? And I was on that path for a while. But eventually I was thinking, there's gotta be other things, right? There's a lot of interesting questions in biology. And I started getting attracted to pharma again. I started looking at jobs locally again. I was back in New Jersey. So I went to Sanofi. There was a job description that was perfect for me, right? It was, we need somebody to run a lab that makes genetically engineered mouse models for, for research, right? And in that role, I worked across all therapeutic areas. I worked with immunology, I worked with metabolism, the obesity and diabetes problems. I worked with oncology. And that was fun for a number of years. But then as companies do, they do a lot of reorganization. I ended up focusing only on immunology. I was absorbed into an immunology department. So my focus for the rest of my time in big pharma was immunology. Around 2012, the site that I was working in at New Jersey, it was the Bridgewater Sanofi research site. It was a huge facility with about 2,500 employees that was shut down. There was big layoffs. Eventually I landed in the company that Sanofi bought, Genzyme, so moved to the Framingham area and I continued working in the immunology department, focusing on the pharmacology of immune mediated disease drugs. So that really developed my career in just understanding drug development, getting the proper mouse models and the proper pharmacology models established. But again, big pharma, pretty long haul career wise. And I started looking around at, and I was starting to get recruited actually to small companies. And I remember making the jump from a company. Sanofi at the time was I think 110,000 employees. And I joined Xtude Pharmaceuticals, which was 18 employees. Big change. Right. And that gave me an opportunity to wear a lot of hats. I worked in an awesome area of research, started getting to nanoparticles, a class of drugs that would be only active in the, in tumors, and continued down that path. That company unfortunately failed. And I landed at Kodiak Biosciences and that was another whole new modality, which is exosomes. And again it was targeting exosomes to tumors, to the tumor microenvironment. And I'm doing very much the same now at Werewolf, where our drugs are activatable in the tumor microenvironment. So again, I've been focused on the pharmacology of these unique modalities to get your desirable pharmacology onto your target and try to reduce the systemic effects of, of these drugs that can be very toxic.

That's a really interesting career path. So today at Werewolf Therapeutics, how many people are you? Is it still really small?

Are you?

Yeah, it's pretty small. I haven't been at Werewolf very long, about a year and a half and we haven't really grown since that come around. 45, 50 people. And I think we've been about 45, 50 people for the last few years. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that, there's a lot of that in the area. And you, there's a. It seems there's a lot of investments in, in very early companies too. So people do tend to be in smaller companies. Kodiak was funny because I joined Kodiak as employee number 50 and that company grew to about 120 while I was there.

Still a good sized company. We talked to some people and they're like we have five employees.

I have a couple of questions about what you do now. First of all, what exactly is a translational pharmacologist? What is your overall mission in that department?

Yeah, so that's a very good question. And this is something that I learned organically. I don't think it's something you really go to school for. It's really trying to understand how to translate the preclinical data that you get from your drug to the clinic. And there's steps, right? There's the preclinical testing where we look at various pharmacology models in oncology. We may be looking at immune oncology models in genetic mouse tumor models, for example, where the tumor is derived from the same strain as the mouse and you can really use the mouse immune system to attack the tumor, but you have to take the data you get from that effort and then translate it to the next step. Right. Which is what a lot of people call the non clinical pharmacology. It's before you get into the clinic, but it's not the preclinical work, but it's really the safety pharmacology that you do to ensure that your drug is safe or looks safer than other options. So they could be glp, tux, mouse studies, rabbit studies, monkey dog, higher species. But you do have to do a non human primate species before you get into phase one. In that step, you're learning about the safety profile of your drug and then you're helping design the first in human dose. I'm blessed here too, because we have a clinical pharmacologist that really specializes in that effort here at Wearwolf. So but I did that work for while I was at Kodiak as well, trying to understand how much we, you know, given what we found efficacious in the mouse models and what we found safe, for example, in the non human primate and what our starting dose should be in the clinic. Right. So that's the translational aspect of it. Now the translational pharmacology also expands into biomarkers. What kind of biomarkers do we need to look at? What readouts are we looking for when we get to the clinic? And again, that's a lot of translational work from what we found to happen in the mouse models to what happened in the monkey. Any gene expression changes we saw or cytokines that were released, for example, or anything that we, you know, we found in the monkey studies, how we translate those to understanding if our drugs are working in humans.

