Leveraging Partnerships and Scrappiness to Start a Biotech with Sarah Hein, PhD, co-founder and CEO of March Biosciences

Sarah is the co founder and CEO of March Biosciences. And honestly, Sarah just gives so much good advice and really actionable thought processes and frameworks for people who maybe want to start their own biotech, maybe just want to succeed in biotech. For Anyone who's pitching VCs anytime soon.

This is a, this is a can't.

Miss episode for you. It's really good.

Welcome to Building Biotechs, a podcast by Reeconomics 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. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We're so excited to chat with you. We're going to start this show the way we start every other show, which is what did you want to be when you were seven, what are you now? And how did you get there?

I think when I was a kid, I was always going to go into something in biology. My mother's a physician. I have several doctors in my family with extended family. But I did not have the right predisposition to become a clinician myself. I just couldn't quite put my heart into it. What I loved was science. And after undergrad I had a really informative experience working in a lab during my undergrad days and ended up getting a PhD in Houston, Texas at Baylor College of Medicine. And it was through there that I realized that the most applied form of that was really through commercialization and biomedical development. So ultimately what I became was an entrepreneur. After graduate school, I went and worked with a fund called Mercury Fund as a venture fellow and helped launch a startup called Courier Therapeutics, which was a retargeted cytokine company. Um, I was the most junior person in that, but I learned there's no faster way to learn anything. And now I'm the CEO of a new company called March Biosciences, which is a clinical stage cell therapy company.

What was the catalyst for deciding you were going to go the non traditional route as opposed to the way most of our classmates went, which was either to go into a professor position or into industry?

What I realized pretty quickly in graduate school is I loved science, but I didn't love academia, if that makes sense. And I think that's not an uncommon theme for people getting their PhDs and I started looking around at, not academia, which I think from. At that, at that stage of your career is where a lot of people start at is this large amorphous white space that's out there, where, you know, you don't really know what's out there, but you need to start getting exposure. And was really fortunate. I got plugged into a local group called Inventure with other startup founders and people who wanted to get into startups. And, you know, it's a really small ecosystem here in Houston, but it's been growing tremendously. And these. This group of people actually had become foundational for the local ecosystem. And what I realized really quickly was I loved startup people. I loved the yes and attitude where, where you know, you don't. You start from the proposition of what if you could do something and you work your way back there on how to actually make that a reality. Which is a very different perspective, I think, than not just in academia, but really in most careers where a lot of times you're starting with no and then you're trying to fight to make something a yes instead. And so it's not to say it's easy, but that general shift in perspective was very refreshing for me. And applying that to biotech and understanding how do you get into this process of drug development to make the scientific projects, I would see a reality in the clinic and beyond. That was where I sort of fell in love and wanted to pursue that as a career.

I'm really glad that you touched on the Texas ecosystem, because that was actually one of my questions. We are based in New Hampshire and we work in Massachusetts all the time. So obviously we're very looped in with Cambridge and, you know, there's a lot of little biotech hubs all throughout the country. But can we talk about Texas for a little bit and sort of what you're seeing down there? It seems like there's some really cool science happening down in Texas. It's really growing.

I came to Houston originally for graduate school, which was at Baylor College of Medicine. It's based in the Texas Medical Center. The Texas Medical Center. The place is the largest continuous medical center in the world, actually. And where we specialize, I would say above and beyond, is really in cancer. We have Baylor College of Medicine's, a Comprehensive Cancer Center, MD. Anderson is the largest cancer center in the world. Texas Children's Hospital is the second largest children's hospital in the country. And they also have a tremendous cancer practice as well. We also have other verticals like the Texas Heart Institute and UT Health specializes in a lot of more small molecule developments. So there's a lot of research here. But what's been historically very limited is the translation of that research into companies. There's a lot of reasons for that, really. At the end of the day, I think culturally there's just not been as many. It's not in the water here the way it is in San Francisco or in Boston, where if you're a faculty member or if you're in a lab and, you know, other people have done it, now this becomes a reality that you could pursue. We also just don't have the network connectivity. So even where people have commercialized technologies, historically there's been a activation energy required to be able to bridge out to the other ecosystems where you can find the right capital. Now that's historically been the case. What's been really exciting for me and part of the reason I've stayed in Houston is the growth of the ecosystem, even the last 10 years, and the trajectory, looking forward of where we could be. Over the last 10 years, we've gone from almost no commercial activity to now. At tmc, you have TMC Innovation. They run multiple accelerators per year. You know, they get, you know, a tremendous number of companies through those accelerators in that innovation space, co working together, you know, starting to form those ecosystems like you see and some of the other hubs. And now, you know, they just launched Helix park, which is going to be sort of the new Life Sciences Plaza with I think the. Don't misquote me if I'm wrong, but I think it's something like several million square feet of lab space and coworking space, offices, all dedicated life sciences just here in Houston in one, you know, very tightly knit community. So it's really exciting seen a number of public companies emerge here locally over the last decade, driven not least because of seaprid, the cancer prevention Research Institute. So there's a lot of energy, a lot of potential for where things are going, and I've been excited to see the ecosystem grow.

