From Dinos to Drugs with Isaac Stoner, CEO of Octagon Therapeutics

Today we got to chat with Isaac Stoner. He is the CEO and co founder of Octagon Therapeutics. He has such an interesting background, a lot of really small companies. He's a self professed small company builder, which we love and we definitely resonate with. He also has done some interesting things that we chat about, like go on an adventure into the mountains to recover an airplane black box. So if you want to know about that, you're definitely going to need to listen. And he also runs a great networking group here in the Cambridge area where people get together and they drink beers and they chat science and you have to know him to get into the group. So we always tell you to link in with our guests. We always put that right in our show notes. But this time we really mean it because if you want to get into Isaac's group, you really need to link in with him. Without further ado, here's Isaac's donor.

Welcome to Building Biotechs, a podcast by Recruitomics Consulting.

We've helped over 75 biotech, life science and venture capital firms strategize, hire and retain thousands of employees. 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. All right, Isaac, thanks so much for being here today. We are super excited to chat with you. Let's kick it off the way we always do by starting with what did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now? And how did you get there?

Yeah, I saw that question and I had to rack my brain to figure it out because I think it changed a lot. I think I was always drawn to science, but I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a paleontologist. I think that's what it was. I wanted to study dinosaurs. Maybe there was some thinking about being an astronaut. Now I'm trying to convince my little boy that he wants to be an astronaut, but certainly never, never really planned on building biotechs per se. Always was that nerdy kid who liked science though.

Yeah, we hear that a lot. The astronaut one. Paleontologist. That one's new. But I'm surprised we haven't heard more paleontologists because I feel like I at least went through a phase for a while. Maybe I was like nine. I don't know. Dinosaurs are cool. Big dinosaur fans over here. So what are you now? What are you doing? And how would you characterize that because you wear at least four different hats. From what I'm seeing here, I'm really.

More of a unit tasker, which is interesting because you wouldn't know it looking at my resume. I spend 99% of my time focused on my little company, Octagon Therapeutics, which I started with a couple guys out of Harvard a little more than four years ago. We're focused in autoimmune disease. Have discovered what we believe is really a fundamental axis in the development of immune pathology. Why does your immune system go haywire and turn against normal healthy cells and tissue and cause all sorts of diseases like lupus and Ms. And arthritis? We found a new pathway and we've shown we can block it with the drug we're currently in animals. Things are looking exciting. The, the whole focus of the company is can we block that abnormal immune activation while sparing normal, healthy immune functioning. And so far things are looking very promising. So we're at that kind of key inflection point now where we're trying to get out of animals and get the FDA to give us green light to begin human trials sometime in the next, hopefully year and a half.

Can you tell us a little bit about the structure of Octagon right now? How many people are you? So are you, you know, hybrid, remote in the lab? What's going on over there?

We're eight people, which is very fitting, but have a lot of development being done externally through specialized CROs. We don't do any of the animal work internally. We don't manufacture, optimize, produce the drug, which is an antibody internally. All we're doing is some of the core discovery work, the biological investigations, and then some kind of key pieces of the testing as we move the program forward. I've always been a huge proponent of having everybody on site, same place, under the same roof. I think it's really, really crucial for fostering those exchanges of ideas. We're trying to solve a problem that's never been solved before in a new way. Really important to have everybody there. But we just recently have begun to move to a little more of a hybrid setup. For example, I'm in the home office right now. I don't love working from home. I love being with my team. But we're, we're almost entirely on site, just starting to explore a little bit of a hybrid setup.

So are you going to keep it at eight people or you hire in pods of eight? What's the plan there?

We're going to go right to 80, 80's next, even after we move into the IND enabling work, which is where the FDA would give us a green light to again do those early human studies. That's not going to be done by us per se. Right. That's going to be done through specialized vendors and specialized CROs clinical sites. So we're thinking that the max size this company is likely going to grow to somewhere in that kind of 20 range and then maybe 25 if we bring another program online behind the first. But our goal is to stay pretty lean, kind of a core team and then all the other development work and clinical work being done externally.

You are an advisor at over at KDT Ventures, is that correct?

Yeah. So I, I am not an investor, I'm not a venture capitalist. I've spent a little bit of time on that side of the table. But my good friends Kane McClary started KDT right about the same time that I started Octagon. He invested in Octagon, I invested in his fund. And we've been exchanging ideas for a long time. So every now and then he'll send me a company he's thinking about or a management team he wants me to talk to. That's about the only contribution I've had to kdt. But they've done fantastically well. It's a really, really great firm. You know, new ish, but they've become a really powerful brand.

