From Seed to Success: How MassBio is Boosting Biotech with Jason Cordiero, Chief Operating and Innovation Officer

I am absolutely reeling from this conversation. I have lived and worked with companies in Massachusetts for well over a decade and I cannot believe how much I didn't know about MassBio, which is an organization that I have belonged to through multiple client companies and through my own company over the years. So today I got to speak with Jason Cordeiro, the Chief Operating and Innovation officer over at MassBio and he described their five year strategic plan which is being announced today, which is the day we are dropping this podcast. Their focus is really on furthering the industry and that is taking on so many different shapes and forms within the organization from helping little baby biotechs, to educating potential investors to educating the public and advocating for policies that support biotech, to helping communities set up biotech friendly spaces, to workforce development planning. All of this and more. I cannot believe how many things they are packing into that five year plan. So whether you're in Massachusetts or not, this episode is worth a listen because massbio has a pretty long reach. It is not limited to just Massachusetts based companies. In fact, I was shocked by how global it actually is. This episode is a treasure trove of resources if you're starting or growing a biotech or if you just want to learn a little bit more about the massbio ecosystem. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jason. Welcome to the Building Biotechs podcast. Over the years I've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health. We speak with those at the forefront of Growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm your host, Karina Klingman. I hope you enjoy the show.

First of all, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited about this conversation because I'm a huge fan of Mass Bio and happened for a really long time.

I'm thrilled to be here. We have a lot of exciting stuff to talk about, so really appreciate being invited to have a conversation with you.

Absolutely. Yeah. We did this pre podcast brainstorming meeting and I feel like I live in Massachusetts, I work with companies in Massachusetts and I didn't even know half of the things that actually you offer and that are going on in MassBio. So I'm excited to dig into a few of those things. But first I just want to know about your career. How did you even end up where you are?

Yeah, it's a great question. I have a degree in biology. I did some molecular biology work. I worked in the lab For a little bit. Realized that I wasn't great at science and I prefer business and working with people. Found my way to working at Thermo Fisher and some various commercial roles and strategy roles. Really got involved with this early stage biotech community that we have here in Massachusetts and born and raised here. It's all been in my backyard. Very fortunate for me in my career, but really starting to understand that there's so much that anybody can do to help these companies and they're all really geared towards helping patients at the end of the day. So came over here and I've been at massbau now for about six years.

Can you just give a broad Overview? What is MassBio and what does it do in general terms for our startup community here?

Yeah, for sure. And your point earlier around, you've known MassBio for some of the things that we've done, but certainly not everything. And that's what we're trying to do every day is educate around all the different things that we do because a lot of folks know us functionally for the role, they interact with us. So we are the membership organization representing the biotech life sciences industry in Massachusetts. We have about 1700 member companies and so we call our members as the companies. But if you work at any one of those companies, you are also then a member of MassBio. So largely anybody that works in the life sciences industry in Massachusetts is probably a member of MassBio. And so we do a number of different things. We have programs that we're going to talk about today that really help to support the business environment, to help drive innovation and bring resources to early stage companies. We do work to make connections with funders. We have a program called Our MassBio Edge, which is a savings program. So we aggregate the buying power of our entire membership base to get best in class prices for everybody. It's one of the foundational pieces of MassBio. We advocate on behalf of the industry and for patients both here in the state and federally to make sure that we are protecting innovation. And then we bring forward best in class events and learning and networking mixers, which is what a lot of people know us for and that's what we how we bring the industry together. So really we are a connector, convener and catalyzer for the entirety of our ecosystem, not only here in Massachusetts, but really nationally and really globally.

Yeah, you have a surprisingly good job board as well. So one of the ways I've always interacted with you is I work with tiny startups and the first thing we do is we get registered to be MassBio members and then that gives some really powerful hiring tools and there's a newsletter with good circulation for those jobs. So I just want to plug that from a talent perspective. That's really valuable too.

Yeah, it is. We get that a lot and we work with partners. We've done job fairs in the past too and yeah, it's always one of the top four or five web pages on our website that gets the most hits is the job board. And yeah, it's a great, it's a great feature. I tell anybody that's looking to get in the industry, check out the MassBio job board. It's not just scientific jobs, it's everything you could be looking for in the industry because that's what we do. We support and not just science, but business and everything in between. We do a lot of workforce education, training and the prevailing thought is I need to have a science degree to get into biotech and frankly we need just as many accountants that in our industry and finance folks as we do bench scientists. And so we're continuing to educate the workforce on that.