That's awesome. Thank you for that overview. That was really comprehensive and super interesting.

Yeah, I. Well, I used to work at TMC as well. My stop between Courier and Markfio was I helped launch the accelerator for cancer therapeutics. If you look at the biotechs that have emerged here, you know, way back in the day, Nancy Chang, she launched Tanox and sold it, you know, in the 80s as a female entrepreneur, one of the first huge success stories for Houston. But since then, where you've seen a lot of companies go public and be successful, have been in the cell therapy space. And we've partnered with ctmc, which is a spin out from MD Anderson Cancer center with National Resilience on our manufacturing. There's a number of facilities that have gone into production up in the Woodlands, where Alexandria Ventures has launched their facility. The other interesting thing, you know, for people, I. Part of the reason I love to advocate for Houston is, as I have personally found it, to have outsized opportunities. You can find incredible research here to work with scientists who want to see their work get commercialized. And, you know, like I said, this is some of the best research in the world, particularly in this space. And so there's an opportunity to meet people, to get plugged in and find a tremendous number of resources. And I have found it to be a very welcoming community where if you come here with a collaborative attitude and really work to drive patient impact, you find doors open for you and there's opportunities.

Well, Sarah, can you tell us about March Bioscience and what you guys are doing and give us kind of an overview of the company?

Yeah. So March Biosciences is, as I mentioned, we have a clinical stage asset or a couple of clinical stage assets actually spun out of Baylor College of Medicine. Not my work, even though I had gone to Baylor back in the day. I'm working with the inventors, Dr. Maxim Welken, who's our CSO, and Dr. Malcolm Brenner, who's really a pioneer in the field of cell and gene therapy and had built the CAGT at Baylor originally. And what these assets are really geared towards is a lot of the cell therapies that you are familiar with that are approved are really targeted towards B cell cancers. There's a whole subset of lymphomas and leukemias called the T cell cancers that even today, not just with cell therapy, but generally are completely unaddressed. And so the prognosis for these patients, if they become relapse or refractory to primary care, is only 10 to 20% survival over three years. You're really measuring lifespan in months at that stage, unfortunately. And, you know, we have a phase one trial ongoing for two different assets that are showing really strong safety profiles, you know, the early signal for long term, you know, complete remissions. And so it's been really, really exciting. A lot of March's job's really been to take those assets and get them ready for the next stage of development to a phase two trial.

That is a terrifying statistic, though. About the cancers you're working on. So that seems like it's really impactful work, probably very rewarding as well. Which sort of brings me to, as a, as a startup founder, there's a lot of. There's a lot of keeping your eye on the mission, right? Because it's hard and it's not always lucrative at the beginning. And so tell us a little bit about how you have sort of kept your vision, your mission through this. It sounds like you're very passionate about the patients, but what else has kept you going?