When you're meeting with other people who are getting their biotechs off the ground, do you encourage them? You know, think lean, stay lean for as long as possible and outsource as much as you can?

Oh, yeah. We find that, you know, just observing what's happened since, call it 2020, a lot of people took these big fancy lab spaces, big leases in seven years, that sort of thing, and expanded their teams way too fast, put way too many programs into development, even things that were really mostly science fiction. Those are the companies that are going through the tough times now. Right. It's a lack of focus and a waste that really began to happen around about the beginning of 2020 into 2021. And then all of a sudden the party stopped in 2022, 2023. I've been preaching it, this kind of natural responsibility. Don't over capitalize the company. Don't start spending money just because your investors are telling you to spend faster. Don't get obsessed with a platform until you've shown that platform is good for something, namely producing a therapeutic, producing an asset. I'm feeling kind of smug now that that my whole thinking about this asset centric running lean model. Looks like everyone else is beginning to adopt it.

Yeah, we're certainly hearing the conversation shift that way. You have an interesting background too. You come from a very business minded way of thinking. You've got the MBA and all of that. Is that something that sort of influenced that early decision to stay lean or you really just seeing around the corners? I'm just curious about that.

Even before going back to business school I've been involved with a couple of startups and had had both of them had been in, you know, the biotech or life science space and had seen that it's easy in this business to blow through cash. There will not always be new cash there for you once you've blown through that early investment. 2007 I was the first hire at a next gen sequencing startup, raised a couple million dollars, made some real progress, problems with some IP. And then 2008 happened and no investors were writing checks anymore. It was the end. And that unfortunately killed our little company. So we managed to pack up the IP and we were selling it around and ended up, I ended up joining another startup through that process that was a success. But that early lesson way back in 2007, 2008 has always led me to have that fear in the back of my mind that the sky's about to fall. Right. Always thinking about somewhat catastrophi, realizing what could go wrong here that would put the company in a bad spot. The biggest way that things can go wrong for a biotech anyways is you spend all your money and you can't raise more and that's the worst case scenario. So I've always been kind of focused on stretching a buck, focused on making sure that we always have that Runway we need.

You're a negative optimist. That's how I describe myself. It's like you hope for the best but you kind of plan for the worst. You always are hedging.

Planning is the name of the game. Right? So optionality. How do you have optionality when you make sure you don't get out over your skis. Right. Which is what a lot of biotechs unfortunately did over the past couple years.

Here you were just talking about Genome Corp, Is that right?

Yeah. Tiny little company, really interesting technology. I joined up with one founder right out of undergrad. So I had a background in some microfluidics and polymer chemistry. He needed someone to get the lab up and off the ground. But it was a team of two for a while, which was really fun. That's where I caught the Startup bug. We were based down in Providence, Rhode island in a little incubator with a bunch of other companies working on innovative stuff. And I found that environment super exciting. So that was around the time that I was like, one day I'm going to start my own right after learning that lesson, and now here I am, for better or worse.

So now you're kind of in an interesting spot, right? So now you're the CEO and eight employees is still eight employees or colleagues. I'm not sure how you're structured exactly, but is it a tough balancing act to sort of be driving the innovation but also leading the team and stepping into. You've got to manage people, right? The talent management is a core part of that. How challenging do you find that?

I don't view my role as driving the innovation. I have a couple very smart people who are doing that who are better at it than I am. I do stay really, really close to the science and I think that's something that all the CEOs in this space have to do. You have to be well versed in the science. You have to be willing to sit down and read the papers and get up to speed and make sure you understand the intimate details of the space you're working in. But I look at myself as really empowering the technical team to do what they're doing, making sure they have the resources they need, people, money, space, partnerships, et cetera. So it's a little bit less managing and more empowering. But a big piece of the role is trying to drive accountability. Right? The trains need to run on time. We're going to have agreed upon milestones, budgets, timelines. And so that's the piece of the business that, that I'm kind of on is are we on track? Are these timelines realistic? Are things slipping and how do we catch things before they do slip? I think there have been all these great studies the military has done around how many direct reports can one person manage? What's that optimal number? I think we're about there. And again, these are not all my direct reports, but I do stay very, very closely involved with all the people in the company. So long winded way of saying, yes, I'm tangentially involved with the driving innovation, but if that means taking the trash out for the team or doing whatever needs to be done to empower my scientific team, that's how I view my role.