I am so glad you explained that because I'm not going to lie. Most people know this who listen to the show. I'm an operations person, not a scientist and I was prepping for this googling translational pharmacology. Like what does he do? So I appreciate that insight.

Yeah. And we, we always also talk about pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. I like to describe those things as I didn't invent this right definition, but I like it a lot. So pharmacokinetics is really what happens to a drug once it gets into a body, what, what a body does to a drug. And pharmacodynamics is what a drug does to the body. Right. So what changes happen with, by introducing that drug to a living system.

That's a really good explanation of that. And that's not one that I've heard given before. And I'm stealing that so that I can tell candidates what that is. When we talk to a lot of candidates who, you know, to your point, you don't go to school and study this. You don't go to school and study. I'm a molecular pharmacologist. That's part of my PhD training. I didn't know any of that stuff when I was finishing my degree. Nobody. You don't know what a drug, what even. How is a drug made. You don't know that when you finish your PhD.

Yeah. And you're right. And there's so much regulatory stuff that really there's a whole group of people who are these. A lot of these people are consultants and they've got a real handle on the whole regulatory landscape and the changes that are happening in real time to help us understand what we need to get the FDA to allow us to put our drugs into clinical trials. And those are a very special phenotype. They really know their area of expertise. It's incredible.

Yeah, we talk a lot about using external consultants. That's a really good use case for that. Hiring somebody internally to consult on that at the size you are right now maybe doesn't make sense. Whereas a really large company that's dealing with multiple drugs.

Exactly, exactly. That's. These are very well paid people. And if you're developing one drug, it makes no sense to have one person that, you know that, that specializes in that. So we've used consultants in most of the smaller biotech positions I've been in at Sanofi, we had entire departments that specialized in that work. For example, when I was at Sanofi, I really focused on the preclinical aspect. So there was no translational for me. Right. It was here. Here's the drug tested in the. In the mice. Give us the data. And then it got taken to the next area. Right. The next department. Right. So you basically throw it over the fence and the next group takes it. Right. So you don't really see the. You don't really see how the sausage is made unless you're in a small company, I think. Right.

That's a perfect lead in to my question, which was can we dive in a little bit to how was that jump from going from a huge company like Sanofi down to Ixtu? That must have been pretty wild when you first walked in.