I had helped launch the accelerator for cancer therapeutics, and I love startups as a vehicle to take science and go after big goals. But I always say it's not the easiest way to do it. You have to understand what is the reason that the startup should exist in the first place. And it's not for press releases. It's not to say you raised a bunch of money. It's to accomplish some goal and to set that appropriately, you have to understand if you see a potential in a project and you strongly believe that there's some value to it to patients, what is stopping? What are the proof points that you need to set out to get to, to make other people see that same vision that you see today for cell therapy, Quite commonly, it's manufacturing and achieving manufacturing scalability. That's a. It's been a recurring theme and a recurring challenge. And so if you set those goals and you've done the work, I think to fundamentally establish that you believe in the mission and you believe in the potential of a product and you understand what it is that are the goals that you're going after, I think it becomes very easy to maintain that. It's certainly not an easy job to start your company. In general, particularly over the last year or so, biotech's been going through a lot of bumps and a real down cycle. But it doesn't change the reality of what's in front of you. And even in a down cycle, it opens up a different set of opportunities. For me, that's what keeps you going, is I always say you have to believe in something first before you can get anybody else to believe in it. And if you do that and you have the right partners, then you can move forward.

That's one of the things we want to talk to you about, finding the right partners. How have you managed to do that and what are the things you look for in a good partner?

When you think about the partners for a startup, you're thinking about multiple levels. You're Thinking about your co founders, you're thinking about your initial team, you know, for us, development partners as well. And then of course, capital, you know, that is truly a partnership relationship as well. And you have to start at the beginning with your co founders. Who, what are you going to start a company on and who are you going to start it with? And for me, that was really the crux of should I even start Marsh Biosciences versus I don't, I don't know what another company would've been called, but some other company it was. Does this technology pass the steadfast? Well, we had, you know, clinical data phase 1 trial with complete remissions, long term remissions in patients who otherwise frankly, would have been on their way to hospice and would've had not a lot of opportunities in front of them for any sort of positive outcomes. And so that was easy to see. Right. The technology fundamentally seemed to work. We thought we could unders. We. I understood it well enough to, to see where we could push that forward and hit those right points. But equally important to me was who do I get to start the company with? And as I mentioned, the technology is really invented primarily by Dr. Maximokin at Baylor College of Medicine. And we first started talking, he had, you know, the CD5 car T asset, that's our lead asset, a CD7 car T asset, and the number of pipeline assets that we're, we're working on that even expand beyond T cell malignancies. And I had looked at that point at every faculty member, at least in Texas, that was working on innovation and translational technologies and, you know, keeping very good tabs on the rest of the country as well, or even, you know, the global landscape. And I hadn't seen any faculty members who at that point were an assistant, you know, faculty member with multiple clinical stage assets that work. And that was an incredible opportunity to work with someone who I thought was brilliant, who I thought had a lot of dedicated hard work that they were willing to put in and an interest in seeing their project progress into the next stage of development to help patients. And so that checked all the boxes for me. From a personal standpoint, what should that founding team look like? At that point it became a matter of who, how do we get this to the next stage? How do we find the right people to build this with? We were really fortunate. I was able to pull in a mentor of mine who unfortunately passed relatively early in the development of the company, but was really critical. David Schumer, who helped us go through a lot of the licensing process and thinking about getting our feet under us and then finding the right people to engage to get actual work done. Again was a matter of trusted resources. You find the first couple people, you. You stretch your network to find the first few people to address the challenges that are right in front of you. And if once you find the first few great people, the good thing about good people is they know other people who are good. And so half of our team are all referrals from the first half of our team. And it's now everybody's cooking together and working really well together at that point. Hopefully the, you know, once you have a right team, established the right plan, and you actually have a little bit of cohesion and clarity to your vision, then you can start finding additional partners like manufacturing. In this case, our alliance with CTMC has been really critical to allow us to move very, very quickly on the manufacturing front and then ultimately to capital raises as well. And we were able to announce an award from Sea Print, the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas, recently. We also have an investment from the Cancer Focus Fund, which is tied to MV Anderson. And that's clinician and scientifically led process first, and then they do full diligence. And so it was a real vote of confidence that we were able to pass muster with people of such high caliber, the clinicians at Anderson, who believed in this technology and wanted to help us push that forward.

I think your philosophy of finding partners is so interesting because that is the exact same tack we take when we have to hire a team for a stealth company. It's who knows who, how do we leverage that network? Because the great scientists that founded the company definitely know other great scientists, but they don't know they know them. So it's like, pull those out, ask the right questions, find those, and then you build this amazing network of people who then just support and bolster the company. So it sounds like you do that, but on the partner level. And that is really fascinating. Very obvious, but not so I think, you know, great job on building those networks.