I really like that. I think that's an excellent way to describe being a CEO is the empowerment piece of it and keeping the trains on the track. That's perfect.

Yeah. And removing the barriers. Removing the barriers that the team kind of comes up against. I think that's also really key. What's your culture like there? And what do you really value in that culture? How are you building that?

I learned this actually through my last company. We had a very, very flat culture that worked well, and so we've tried to do the same thing. So extremely flat hierarchy. Everyone's involved in every decision. We're small enough that we can do that. And transparency. Every single person within the company knows what we're trying to accomplish and why. They know what the balance sheet looks like. You know, people were very, very open with. Things are going well. Things are not going well. Here's what we're working on. Here are the challenges we're up against. Here are the big successes that we could share together. That transparency piece has been huge. One thing that we really value in hiring is creativity. We try and find people who are, yes, they're brilliant, but these are also super creative problem solvers. You can go out there and just noodle on something. Our lead program is the result of really a Skunk works project that started in a side room of one of our labs, and now we're building a company around it. It's very exciting. One of the ways that we've selected for creative people have been really trying to get outside of the little Boston area biotech bubble. So we've hired broadly. We have a couple people from South America, we have people from China. We. For a little while, the dominant languages spoken in the lab were not English. We had mostly Spanish and Mandarin being spoken. But it's. It's been great fun again, having this dynamic creative team who everyone feels like an individual contributor. They're empowered to be an individual contributor. But also we found people who play nicely together.

So I want to talk a little bit about networking because you are prolific in the networking space. So we talk about building biotechs, but biotechs are not built in bubbles. We are really interconnected. And I know you run a large networking group and that's central to what you do. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah. So, you know, it's kind of accidental. I like people, and one of the reasons I like the whole biotech ecosystem is it's a small world. Everybody knows everybody or should know everybody. So actually, way back in business school, I started getting together with people that I'd worked with before in the Boston area. Some of my. My MBA classmates who were interested in Biotech and life sciences and just had a few folks out. We got together around a table at a bar and drank some beers and talked about things happening in the industry, things that we're excited about. And this has just grown. So starting with 10 or 12 people now something like 800 people on the listserv every month or so we try and get folks together. Super informal, don't rsvp, doesn't cost anything. I don't even sign up, just show up. And it's been very popular because of that informality. What I do is, you know, if you build it, they will come. So I say we're waiting here, people come. And then I write a recap of the interesting conversations I have along with my own thoughts. I have lots of them and blast that out to the whole listserv. But I've also started doing, especially over the past two years, is also sharing job postings, resources, blogs that I read, you know, news feeds, anything that, that I find helpful and useful and I think that the community would benefit from, I tend to blast out. And really it's ended up being a group that has accidentally become biased towards mid career folks. You know, it's a come one, come all. But we picked up a lot of people who are in that kind of mid career.

Yeah, I'm a part of your group and I love your recaps, but I'm really looking forward to doing that. I think about a lot with networking is we tell people like, oh, go to all these networking events, but a lot of times it does cost money and if you're talking to someone who maybe is job hunting or maybe the finances just aren't there and you're asking them to spend a hundred dollars to go to this event. I like the Sheridan and that's it's give or take, right? Like it may not actually be the best event for them. So I love the fact that you put that out there for the universe for free.

Low fortune, come down, meet some people. If you want to stick around, I'll put you on the list. If not, whatever. So I think again the low friction, informal aspect, important people seem to like it.

Yeah, they definitely do. Is it okay if we link to how do people sign up for that?

You know, send me an email. You gotta let me get to know you. Right. That's the key. And this is all serving. Right. So now I'm building my, my network by controlling the list.

Okay, I love that. So people should link in with you and they should be normal humans that you want to Interact with and then you'll invite them. I love it. So what are you seeing come down the pipeline that's really exciting to you in biotech? Anything that we should highlight?