So you have this thing, correct me if I'm wrong, called MassBio Drive Accelerator. What is that program?

Yeah, so MassBio Drive is as it sounds, it's an early stage company accelerator. It was built off of a program that MassBio had run for about a decade called Mass Connect. And about four years ago the team looked at Mass Connect and said how do we enhance this program? How do we really help startup biotechs looking for their seed round, their Series A round? How do we help them get to that next level? So we built Mass Bio Drive to pull together all the resources that we have available to us here. This network that we have it talked about as being convener. There are so many people in this ecosystem that have started up companies, found funding, brought a medicine to a patient and so we have this really rich environment of folks and how do we create access for startup companies to those experts? And that's really what MassPower Drive aims to do. It's broadly a mentoring program. So we pair our each cohort that we do, two cohorts a year, five companies apiece, we pair them with a mentor group but we also have curated, it's a six of the eight weeks of the program, our curated educational content and curriculum. So that's really going to be the 101 business basics for a biotherapeutic company. We partner with experts to teach curriculum in areas like, you know, your regulatory strategy, your Drug development strategy, IP and general legal strategy for a startup company, fundraising strategy. So all of these elements that a bench scientist who has a really great asset and a brilliant scientist may not be as familiar with how to run a business. So we help pair them up with the mentors and these curriculum exports, put them through eight weeks of program and with a demo day at the end where we fill a room with a bunch of investors, pharma, biotech, BD folks, and we give them the opportunity to pitch their company and to start to make introductions to get to the next level. We've done this now four years and ten companies a year. So it's been tremendous. We have companies raising their seed rounds now, which is super exciting. A really rewarding program.

Yeah, it sounds like it. That's a really good ecosystem too. Do you take other companies from not the Massachusetts area for that program as well?

Yeah, that's the beauty of it. When we revamped the program from what it was originally, there were a couple of things that we wanted to key in on. One is the regionality piece. Right. We recognize that there's really good science all over the country, all over the globe, but some of it may not have access to that resource pool that I talked about. Right. So we are able to do this program in a hybrid fashion. And we've had companies, we accept companies from all over, we've had companies from Argentina, Vancouver, Nebraska. So about half the companies haven't even been from Massachusetts. So it's just a really cool way to, of taking what we've, we are so fortunate to have here and creating access to it for really good science, really great scientists all over the place. So it's a great program and one of the things we want to focus on is diversity. So we really try to bring and find as many diverse founders, female founders, diverse science as we can to bring that into the program. And that is a key hallmark of what we've done about. Again, about 50% of our graduates are female founded companies. We're really trying to do those things to diversify our industry and like I said, create access for people that might not have it right now.

Yeah, that's really important. How do you support companies that are not local in some of these initiatives? You said it's hybrid. Is there video component? I assume that pitch, that final, that final showcase is probably in person.

A lot of the mentoring and the expert curriculum and is delivered virtual if needed. We have had companies come through that are local, that have sat down and done some of the in person the six weeks but we have a couple of in person touch points along the way. We kick off each cohort with a mixer so that the cohort can come in, they can meet their mentors, they can meet the experts and they can meet others in the ecosystem. So we provide some travel stipends. So that first touch point and then the demo day that is an in person event. So we get everybody in the room. Typically we do it here at the MassBio hub. Another thing that MassBio does is we have a conference and business center here. So very fortunately it is a sort of landmark now in the industry of people to come together and meet. And so we host our pitch days there and we get everybody to come and attend.

With the way that things are moving and becoming more global for those pitch days, do you syndicate that? Do you broadcast it to investors that are not in the area? How are you thinking about even making it a bigger pitch event?

We record them, every one of them. We haven't streamed it yet because we want to create a real close knit environment and we think there's a lot of impact for our cohort to be able to meet the investors in the room. But we record every one of the pitches, we share them and we spread that broadly. We put it on our website on MB Vision is our video page on our website. So I encourage everybody to check that out. But we also partner with. We're start beginning to partner with other states and other trade organizations. Some folks may have seen that we have South Carolina BioDrive that was launched. They're going through their first cohort now. So we're trying to really take the model that we've built and share that with other regions, other areas that are might be interested in and getting involved in running a program like this.