You just said something, Karina, actually, that I thought was funny. You said they, they know other people, but they don't know they know it. And it's funny because when I've worked with a lot of faculty on under, they, you know, they're the best advocates initially for their technology, but helping them understand commercialization potential and landscape analysis. And it's funny because I, I've actually said that I was like, you know, more of what's out there than you think. You do, you actually do know how to, how to do this analysis. You just don't think you do because you haven't framed it that way before. Um, and sometimes it's just a matter of shifting perspectives.

It's all in the questions you ask and how they're even viewing it. We have so many people that say we have this job, we need to hire this, you know, the chief technology officer, we need to hire this person, but nobody exists out there. And then you ask the right questions. It turns out actually your good friend over here is the CTO that we need to hire. So it really is just getting into somebody's mind. I love that, I love that you do that for partnerships. And I, I wish that more people would take that approach. Cause I think that that strong support network is exactly what a baby company needs to survive. So Sarah, tell us a little bit about what you did at career and how that set you up for the success that you had in the exit that Courier had as well.

So when I left my PhD, I went to Mercury Fund as a venture fellow and you know, they had already started, you know, talking to Sasha and working on spinning out. But I helped launch Courier Therapeutics as co founder and frankly, even though as the only full time person in that for a lot of the life of the company. Although again, it's important to note that I was, I was working with Dan Watkins and then with John Westwig as well as the original academic inventor, Sasha Craft throughout that entire process. And my job, which I think was a great job as someone coming out of a PhD was primarily boots on the ground, somebody who had the time and attention to get work done but didn't have the experience, at least initially, to know exactly the most effective paths forward. And so it was a really great experience. I got to work with people who were much more experienced than myself to map the path forward, but see every part of that business. And I did everything I would say, people, scientists, you know, you gotta start with what you're good at and what you're qualified to do today, which is, you know, I did everything from pipetting and lab experiments to pitch decks and you know, talking adventure and all the things in between. So Courier was a really interesting story and informed my thinking on this company on a number of different levels, the first of which is on people. Right. One of the things that I learned there is, there's always questions right. Whenever you about starting startups is it's a little bit of hypothesis of, as I said, what, what is the reason? But for that, somebody would acquire this or somebody would give this the next, you know, larger round of funding. And then you test that hypothesis and going by going and talking to people, and there's a few consistent areas that people typically would get hung up on. And what we ended up doing is we found people who were really sophisticated in certain aspects of, you know, drug toxicology, drug manufacturing, and all of a sudden, you know, in, in just a. But if you get to finding the right person to give you the right perspective, you can clarify what otherwise would have taken you maybe once or maybe never on what you would have been able to figure out on your own. So I'm huge believer in finding the right people to move forward. The other thing that I felt like I, I took from that was maybe a slightly different perspective, possibly informed by being in Houston where resources are not quite as plush as they are, you know, in Boston or in San Francisco. But there's an, there's an opportunity to be capital efficient and you can have an outsized return for your investors and for your founders when you do that. So if you're, a lot of times people are very, very focused on sort of your high level drug development perspective, and those are very important milestones of, you know, preclinical data. Put it in a mouse, you put it into an index where you get your ind and then you put it into a phase one trial. People gloss over manufacturing, which is where I feel like all drugs solve out eventually. But, you know, what they don't necessarily focus on is, okay, what gives somebody the confidence to give you the $20 million to run your phase one trial? And that could be a lot of times related to the technology specifically. So IL2, which is what Courier's technology was a derivative of historically had safety issues. That's, it's a very effective therapy. It just is very toxic. Um, and our strategy was to make that a much safer therapy while maintaining the efficacy and tracking that in the closest models we could get to. That's what enabled ultimately that exit. So that was a long way to get around to the exit. But I think people always focus on the exit as if it just happens, but it doesn't happen. It's about what did you do along the way to knock down those barriers that then allows you to have luck happen to you. Because the other aspect of it is sometimes you just have to time the market right. You can't control that aspect, but you have to set everything up to have luck be able to happen to you.

That is an incredible experience, though. I mean being so boots on the ground and actually taking a company all the way through exit is something that a lot of people will never get that experience. That's really, really cool.