It was scary. I knew I wanted to do it and I was driven to do it. First of all, I really wanted to get back into oncology. That was, that was the main focus for me. You know, I, I lost my cousin to bladder cancer. I wanted to really try to give back. I had my postdoc in prostate cancer. I knew that I knew the meat there. So around that time I was very much focused on moving in, in that direction. My first biotech boss, a gentleman named Jannik Anderson, he's the CSO of Tango Therapeutics. Now. I was interviewing with Jannik and I said something to him that I never thought I would say in an interview, which was as I'm struggling to make this decision to go to this company. I knew I wanted to go to a company, but 18 people, it was really scary for me. And I said, what happens if we fail? And his response was great. He said, I don't expect us to fail. And he was super confident that we wouldn't. But he said if we do, if you come to biotech and you do a good job here, you'll have a wonderful network that will help you, you know, in the next step. And that was like, wow, okay, so, so I'm obviously I felt confident enough to go into small company and do a good job, but I had never really had thought about it because when you're in a big company like Sanofi or Genzyme, you have a network, but it's mostly people in the company. It's mostly people in the large company that you work with. Sure enough, when XTWIT unfortunately failed, every boss I've had since has been some or leads that I've had or potential job offers have been part of that network. Yannick and his Merc network, Janik work with Sriram, who was my boss at Kodiak. So that made that transition. So yeah, the network is very real, I think and that was, that was very helpful. So going into X to it with a very limited piece of the drug development process and I was given the opportunity to build a whole in vivo pharmacology group out of nothing, right? And we were in a very beautiful place. We were at the AstraZeneca biohub which was an awesome facility. So I still had the big pharma feel, like I was showing up to work in this great big building and this beautiful campus. But we had a team of, we had to build an IACUC or work with an iacuc, get all the animal work sourced. We did a lot of outsourcing. I think that was the other big piece I learned at Xduood was how to work with a lot of different contract research organizations and just get it done. And really be very conscious about getting from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible, in the quickest way possible, because you don't have a lot of time. You don't have a lot of Runway if a program or a project fails. In a big company like Sanofi, you have a pipeline of drugs that's bringing in money, so you can just jump to the next thing. In a small company, you're really under a lot of pressure to the del to deliver the good data and get the next steps. I came into XTUD as an associate director, but there wasn't a lot of positions above me, right. There was, you know, a director or two, and then there were. There was Yannick, who was our VP of biology, and Peter Bloom Jensen, who was our cso. So I got to interact with Peter a lot in designing studies. Looking at the big picture, it really opened my eyes to, like, how everything works. Unfortunately, we never got to the clinic at X to it, but we did at Kodiak. We got three assets into the clinic while I was there, so I got to do all of the regulatory documents that we needed to do there. So, yeah, I think in a small company, you wear a lot of hats. You may go to an auction to get some equipment, for example, which you might never do in Sanofi. You might have to sweep up the lab, but you also get to do the really big leadership things, right? Hiring people. We also had a very robust relationship with Northeastern, so we were getting really stellar students from Northeastern University that did rotations for us and worked in our. In our teams. So you get to manage a lot of different people. And you learn about the soft skills, too, about being a better manager, thinking about people's careers. They're looking up to you to really help them chart their own paths through their career development.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which is. It turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are. You might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that Sounds interesting. Click the link in the show notes or search for Biotech Career coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show.

That's awesome. I'm so glad that you touched on the mentorship too and how important that is because I feel like everyone knows it's important, but it's helpful to actually hear how it's impacted people and the relationships they've built as opposed to just being like, I should find a mentor and like what, Ben? When you can really see the longevity through a career, it makes a big difference.

My advice to, to people I think that are starting in this path, there is a lot of great science, right. I think going into the, to each of the roles, your roles with a really positive attitude, really trying to understand that you can learn a lot from any place you're working in. I've been blessed in that I worked in great places where, you know, they're really smart people, but they don't show it in the sense that they don't have a, a chip on their shoulder. Right. I've heard about other places that may not be as friendly. I would say one of the biggest pieces of advice I can give people is know when to leave. There's no reason, especially in this area, in this Boston area, to stay in a position where you are struggling or you're not getting the mentorship you need or you're not getting the career growth. I had to do that at some point at Sanofi, I felt, or Sanofi Genzyme. At the time, right when we moved.

To Genzyme, you outlined a lot of great things about small biotech in that, yeah, you touch all the things, you learn so much, you wear all the hats. One consistent shortcoming I would say of small biotech is that there are often not leadership development programs in house because the companies are too small to have a leadership development program. Whereas at bms, if you were on leadership track, you probably have a lot of resources and training and tools to become a better leader.