Yeah, I shared that South Carolina Bio drive in the newsletter a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago now. And that's really. It's great to see that's branded reaching out and yeah, I see did that question because I want people to know that there's actually a place they can go to watch some of this content.

Yeah.

Because it's a good way to get to know what is expected in a pitch type situation like that. It's a little different than grad students if we've got early stage founders. They're not really used to that sort of a style of communication.

Yeah, for sure. And that's one of the things that we do as well. It's not one of the official curriculum areas but we bring in a presentation and Pitch coach that does an overall meeting with all of the companies, talks them through how they can better talk to an audience. They'll work with each individual company on their deck to make sure that it's clean and it tells the story that they're looking to tell and walk through the best way to do it. So we try to help sharpen them up. There's their presentation skills up a little bit too. Ultimately, at the end of the day, our goal is to best prepare these companies to be successful. We know that it's an unfortunate statistic, but 90% of these biopharma companies ultimately fail and a drug doesn't get to market. But we want to do everything that we can as early as possible in their life cycle to help them make it and to be a little bit more sustainable in this industry.

Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like you actually bring in some pretty cool resources for these folks. What are some other experts or examples of experts that you bring in to this program?

Yeah, so it's outside of the curriculum experts that are teaching the course. The mentor pool that we have is second to none, really. These are folks that, like, I've talked about, have built companies, or they're working in big pharma doing drug development, or they're at a venture capital firm right now and can share the knowledge of what they've seen and what it needs to be investable. And so there's just. We have this. We curated this brilliant, brilliant mentor pool of folks that want to give back and help the next generation of founders and companies. And so there's so many experts in there that we're always looking for more. But we allow the companies themselves to take a look at our mentor pool and select which mentors they really want to work, work with, what is going to augment their skill set best. So we have each of our mentors fill out basically a baseball card. Tell us what your areas of expertise are, what you've done, give us a little background about yourself, and it creates a really cool environment. And the mentors end up staying close to these companies far after they've graduated from this program. And it creates just this really cool community that everybody keeps coming back.

That sounds really fun. I'm going to have a lot of links in the show notes for this episode. So if you're listening to this and wondering how you get involved, check the show notes. Where would somebody go? Who would they contact if they want to become part of that mentor pool?

Yeah. Everything is on our website@massbio.org under our innovation section on the website. MassBio Drive has its own section. You can apply there. Our colleague, you'll hear from one of our colleagues, Caroline Pepic or Nikki Seiler, who run that program on a day to day basis. And they're absolute rock stars.

Excellent. And is that also where a company might go if they wanted to apply to become part of this accelerator?

Absolutely. Same place. Right now we just are about to announce our fall cohort. So the next application will open in January for our spring cohort. But investors beat pharma. BD Folks, keep an eye out for this next crop of companies that's coming through. There'll be a demo day in November on the 16th, I believe.

Excellent. We'll put all that in the show notes. That's great.

Yeah, I mean, we're trying to bring as much value as we can to these companies. So if any, we're always open to new ideas from the community, from the people around us that make the industry go. We want this to be an ever evolving program. Some of the things that we're looking for, we're always looking for more funding. This is a program that's funded by our sponsors. So ultimately we want to raise more money for it so we can get good grant equity fee grants out to these companies. We're looking at things like partnerships with incubators to get space for some of the cohort graduates. So we're open to any ideas that are going to bring great value to these companies early on when they're resource constricted. So bringing more resources to the table for them is really what we're trying to figure out now and how we're going to keep evolving. For this program, we actually take in close to 175 applications a year and we only take 10 companies through the program. So it's super competitive. But we recognize there's a lot of really good science, really good companies that haven't got through the program. So we're always trying to think of ways to keep them involved. We share the resources that we have with them. So they might not get the mentor group and the management of the program. But as much of what we've done, the resources that we have, we want to be able to share with them and, and we invite them in to come to some of the events that we have to help learn. So we're always, again, this is all just really trying to keep pushing the industry forward. So the more value, more resources we can provide to everybody, the better.

Yeah, that sounds great. I know for the majority of Companies in the massbio ecosystem, there is this purchasing power agreement which allows them to get really good access to different types of vendors. And I know you've negotiated some prices for that, so can you talk about that a little bit?