Yeah, it was really fortunate. You know, going into startups, I don't think you can ever assume that you're going to have a successful outcome and you know, doing so. For my PhD, I didn't assume that that was going, you know, clearly it's better that, you know, Courier was successful and I believed in the technology, but I figured I was believe, you know, when you're making big bets, get to look at what your potential downside is. And the potential downside wasn't that bad because I got to work with a venture firm to help launch a company and I knew I would learn a ton. And my, my joke, but maybe not joke, is I could always go get a real job afterwards and I didn't necessarily have to get a real job first in order to be able to have that experience. Love that.

That's a great way of looking at things.

We work with a lot of students who are finishing their PhD, their postdoc and thinking about what to do next. And I think that sense of like getting a real job is so, it's so present and it's what, you know, what you did was in fact a real job. But society has painted it as this, you know, adventure that only certain people are willing to go do. But maybe if you could demystify that a little bit and you're thinking about that because I think you, you had such a great impact on that company with like you said, no formal experience growing a company for toward an exit. So if someone's out there thinking, oh well, I only have a postdoc, I don't know how to do this, like what are their transferable skills that you should highlight?

Yeah, it's a little bit different for everybody, but there are going to be themes, right? So as a PhD, I actually say I think PhD training can be quite good for entrepreneurship. You have to take in a lot of disparate information, learn about a field very deeply understanding, you know, early stage biotech where it's really different from a lot of startups where you think about the big tech startups they're always talking about. You gotta find your problem statement, your problem market fit. I don't have to convince anybody that cancer is bad or that there's a need in cancer. What I have to convince them of is what's different about this approach, both in what is the current standard of care, what are the emerging therapeutics and, or where there's been failures in this space before. And all of that requires a scientific understanding to understand it deeply enough to then simplify the differentiation statements well enough to explain that to other people. PhD's training is very, very valuable in that. And I actually see a lot of people come more from a business background. Those CEOs do tend to struggle on that vertical, or they don't struggle necessarily is on the network or understanding from a business perspective, you know what, what investors need to get. And that is where PhDs, I see them struggle a lot on that side of it. The other thing that I think PhD training can be quite good for is look, if you, if you've gotten through your Ph.D. successfully, you're, you're no stranger to really hard work. A lot of times that's very long hours. And you're no stranger to having to present ideas and having people meet them with a certain amount of skepticism and then learning from that, adapting that story, taking what's valuable feedback, leaving behind what's not valuable feedback, or learning how to explain yourself better, and then trying again. And that sort of resilience, I think is very valuable for startups as well. If you're a PhD and you're a postdoc or you're a graduate student, you're like, this sounds super cool and I want to go do startups. Even though that is what I did. I would say by and large, you need to have a real clarity of what are you really getting into. I was fortunate because I had been part of the startup ecosystem for so long. I had an unusual level of clarity of what I was really getting into and how to work and how difficult it really was going to be in between the fun parts, because the fun parts are really fun, but the down parts are also really depressing, honestly, at times. You know, there's only so many times you can get told no in a day. And even if you're resilient, you're like, oh, this, this is terrible, I gotta take a break. So understanding that look for opportunities where you can work people with people who you think are really smart, who, like I said, no matter what, even if it doesn't work, you'll have learned something, you'll have broadened your network. And I think there's, that's a much better approach when you're thinking about what's that next step look like than what is the title or do I have to do lab work or not have to do lab work, which is where a lot of people get hung up on. Like I said, I did everything and I think I was better for having seen all of the aspects of the business. Yeah.

Sarah, one of the things you said you did, and I'd love to talk about this for a second, was pitching the VCs. We talk about that a lot on the show because it's really interesting and I think it's something that's intimidating and it's, you know, overwhelming for people to think about and they don't really understand what even goes into it.

Can you tell us a little bit.

About your experience when you were pitching.

VCs and what that looked like?