I'm excited about what we're working on for sure. And more generally, the fact that we're seeing the pendulum swing away from niche, super rare, super orphan towards big indications. You're back, CNS is back, Immunology's back, We're past peak oncology and I think this is a good thing. These are the diseases that affect the majority of people. What also I've seen recently is these new modalities, be it microbiome, gene therapy, gene editing, are somewhat becoming out of vogue or at least we're past that peak on the hype cycle because they're hard, they're really hard to make work, they're hard to commercialize, they're hard to manufacture. It's hard to find a price point where the model works for these treatments. The workhorses of the industry are still small molecules and biologics. People know how to develop these, they know how to test them, they know how to make them, they know how to price them. And I like that we're seeing everything swinging back in the way of let's look at new interesting areas of biology that we can go after with these well established tools that are in the toolkit of the industry and especially do that in the space of larger indications, diseases that affect millions and millions of people. Alzheimer's, obesity, autoimmune. And so I really like that that's where we're headed as an industry right now.

And the FDA is a little bit more equipped to help with the process there as well, because some things that we've already paved the way there. So I think when you're setting up your company for success, you can more readily find consultants that can help and companies that can help commercialize as well.

Exactly. You don't have to build a manufacturing facility to produce a vector for a specific gene therapy. You don't have to create a whole process around a microbiome intervention or something like that.

That'll be more attractive to investors as well. Because there's going to be a sooner endpoint.

Yeah, I think so. Although again, two or three years ago, 20, 20, 20 21, it was all about new modalities, it was all about these emerging paradigms. And I think again, we're just seeing a natural reset, things swinging back the other way.

So speaking about investors, do you have any advice that you would give to people who are about to go pitch investors or trying to raise some money.

See, it's interesting. Octagon. We technically started in like late 2017, but we ended up scrapping the foundational science and starting again. So we've been on this, we've been in this particular mode for just about four, four or five years. Four and a half years.

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 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 the Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show.

Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell us that story about starting and then starting over again? That's really interesting.

I think it happens a lot. But we started out with a piece of technology incubated within the academic setting that looked really exciting. We had a compound, we had some animal data and just could not make it work. So ended up again because we were running lean. We had a little skunk horse project going on in the back room and we're able to do a pivot towards new biology, new approach that put us in a really good spot. If we'd been out there with a huge lease, spending money handed over fist, we never would have been able to make that happen. So again, it's running lean until you figure out that that kind of key first product is is something that we always try and do.

So for people who are maybe on the cusp of going out and pitching investors and they're looking for investment, do you have any advice for people who are right about to start doing that?

Yes. So much stuff to do and stuff not to don't figure it out for yourself. I think there is, especially for first time founders and those coming out of academia. When I get it, when I talk to aspiring founders who have the idea they're maybe leaving the academic nest with a nice piece of technology, the first question is always can you introduce me to vcs? And my answer Is no, you don't want to be talking to VCs right now. You need to really figure out what it is you're doing. You need to get those key pieces of the company together first. Maybe do a pre C round or something like that. But you don't want to be figuring out the process of pitching investors on the fly. You should surround yourself with mentors, people who've done that before. People can either be there in the room with you or guide you through that process. I really feel there's venture capital for example, there's almost this apprenticeship model where you go and you do your time as an associate with a good firm and you learn how they make decisions. You can learn the process and then you become a principal and then maybe you make partner or maybe you go out and start your own fund. But you never would just leave an MBA program or something and go start a fund. You really, you have to go figure it out by learning under experienced investors, experienced fund managers and the same paradigm should exist in the startup space. Right? If you want to be a founder, you should go work with a good company builder or multiple good company builders and learn those lessons first. So that's how you should learn how to run a financing process, how to court investors, how to pitch investors, how to build a pitch deck. And so that was one thing that I did semi deliberately is is work for some really good founders and company builders. Before taking this plunge. I thought I knew what I was doing when we started. It's still hard, it's never easy, but at least I had some of those hard fought lessons already out of the way. Back to the initial question, don't start with VCs, especially for first time founders, a lot of them coming out of the academic setting. See if you can land yourself a grant, see if you can go find a seed fund, an angel group, something like that. Some way of getting that first de risking cash in the door so you can begin to build what it is you're trying to build. Venture capital should be later down the road. Thought.

So. This comes from a lot of experience of many different companies and how they attain funding. Did you team up with your co founders with this structure in mind? Are you that experienced person on your team or did you even find someone more experienced in terms of raising?

You always want someone more experienced. So when we started the company we had an executive chairman who had decades of experience in that role. We since have restructured things a little bit so now we have a board again with highly experienced people who are Helping out, really? I view an experienced board as a resource, especially when it comes to fundraising decision making, making sure that we are dotting every I and crossing every T. But no, we have more experienced people around the table. I came to the team, teamed up with these two scientific co founders, as the operator, as someone who knew what it took to go from zero to one in terms of getting the company up and off the ground, putting the various pieces of the appropriate business functions in place, doing what needed to be done and making sure they had the resources they needed to build this new class of medicines. But no, I am not the experienced people. We have people who are far better than me, who are helping me out.