Almost all of our biotech companies use at least one of our agreements, whether it's with Thermo, Fisher Scientific or Veolia Environmental, they know us as a resource that we've already negotiated on their behalf the best pricing and the best terms that they're going to be able to get. And so next level, one of the ideas that we're kicking around is this idea of a launchpad for early stage biotechs. And it's similar to the Edge in that we want to bring in the best in class partners, but this is going to be really service oriented. And so we're going to try to find a few key areas that we know early biotech companies need. Things like law firms, attorneys, CROs, CMOs. These are heavily service based industries. And so it's tough to negotiate price because every project's going to be different. Right. But we can position it in a way where we have a few options that have committed to working with the members in a particular way and we've vetted and approved them. Then we can save them time, resources. You don't have to go out and find an attorney. You can come into the launchpad and know that there's a few that know intimately this industry and masspile has vetted them and you can choose from one of them and know that you're in a great place. So that's over the course of the next couple years, we're going to really build this launchpad up, idea up. And I think there's a place for everybody here. MassBar. We represent academics, we represent the companies that we've talked about for drive. They're just spinning out and it's one or two people, but we do everything in between. Series A, series B, public companies, the largest pharma companies, they're all members of MassBio. This is what I love about my job, is I'm thinking every day about every one of those companies and how we can meet them, where they're at. And this idea of the launchpad is yeah, we can bring in a firm or a CMO or CRO that's really good with startup companies and we can have one that's great for more mid stage companies and one that's really good for larger companies. Right. And so we start to think about everything that we can do for all of our members. It starts to get really exciting.

This massbio Align summit that I've heard about. Tell me about that.

We're always listening to what our members are looking for and what they need. Right. And what they need now is shots on goal and we need more investors, we need more money right into the industry. So Aligned Summit is an early stage investor conference that has partnering throughout last year. We had about 50 companies pitch that are from seed to series B. We have about 500 people investors. Again, biotech, corporate development, business development folks and biotech companies. 500 people attend and really we're trying to focus on bringing in alternative investors as well. So we're thinking about family offices or private equity that haven't really been in the life sciences space before. But want to learn more, want to find some cool companies and cool science. Align is really trying to help us broaden the reach and create better deal flow for some of these investors that haven't traditionally been in here or aren't the premier name in venture capital in our industry. So we're trying to build the biggest tent that we can. And the Alliance Summit's the best way to bring in companies from all over the world really to present to a curated audience.

And when does that take place?

So we are going to be doing that in October of 2025. Our alliance summit in 24 was in April. We've moved it out to the fall for 2025.

And how do you think about enticing these newer investors that haven't yet broken into the biotech space? Especially because right now biotech is not seen as maybe the safest investment there are. I think investor sentiment is somewhat low. So how do you get these family offices, these PEs to get excited about this?

Yeah, I think it's really around from a mass bio lens. Right. It's around all of the things that we're doing to support the companies that they may be investing in. Right. We want to pair them up with the resources if it's through mass bio drive, making sure that they're finding success early and building a roadmap for success. Right. We want to make sure that we're highlighting real areas of need. Right. There are a ton of indications out there that still need support and rare disease and we know that there's an impact that we can have and there's a story we can tell around that impact. We want to engage with investors, we want to help them. We're going to be building over the next couple of years a program that is going to Help educate a non biotech life science investor on what it is to be an investor in this industry. Right. What are the terms need to look like to make this company better for a follow on investment? Right. What are some of the due diligence steps that you need to do to go through and what are some of the things that you're looking for? So we're going to be working with a lot of the investors in this space now to help build this training to bring others into the industry and give them a level of comfort around investing in this space that's really valuable.

And I have not heard of anyone else doing that. And one thing I've heard from investors who did try and jump in during the pandemic when it was quite exciting to invest in biotech. One thing that I heard from those non traditional investors was that they made some bad bets because they didn't actually know how to evaluate things and set up terms and all the things you just mentioned. And how would they. Because biotech is really quite unique. It's not the same animal as tech investing or other types of investing.