One of the really great things about, like I said, going to the startup via Mercury Fund, via working with Dan Watkins, is you kind of realize that VCs are human beings too. Right. And it sounds very obvious. Um, but, you know, there's a lot of sort of inbuilt perspectives and the way a lot of times VCs come across as maybe a little cold or intimidating. Actually, from my perspective, a lot of times has to do with time. There's so many people and so many demands for their attention. And so learning to be very succinct, which is something that PhD tend to be very bad at. And I'm always still trying to improve that. Very, very succinct in what is the real value statement of what it is you're putting in front of them is, I think, the number one lesson learned. And I will. And I did not know that at the beginning. And I, as I said, I'm still always trying to improve at it. And it's a, it's a continuing struggle. Cause I'm still a scientist at heart. I think these are human beings. They're really busy, they have a lot of tensions in their time and they're, they're distracted. If you put yourself into that mindset of how do you feel when you're distracted? If someone's throwing a bunch of really technical information at you, probably not taking it in very well.

Right.

The other thing is just to learn to tell a story. What are understanding, what are the metrics they get measured by? And how are you going to help them see that this project could be beneficial to them in the long term for the metrics that they have to get measured by everybody? I think in this business probably there's easier ways to make money, right, Than trying to do biotech, where there's a lot of deep technical challenges and risk and regulatory burden. So they want to, they want to benefit patients. They want to be part of projects that are exciting, where you can see potential patient benefit, but they're still measured by their ability to return money to their limited partners. And so if you understand that, if you understand their timelines and what kind of metrics they need to see, then you can help figure out how your story fits. Fits their need. And I think that's the most important thing. Pitching the VC's last thing is, you know, somewhere in between showing your entire thesis work and showing no data is the right amount of data for a tech company to put into a pitch deck. I've had struggles where I either have people. Nobody really wants to see Western blots. I promise you, I don't even want to see Western blots. And I have a PhD. But at the same time, you know, if you, if you're like, just trust me, this works. It's not very credible in a scientifically, you know, based business. So that's just a skill you have to learn. You learn it by, by having those interactions and getting that feedback. Um, and certainly I, I did start as the one, you know, telling the story and doing all, all the pitches. It just sort of evolved over time.

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. So we've had people on the side of the table you actually came from, right? So the venture partner side come in and just be like, you all have terrible pitch decks, but like, no real actionable. It's just like we just see terrible deck after terrible deck, make them better. And so I think that's a really, you know, yes. You can't quantify how much data needs to go in there, but there are folks out there that do this for a living. So if you are a founder without a good support Network of people who know how to do this. There are people out there who can help you translate that into pitch decks, right?

Yeah, there are, there's, there's absolutely people. Um, I always say build up your network of people, you know, of your circles of trust of. And when you start pitching idea, when I, we start in March, um, I'm not going to ever show anybody the first set of decks because they were terrible, even though I had done this before. Right. And, and, and there was a lot of assumptions in there that weren't right yet either. And you know, you, you need to do the work, fundamentally respect the people's time that you're going to go ask for to, by doing some of the work as much as you can on your own. But then at some point you have to leave your comfort circle and just go start talking to people that you think are smart, that can provide you the right kinds of feedback and then really listen to what they say. You will sort of hear it in the way that they ask questions or what are they asking questions about and the kinds of responses and engagement you get from that. And so if you really listen to what are people saying and what are they really trying to ask about, you can get a better perspective on where do you need to tighten up your story, where maybe some of your assumptions are wrong, or where you need to explain something more clearly to help them see the same value that you're seeing. Because you've had hopefully weeks, months, years sometimes to really sit down and deeply understand the technology, understand the landscape and understand how this differentiates. And they have 20 minute presentation maybe, but let's call it five minutes before they've decided whether or not they're going to keep listening for the next 15.

Right.

Or if they're going to start checking emails in the background. So, you know, I think that's a really important thing to appreciate is, is every time you're going out there and telling your story to somebody, listen to how kind of feedback you get and then make adjustments on how you get it better.

This sounds like a marketing problem. All of this is marketing whether you're marketing your company or really anything, right. And so that's almost like focus groups. You can't objectively look at your own materials. It's really hard because like you said, you know it way too well. You're just, you're in the trenches. And so I think that's really good advice as well is get, get some folks in your network to look at your things, put eyes on it and give you the feedback as if they were a focus group.