They, they have really good leadership programs and that kind of. They recognize people and say, okay, this person has some leadership skills or up. They give a lot of management training but sometimes there's not a lot of follow up with that. Right. You get the training and then, okay, now you've got all these extra management skills but you're not actually advancing in your career really. Right. Or you're not getting the training that you need to really get to the next step. My advice to people is be patient in any Kind of area you're in. Give it a year or so and see how it's going. But, but no, but also know when to leave, know what you can get from the people you're working with, know what you can give to the company, know your value. Because I think one of the things Werewolf does really great is in Kodiak was this way too. Actually, all the small biotechs I've worked at, everybody, you know, when, when and, and now I see it more so because I'm in a, in a, in a higher leadership position. I'm a VP now. I didn't see it when I wasn't a vp. Right. But when you get into these meetings and you think about promotions and people's career growth and their impact on the company, a lot of research associates don't know this, but the VP and the Seat C suite is likely talking about them and the value they have for the company in this company or in other small companies. Right. I don't think, I don't think this is happening in Big Pharma. Right. I, in fact, I know it's not. So that's the really big advantage, I think, of working in a small biotech. No matter what level you're at, you're coming in with a BS as first year research associate and you're doing some great work. The C suite is talking about when to promote you. Right. So that's my message to young people. I think when I talk to candidates, I always say big Pharma, excellent place to learn a lot. Right. There's no wrong answers in your career. But I think most people should experience both. I think people should try to work in a big company, see what that's like. And you can go both ways. You could start in a big company and learn a lot and then go to a small company and take some of that knowledge with you. Or you can go to a small company and then take a role in a big company. I've seen a lot of people show a lot of success in either example. Right.

Yeah, I think that's really wise. And also one of those things where nothing's one size fits all. And the whole thing about when we started the show, we were talking about why some companies make it and why some don't. And really it comes down to timing, right? A lot of it is just time. Timing is everything. And so even in your own career, think about the timing and think about what makes sense for you. And you're not really locked into anything ever for the most part.

So if you want to start small and go to a big company, do it.

If you want to start with a big company, try a small one.

It's fine.

Careers have more flexibility than I think people sometimes think they do.

Yeah. When I joined Sanofi in Bridgewater and bought a house nearby, I thought that was it. I thought this was going to be my. I'm going to retire here. Because there are a lot of examples of people there who had been at that site for 30 years through iterations of different companies. Right. Sanofi and Aventus before that and HMS before that. It was. There had been people who had been at the site for their entire career. And I thought, okay, this is the next step. Right. And I think that was the paradigm that was really through the 80s and 90s, right. That you go to a company and then you work at that company and then you retire and you get your gold watch and then you, you know, that's not the case anymore. I think the other thing I always tell young people a lot is change. Right. Is just inevitable. Right. And the better you are at managing that change and embracing it, the better you'll do in your life and your career. Point is, don't get too comfortable because things are going to change.

Super valuable advice we have. A lot of people come to us for career development advice and that's the big worry. They think that small biotech is very volatile, which it is. You may hold more roles at different companies, but your point about the network and the amount that you learn and those then transferable skills, because now you've touched so many different areas of a company that's really huge. And then we don't see that big companies are as stable as people think they are. Entire departments, groups, entire drug indications get let go.

Absolutely. And I lived this. Right. I think we used to joke about the yearly round of the holiday layoffs because it was almost every year we would have a pretty large layoff in a big company and it was not a state. It never felt like a stable place. You know, I think. I think it did for the first four or five years of my career at Sanofi, we had a very stable department. In fact, we operated more like a small biotech inside of a big company. I had a pretty unique role. I got to work on doing stuff I did as a postdoc and as a graduate student specializing in genetically engineered mouse models for the entire company. That department, over the course of four or five years, I think only had lost two people. And there were career changes like One woman decided she wanted to be a teacher, which is a great move. So it was a very stable place for five years. Then things started changing all the time. Right. So we had reorganizations and transformations and you know, all the kind of euphemisms they used for these things. Right. But they, they're all. They always had to do with change. Right. And eventually you become accustomed to it and you understand changes, change. Right. And I think younger people are much more in tune to that now too. Right. I think it's really a gig mentality, right?

Yeah, no, definitely.