Yeah. And that's tough. And it's just education. Right. I think, well, you can look back and we'll all be able to learn a lot from the pandemic investing years. Right. And some of the mistakes that we made. How do we avoid that in the future? But this is what we're trying to think about is there's probably a lot of investments made there. I know there are a lot of companies out there that took money and that's still a really good company and we just need to make sure that we're getting them that next round. Right. Early stage investment has been really slow these past few years. Especially for seed rounds, series A rounds, the number of investments has gone down significantly. So we need to be able to get some of this good science that's out there that's been struggling for a couple of years, that next round of investment and keep that moving on, ultimately getting a therapy into a clinic and hopefully into a patient. But these are long time horizons that I don't think a lot of these investors really accounted for early on. I mean, Modern was able to get a vaccine and Pfizer will get a vaccine up very quickly. That's not the norm. And plus that was science that had been developed for years and years before the approval happened. There's some level setting that certainly needs to happen.

Yeah, that's the real key. The technology existed, it was just pivoted quite quickly. And I Think that is not something that people didn't know what RNA was largely before all of that. I'm not sure that most people still know what RNA is, but that's okay. But you know, to most people, including folks who are highly educated, it seemed like magic. Right? It just was like, wow, there's a vaccine. And I worked for Moderna back in 2014-16 and I know that the groundwork had been laid.

No biotech, not exactly a way to make a quick buck, but certainly a noble investment.

Yeah, it's an impact. I honestly think that the investors that do the best here are really impact based investors.

Yeah. And that's one of our pillars, being able to tell the story of our industry right now. And I know a lot of folks that are probably listening to this are in the industry and are going to understand what I'm talking about. But I know that the folks that are in our industry that are starting up, companies that are working on science, are in it because they are compelled to do good and they're compelled to help people. And our industry gets this like really bad rap around pricing and there's so many factors that play into that. But what we want to try to play a role in changing public perception around our industry. There are people that work in our industry that care too much about what they're doing, and they're all doing it for the right reasons. So any of those really cool stories, you know, that we can share, we want to hear those stories. We want to get them on a podcast, we want to get them on video, and we want to get them out to the public so that people can really understand that it's not a quick turnaround and you're making a ton of money. It's years and years of development and grit that goes into this stuff.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. I don't know a single founder who founded a company thinking they were going to be a billionaire.

That's not why they do it.

No. If anything, they know that they're gonna make zero money for a very long time. A labor of love for sure.

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.

What are mass biopharma days and can.

You tell me a little bit about.

Maybe success stories that come out of those pharma days?

I love it's one of MassBio's keystone events for the innovation industry that we have here under our innovation umbrella. It is a, I guess lack of better term. It's matchmaking for pharma and ultimately a pharma company will come to us and with a some therapeutic areas of interest, some modalities they may be looking for. And we put a call out to our membership and say here's the criteria that pharma company is looking for. Does your company fit applied to meet with them? And then we do some high level search and evaluation on behalf of the pharma companies and we present them with pretty robust list of potential companies that fit their criteria. They go through and they rank out which ones they think are best. And we do a farm a day here again in our MassBio hub, our conference and business center here we do a whole day. The pharma day consists of the morning typically is 31 on 1 meetings across different tracks between pharma and these emerging biotech, potential partnerships, acquisitions. It's all non confidential, being shared really a first Bosch introduction. And so we do, you know, a full day of those one on one meetings here and then we open it up to the public. So whether your company got selected or not, or you're just interested in learning more, each of the days typically end in an overview from the pharma company. So we bring 300, 400 people here into the MassBio hub and they present an overview. What's it like to partner with us? What are we looking for? What's our external innovation strategy? A lot of pharma companies have brought up a panel or done a fireside chat with a company they partnered with recently to talk about that experience. So it's a great way for the audience to hear firsthand from these pharma companies what they're looking for so they can go back and think about how they need to position themselves better. And then that will end in a networking event. For a couple hours it's just general folks meeting one Another, it's all science and BD folks in the industry, they come together and so if you didn't have a chance to get a one on one meeting, you can still walk up to the business development folks in your area, shake their hands, get a business card, have some conversations. So we had some great success. We've had pharma companies make acquisitions from companies that we've put in front of them, certainly partnerships throughout the years. It's certainly one of our hallmark programs that when people know a pharma day is coming, they know what to expect and they know to get geared up for it. Our next pharma day is coming up at the end of October with Novo Nordisk. So that's really exciting. We've launched that. There'll be more information coming out. If you're in the massbio ecosystem, getting our emails, you'll see that apply to meet Novo Nordisk. They're going to have a great roundtable discussion as well.