Most people actually, if you approach them the right way, where you say here's what I have, here's what I have done so far, here's what I think and I want to understand how, how you're receiving that a lot of people will be really generous with their time and give you that feedback, whether or not they're a close network out, you know, closely networked person or maybe just somebody you've interacted with a few times, which you respect. And they've been positive interactions where it gets challenging. I think a lot of people run into walls is they go and they don't ask high quality questions is they say what do I do? And that's not a question I can respond to. Right. I'm like, I can't tell you what to do because I don't know where you're having problems with yet. So you know, when you, when you have those interactions where you take somebody, you definitely here's what I think or here's what I think the story could be like, do you agree?

Right.

And ask specific questions or I'm not sure about this part because this is supposed to be a safe. The initial conversations are usually with advisors or mentors. It's a reasonably safe place to ask slightly more naive questions.

How many people are at March right now? How many employees do you have?

We're still a pretty virtual company. So we have two full time employees, but we have eight people that we work with really regularly that doing all of the work that's occurred over the last year and that's been spinning technology out of failure, working with CTMC on the development work that's been ongoing there, initiating our first regulatory interactions and then doing the fundraising work as well. So we've been able to have a pretty outsized impact. We're starting to convert some of those into more full time hires as we get a little bit closer to that phase two trial.

We're seeing a lot of companies adopt that model. And I think that sort of brings me to, you know, you have this exit from courier and then you think during, right after the pandemic and during this funding crisis, this is a great time to start a company. Right. So that's challenging with funding was lean when you were trying to get it. And I know that you've been really successful, but you've been scrappy too. And we're seeing a lot of companies do that where they are hiring consultants, they're leveraging partnerships, they're doing, you know, More academic work. And so I think, you know, if you could speak to that a little bit as well in terms of, you know, that academic piece I think is an under leveraged piece for a lot.

Of startups when you're thinking about starting a company in 2023. But honestly I think this is going to be more and more the model going forward. There's a tremendous opportunity to collaborate and partner and you don't have to vertically integrate everything, especially at the start before you fully know exactly what this is going to look like as a fully fleshed idea. And so we were very intentional in partnering with CTMC on the manufacturing because that allowed us to move quickly. We didn't have to go find a lot of people, very specialized technical knowledge, build out facilities, which is a huge capital expenditure as a brand new company. Somebody would have, an investor would have rightly looked at me and said, you have no idea how to build a, a GMP facility. And I would have been like, yes, you are correct. Right. So that was at a very intentional choice. And then ultimately what it gives us is the flexibility as this asset grows and matures into the next trial. If we end up partnering that asset, you know, it's already with a facility that's not, you know, necessarily merch biosciences where somebody can work with that very flexibly and take that side of the table or you know, ultimately we can move it into say the resilience network and you know, a larger, more mature version of where biosciences could launch into early commercialization. So there's a lot, a lot of different opportunities that are leveraged there. The academic side is very similar. There's a lot of value to be gained by working with the people who are the best at what they do, who are the closest to the science and you know, have the infrastructure already in place to work quickly. And so by continuing to maintain the relationship, like I said, it was very intentional. Cubic Max is the CSO of the company. A lot of people, I think the historical model would be okay, just you leave the academic founders behind and go hire somebody else. I wanted the person who had invented the technology, who had been overseeing the batch production in the first trial, to help me figure out how to make sure we get it to the next trial correctly. So there's a lot of opportunities to be scrappy when you're starting a company. The other thing I just want to touch on, cause I think it's an interesting point. People talk about all the negatives of starting a company in 2023. But there's some real positives to it too, right? If you can figure out where you're going to find your outside opportunities, there's some really unique advantages to that. We can get people that we probably couldn't have gotten in 2021 at the height of the biotech boom, you couldn't hire people for anything. You certainly couldn't hire them as a brand new startup when everybody was just throwing money around like that. Now there's a lot really talented people who are looking for new opportunities because they're either part of the down, current down cycle or they're worried that the company that they're at is going to, you know, be another casualty of the current down cycle and are looking for the next and exciting projects.