I think it's so interesting, your point about you used to think you would join a company, stay there for 30 years, and that was it. That was exactly what I thought was going to happen in my career. I would join a big company and that was it. And the fear was always job hopping. If you didn't stay at a job for like longer than a year, you a job hopper and all that. And now we see people jumping ship and they're going to different biotechs and they're doing this. And that whole, I feel like that whole concern has really just been mitigated by the fact that how the industry has evolved that to your point, it's a little more of a gig economy. People come and they go and then they come back or they don't and they form new groups. And what's really interesting, just the big shift that we've seen and the mentality about how long people stay at a job and what the expectation is.

So what we've also seen in the past 10 years is that small companies start to think about their clinical prospects a lot earlier than they used to and start to plan for that. And so you are uniquely, I think, in a situation to speak to this because you sit at the intersection of basic research in the clinic. When would you say that a small company should start to bring in somebody, at least with some of the expertise that you bring, to start to think about that transition, how that would translate to the clinic.

Oh, early, very early. Because someone, they don't necessarily have to be a vp, but someone at least at a director level, even associate director level, they should be really thinking about, I mean, the goal of the drug, whatever, whoever's investing in your drug, they want to see you get into the clinic yesterday. And it's not going to happen yesterday. It's going to take a few years. Right. But you really need to plot out the course. Right. The preclinical work comes right away, the in vitro work and the in Vitro proof of concept and the in vivo proof of concept. That could happen within the first year of getting your funding. Right. Getting your seed funding. Someone that's already thinking about the big picture and has some background or some skill in thinking about the non clinical, the non GLP and the GLP tox studies that are gonna be required. I think it's important to get them in pretty early.

We're seeing that the trend is in an ideal world, your funding partners would like you to like to see that IND filed within two years. And that's. That's a tight timeline compared to what we used to see, which was closer to three or four years.

Yeah, that's right. That's about right. It used to be about three or four years and two years. It's extremely fast. Like everything has to work perfectly.

What's one thing that you hope to achieve in the next 10 years?

That's a really easy question. I want to see our drug get approved. Our drugs. I should say our drugs get approved because I think we have multiple shots on goal and I think they're all good. I want to see the patient benefit. Right. I think that would be the cherry on top of my career. Right. To just say I had a big role in this. Right. And we're helping people. We're helping people with real problems, with real deadly diseases.

So I think you're going to have a really interesting answer to my favorite question, which is what is your favorite book you have read recently that you think everybody should read?

I don't know if everyone should read this one, but it was a book that was actually recommended to me by our IT guy here, Werewolf. It's called the Lost Empire of Atlantis. If you're a history buff and you like to understand especially antiquity, it kind of charts the story of. It's really the theory of Atlantis being the Cretan civilization. Right. That the island of Santorini blew up in antiquity and took out the Mycenaean civilization. Right. And that civilization was much more advanced than we appreciate today. Right. It's a lot of history, details of really building this case for that being the legend of Atlantis. Right. I also. This is going back a few years. The Emperor of All Maladies is a great book. If you want to understand the history of cancer. There's not a lot of immuno oncology in that because that's more recent. But those. I think those are two really good books.

Where can people find you? Is LinkedIn best?

Yeah, LinkedIn is best.

We'll include that in the show. Notes. People can click right through to you. And we'll put Werewolf in the show notes as well if people want to check out Werewolf.

Yeah, we have a great. We also have. Yeah, in our science page, we have a nice video that describes our tech.

Yeah, we'll link to that for sure. Amazing. Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Oh, awesome. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Really nice talking to you both.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Take care.

Building Biotechs is brought to you by Recruitomics Consulting. You can find Building Biotechs in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes, and join our mailing list for a weekly dose of biotech news and a podcast overview. And if you need to install a recruitment engine that saves time and money for your growing company, reach out for a free strategy session. Always happy to share my expertise and show you techniques to simplify your hiring process and maximize returns. On behalf of the team here at Recruitomics Consulting, thanks for listening.