That's great.

And is that only for local companies or would a small company be eligible if they were outside of the mass ecosystem?

In terms of the partnering meetings, it really comes down to what the pharma company is looking for. We've had companies fly in from California to meet in person. There have been times where we've done hybrid meetings. A lot of these companies, the global pharma companies, have folks all over the globe. So we have the ability in our conference center to dial people in and have an audience in person too. So really it just comes down to if the farm company is looking for more regionally based companies or they're looking broader. So I would say always apply because you never know what can happen. At the very least, we'll put your company name on a list and that list is going to be in the hands of a pharma company. And that's never a bad thing.

Yeah, that's great. We absolutely love that you are partnered with the Tamir Foundation. We're also partnered with the Tamir Foundation. I think it's just such a fantastic organization. So I know this is a pretty new partnership it just launched. Can you give us an overview of what that looks like?

Absolutely. And we are all so excited about this program that we've built the CEO and founder link that we've built with the Tamir Foundation. It's one of the cooler things that I've been able to do here at MassBio and it's been so well received by so many people. So what we've realized with the Tamir foundation is that they're working so closely with these first time CEOs and giving them the skills to be a better executive to help, you know, shepherd their company along. And MassBio is working on behalf of all of these companies to provide resources and connections to make sure that the company is super successful. So there's this like beautiful synergy of what we're trying to do to help these individuals in the companies and ultimately be successful. And so we thought we should really try to create a network for these CEOs and these founders that they're all dealing with so much and they need a place, a safe space to share some of these war stories, bounce ideas off of folks that have gone through it before or going through it now and without the pressures of a huge big networking event. Right. We need to build a community of founders, a community of CEOs that can be supportive of one another. And that's what we're wanting to do here. And so we just had our kickoff event recently. It was super well attended. The people were amazing. Working with the Tamir Foundation, Catherine and her team has just been incredible. It was very low touch, there's no speakers. We just really wanted CEOs to connect and share and get to know one another. And it was just as we drew it up, it was really cool. A lot of connections were made. And the plan with, with the LYNQ is to roll it out about quarterly throughout the year. And we're going to do an event in conjunction with many of the big industry events. Right. So our next one actually is going to be Monday, January 13th at JP Morgan. So we'll be doing a link event out in San Francisco. Then we're planning on doing an event at Bio and hopefully another summertime event. And then again our Align Early Stage Investor Partnering Conference in October. And it'll be a mix of some of it will be content, some of it will just be a cool environment that we set up for people to meet and get together and talk and share. But really that's what the goal is, to create this safe space for people to just get to know each other and share good ideas.

That's wonderful. If anybody's interested in learning more about the Tremere Foundation, I interviewed Catherine on the podcast a while ago. I'll link that in the show notes as well. So such a good organization and yeah, their emphasis on really developing thoughtful, good leaders is so important. And so I'm glad that you're doing that.

Yeah, I had a chance to meet a bunch of them. The current Cohort and previous cohort at the event. And they're just tremendous people. And these are the folks that are. They're not starting up companies to make money, they're starting up companies because they have a passion to do good. And that really shines through in these TAMIR fellows. In fact, Shameless Plug, one of our mass bio drive cohort graduates, HDACs Therapeutics Navanita Noir is after going through drive. She is also now a TAMIR fellow and they recently announced a good seed round. This is what we're working to do and hopefully we can keep creating these great situations.

Yeah, I bet that feels awesome.

It's fun.

We are recording this just before you're about to release your five year strategic plan. Can you give us an overview of what that looks like?