Many of our clients, you know, trimmed down their hiring plans because of funding, but the people that we were hiring were incredibly high quality. They were the top people. And that was a really interesting, you know, while we were making far fewer hires for our clients, they were just top notch talent. And you're right. In 2021, no, it was an all out war for talent and they're, it was impossible to hire. Really Top notch talent.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and for good reason. Look, why would they go work at this very high risk endeavor if they can be working at a public biochemist company, getting options that are liquid, getting paid well, good benefits, and see a solid path for their work to move forward into the clinic? And that's just not been the case this year. And so there's, you know, always positives and negatives to every cycle and it's just about figuring out. I think as a startup, you're always pushing boulders uphill. Just sometimes it's more apparent how big the boulders are where you feel it a little bit more than you might have otherwise. And so you should always be looking for opportunities and sort of the unfair advantages, no matter what the broader economic landscape is. If it was a boom time, we'd have more competition. Right? Potentially. Right. So. So there's always pros and cons.

What does the future look like for March? Maybe in the immediate future, five years. What's your plan?

Yeah, so March Biosciences today is focused on getting our lead assets, particularly the CD5 targeted car T cell S into a phase 2 clinical trial and treat more patients. The work we're doing in the in between is, is making sure that the manufacturing process that we put into that trial scales. Right. Because that again is talking about the step points. That's been a big challenge in the cell therapy space. And so it's recognizing that and trying to be proactive to get ahead of those challenges has been a lot of the work we're doing today and has to be our major focus. That said, we're thinking about, okay, what is March tomorrow, right? What happens? Assuming success, which you show is planned for success, right. What happens to student success and where do we take this? And I think there's opportunities to expand on these themes of, you know, new target spaces, targets that shouldn't work, which CD5 is one of those. It's a longer story, but it shouldn't work. But it does. And it does because through the technology and the way it's engineered to use that and leverage and go after difficult indications. And so I think that's where, you know, our hurt is. And, and that's why we have a pipeline of development that's looking at additionally sort of novel ways of going after solid tumors, but even after things outside of oncology. And so, you know, right now there's a lot of interest in the autoimmune space. It's certainly something that we've been exploring and we have some ideas around that we're evaluating. And you know, maybe when, two years from now, if, if I had to answer that same question, we'd be talking about a, a story that's a little bit bigger than what marches today.

What is your favorite book of all time that you think everybody should read?

I want to give you two answers. One that's a fun answer and one that's it's not. I don't know if it's my favorite book of all time, but I, I, I read it recently, I really, really enjoyed it and I think everybody in biotech at least should read it. So the fun answer is there's a book. It's, it was an Audible first book and it's called we are Legion. We are Bob. And if you like sci fi, I strongly recommend it. Um, I don't want to give away any spoilers, but this is within the first chapter or so of the book. So there's, it starts with a guy who cry, you know, enrolls in a cryogenic preservation program for after his death and reawakens several hundred years into the future. And it is really well written. It's a fun sci fi sort of space opera. I really, really like it. I've, I've really listened to that multiple times. The other one, if, if nobody's recommended it yet, I, I really, I, I'm a little bit late to the Party. But I, I finally read For Blood and Money and if nobody's recommended that yet, definitely recommend it. It's about pharmacy and Nebrutinib. There's intrigue, there's corporate takeovers, people get fired, fortunes get made, companies almost fail. It's, it's, it's a really fun book and it's all sort of, you know, extensively based on, on mostly reality of, of the evolution of pharmacy and, and first approvals of the Britannia. So very cool.

I am definitely going to put that on the list and read it.

Yes. Biotech business book. You know, you never think it's going to be fun. That, that one, that one's a really interesting story. So I do recommend it.

So where can people find you to learn more about you and connect with you? Is LinkedIn good? Where else?

Yeah, so I always try to be as helpful as possible, so people are welcome to reach out to me. LinkedIn's always a great place for people to connect. I am on or X, formerly known as Twitter, whatever we're calling it these days. So either of those platforms, you know, people can find me and reach out. I'm always happy to connect.

Amazing. We'll link that in the show. Notes for people. Well, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for walking us through your journey. This is, I, I think it'll be really inspirational to folks who are, you know, embarking right now for on this because you've made some really positive points about even though things are tough, there are some upsides and so hopefully people take that away.

Sure. Look, there's always outsized opportunities to be had. You just have to know where to look for them. And it's about time and attention and cultivating luck. That's, that's. Those are my only sort of, I think, points of value that I tell people on a consistent basis. So.

Cultivating luck.

I love that.

I'm gonna cultivate some luck. I really like that.

Sarah, thank you so much. This was really great.

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