Can you talk to us a little bit about building the board? How do you choose your board members? How does that come together? What does that look like?

Interesting you ask, because we are right in the process of expanding ours right now. Up until recently, a lot of our seed financing was done in convertible notes. So these are effectively debt. We now have done an equity financing, which changes things somewhat. So the way things are now structured is we have two common reps, one independent and two preferred stockholder reps. So pretty standard five person board structure. And what we have sought to do is make sure we have a mix of experienced company builders, people who have done it before, as well as experienced deal people, especially coming out of large pharma. We want to make sure we have those contacts. I want to make sure we have people involved who understands the decision making on the other side of the table because we are starting to have some interest from some major players. And we have done our first partnership with Novo Nordisk actually, which has been very exciting. So mix of company builders and deal makers. That's how we think about it. Part of the criteria I like to put in place around hiring good board members is must have previous board experience. We want people who have served on multiple boards, who are professionals with the governance to look highly professionalized.

And so you've been through a few acquisitions before with previous companies, so that's an interesting experience. Can you speak about that and is that sort of the end goal or is it partnerships and staying independent?

Yeah, so it, it's at some point not up to me because we do have an investor base. But I view the most exciting part of building a company is for me anyways, that earliest stage, 0 to 1, the discovery stage, the light bulb goes off and then we can turn that light bulb into something that's actually important for patients. That's the fun part. Once we get into clinical development, it gets really expensive and in my mind, a little less interesting. So does that mean we're trying to do a deal, acquisition or asset deal after we get into clinical development? Maybe. Or maybe we bring in a CEO who really likes that part of the development process. All I can say is the part of the business I like is the part we're in right now. So maybe there'll be a right time, the right deal that comes out in front of us. My previous couple companies that were acquired where I was not a founder, both of those were again, pre clinical and different spaces, but we had caught the eye of some larger companies and ended up getting acquired right when we were about to do some stuff with patients.

That seems like the right time. You're right. It gets really convoluted and expensive at that point.

Just different, I think. Different. The timeframes are different. The culture is going to change, the team is going to change. You're no longer a scrappy startup, which there's good and bad about that.

Yeah, you need those 80 people instead of eight at that point.

So, Isaac, is there anything we haven't talked about? Would you be open to me asking a couple questions about Project the novel?

This is not really a part of my career. This is an accident. But it's a fun. It's a fun thing. So in 2016, 15, I guess, or beginning of 16, I was sitting on the couch with a buddy of mine and we were watching the coverage of the Malaysian Airlines flight and they never found it. And there was about a billion dollars spent trying to recover the black boxes from that crash. And we got on Wikipedia and found a list on Wikipedia of all of the aviation disasters where they never found the black boxes. Because usually the agencies will move heaven and earth to try and find those flight recorders to figure out what went wrong. Why did that crash happen? And there's a list, and it's a short list. It's, I think, 11 airline disasters where they've not dug up the black boxes. And almost all of them are deep water. And so we started scrolling through the list and noticed that one of them is not in deep waters. In fact, sitting on top of a mountain in Bolivia, not far from a major international airport, a plane crashed in in 1985, the Eastern Airlines Flight 980. And we decided we were gonna go try and find the black boxes without any real previous mountaineering experience and not a lot of time and not a lot of resources. So did some real planning, did all the research. We possibly could figured out two weeks of vacation that we could be down there and ended up spending a couple weeks on this frozen mountain in Bolivia at high altitude 17,000ft and ended up finding stuff nobody had ever found human remains from this crash. Nobody had ever found the black boxes. We ended up finding voles which is pretty wild. A lot of this has been frozen into a glacier and as the glacier's been retreating there's stuff coming out of the ice which is pretty wild. So we ended up again not knowing what we were doing. Packing up a lot of pieces of this black box, bringing them home and trying to turn them over to the NTSB in the US Violating several international laws by doing this. Which was great. Ended up getting some press. We ended up getting the BBC and NPR and CBS and all sorts of things based on this coverage. And it's also formed the basis for now a documentary film production. So we've been back a couple of times with the film crew. We've actually gotten close with a couple of the children of one of the pilots who was unfortunately killed in that crash in 1985. They came with us on the most recent trip. But this is. This was our 15 minutes of fame. Was this silly idea that we were going to go find black boxes that hadn't been found from a plane crash 35 years ago where we actually managed to do it.