Yeah. This is something that we have been working on for the better part of this entire year, engaging with the MassBio board, our industry very broadly, and we've worked with McKinsey to gather all this information about where the industry is at right now, what are the needs and where the industry is going over the next five years and the role that MassBio can play to help spur these things along and really make sure that we remain the best place in the world for life sciences and we can continue to be a role model, an example for how to be a biotech hub. Some of the key areas that we're focusing on, we have these sort of four catalyst areas and this is all really building off of stuff that MassBio is doing today. So one of the catalysts is to support early stage companies and we're going to be doing a couple of different things along the way over the course of the next five years. Our LaunchPad program that's going to help bring companies, give them a roadmap of potential partners to help them early on and save them resources and time. We're going to be potentially building a seed fund. So the MassBio seed fund really linked to our MassBio drive accelerator where we want to be able to take these companies, give them pre seed dollars to get that next set of data and really set them up to be really investable and move on to the next round. And not only the money, but harnessing the resources that MassBio has, we have all this connectivity. We have such a broad reach for different partners. So the companies that we can invest in through this seed fund, we can also help them make connections quicker. So we're super excited about this. And another key is there are a lot of early stage companies in the AI drug development space and that what we're calling this tech for biotech space, right? We have a lot of really good bench scientists, we have a lot of good traditional biotech companies here. But we know there's this emerging class of companies so we want to bring them into the fold. We want to think about what are the resources that we need to help provide for them and the connections that we can make for those companies. Really thinking about what this next age of biotech looks like with this focus on digital and AI. So bringing in big tech companies into our ecosystem to help support and bring tools to those companies around. Another one of our catalysts is our funding catalyst. So a couple of things that we're going to do. This is really focused on bringing in more investors. We run a program now called Bioready Communities. We go around Massachusetts and we help grade and prepare them for setting up biotechs in their city or town, right? So they get a bio ready community grading. So what we want to try to do is bio ready for investors, right? And this is we want to build resources, training so that investors that haven't traditionally been in the life sciences can go through this course and become a bio ready investor. And so hopefully we can start to demystify some of the things around investing in this industry. We also want to work with venture philanthropy. We know that there are so many philanthropic groups out there for disease. Foundations are really targeting very specific diseases. We're in a position where we can harness them, bring them all together and create a resource rolodex for companies so that we know that an early stage company is focused on an area we can help get them in touch with the venture philanthropy folks early on. So those are some of the things that we're doing to stimulate funding. We're going to continue to focus on talent in this industry, right? We launched Bioversity. We really bringing in a diverse community into our industry and it's been incredibly successful over the past year and a half. We want to take that to the next level, right? So we want to expand Bioversity. We just announced Bioversity in lol. So what we want to do is start to build bioversities that are a skill set match training match for the community where we put them that will tie back to this industry, right? So for focusing on biomanufacturing in particular areas and bringing folks into this industry and continuing to develop it, we've heard that there's a lot of great mid level talent in our industry. Not a ton of really high end, well Trained executive level talent. And so this is where the Tremere foundation partnership comes into play for us. We want to help build the next generation of executives and leaders in this industry. And we're going to do that thoughtfully through partnerships. And the last piece of talent is again, focused on the digital, the AI in our industry. A lot of really good scientists, and there's a lot of really good data scientists here that go into the tech companies. We want to make sure that they stay in the industry, but we also want to make sure that our traditional scientists have access to training to learn on the digital side and become really good data scientists as well. So we're going to try to stimulate that because we want to make sure that those companies have the resources and talent they need to build and grow here. These are all going to be done over the course of the next five years. A lot of this stuff is really already in play. We're going to build off of our Align investor conference to start to stimulate the investor catalysts. Our other focus area for us is on the impact of our industry, advocating for our industry. So we're going to continue to be policy focused and really tell the story of our industry too. Not only our lawmakers, but also the general public, so that they understand that there's so much more than money in this industry and the struggle that it takes to get there and who the patients are and what they're dealing with and they're waiting and our industry is hustling to try to get them what they need. And so we don't do a good enough job telling that story outside of our industry. And so that's another going to be another huge focus for us over the next five years.

That's all really exciting and amazing and we didn't even scratch the surface of all of the stuff MassBio does because it's just such a massive impactful organization. So for those who want to learn more about you and connect with you, is LinkedIn the best place for that?

Best place. I'm on LinkedIn. Find me there. Find me on our website, massbio.org Connect with me there. I'm happy to talk with anybody and everybody and bring as much value to our members as we can.

Yeah. Well, you're doing a great job. Thank you so much for your time today. I think this was great because I didn't know about most of the stuff you talked about. Like I said, I work with startups in this space. It's new, it's exciting and we just need to get the word out about the resources that folks can tap into, so I'm sure you'll get some outreach from this podcast.

Awesome. Well really appreciate the invite to be on here and tell the story of what we're doing at MassBio and how we're trying to support the industry. So thank you so much.

Oh my pleasure entirely. Thank you.

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