Incredible. And that's such a gift for the families who didn't get the closure and they didn't get the black box and all the information. That's really amazing.

There's still no real answers and there was no usable information on the stuff we found. But we did at least. There were conspiracy theories that there was a bomb on board. There were conspiracy theories that maybe it never crashed. Who knows. Right? And at least we can say it doesn't look like there was a bomb on board. We found him to remain. So everyone's there on the mountain. If someone did want to mount an appropriate expedition, not just do knuckleheads to go up there and identify bodies or bring people home. That is possible. That is doable. And so maybe we'll inspire someone to go do something like that.

I think that's amazing. And I think it's incredible that you started out at seven wanting to be a paleontologist, then an astronaut and then became an explorer doing life changing medicine. That's incredible. That's really amazing.

It's with. With two weeks vacation. It's amazing what someone could do. I haven't had two weeks of vacation since that trip. Actually, we do have an unlimited paid time off policy. That's a big piece of our corporate culture, which means nobody ever takes enough vacation because they have a limited vacation.

It's too bad we have the same and we actually have to enforce it like you are going on vacation. We actually had to put into place some policies around that because we want to make sure we have systems in place. When people do go on vacation, things don't break so that if they had to be out of office for an unplanned thing, things wouldn't break. And so we have to make them test it. So we're like, you are going for two weeks and we will be fine without you. It's hard though. Where are you going to be in the next 10 years? What do you hope to achieve?

Wow, a 10 year plan. I don't have a 10 year plan. My plan is to stay in this industry. I love it. I think it's incredibly hard and incredibly rewarding. I would love to start another company at some point in the future. Maybe that's more than 10 years down the road. But this will not be the last company that I try and start at some point in my career. I would love to be a public company CEO just to see what that's all about. Maybe that's more than 10 years out as well. But I love the Boston biotech ecosystem. I love the people. I love what we're working on. I love the alignment around goals. Right. Can we do well by doing good? That's all any of us are really trying to do. So I plan on being in this ecosystem for the long haul.

No, we're definitely following up with you in 10 years and seeing where you took your two weeks of vacation and what mysteries you solved. You've opened Pandora's box now. All right, Isaac, it's time for my favorite question. What is your favorite book or multiple books that you think everybody should read?

Oh, see, the classic CEO answer would be, oh, I don't read. I'm too busy. But I love to read. I read a lot. I am busy. So I saw that question, I had to go through and think about it a little bit and I had a few answers. But the two that I've read recently that I loved, one is A Song of the Cell by, by Sid Mukherjee. So it's a look back through from a cell biology perspective, medical history, all the innovation that's happened and it's, it's just done in a really nice way. So I like that book a lot. Just finished it recently. I think it came out this year. The other nonfiction one I read this year that absolutely gutted me is A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney. He's a comedian and he's great. It's about his son who got pediatric pediatric cancer and unfortunately passed away. But it's just brutal. It's a. It's an amazing read, just absolutely open. I have a son who's about the same age as his son when he died. And so that one just left me, tears streaming down my face. That's worth checking out. A Heart that Works. Nonfiction A little lighter. I read a lot of science fiction, as any good nerd should. One that I read not long ago is. It's called Children of Time. And so the premise is pretty much we've trashed Earth, we have to leave Earth. And so there's some nice genetic engineering aspects of it, but people have to spin out through the galaxy to other inhabitable planets. And one of the things you get through this book is just a sense of how far apart habitable planets are. It's like generations end up living and dying on these spaceships as they're trying to expand out away from Earth. The take home message in my mind from that silly sci fi book is let's not trash Earth. Let's, let's stay here. Everything else is too far away.

I loved that series. Last question. Where can people connect with you? Is LinkedIn the best?

Yeah, this is probably the best. Just shoot me a note. I'm easy to get a hold of. And we're always trying to expand this little biotech group. It is come one, come all. As said, if you're looking to be part of this ecosystem, meet some friendly folks. It's self selecting, I think. What do they say your vibe is? Your tribe.

Yes.

Somehow it ended up being a tribe of good people who are easy to talk to and have interesting things to say. So it's always a good time.

Love it. Thank you so much. This was really great. I think our audience will learn a lot and got some good books too out of it.

Great. Enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Such a pleasure.

Evening.

Bye Isaac.

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