Episode 3: Building Biotech Outside the Major Clusters with Key Opinion Leader Elaine Hamm

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And I'm James Zanewicz from Tulane University. Welcome back to Bio from the Bayou. I'm one of your hosts, James Zanewicz of Tulane University. And today we have Dr. Elaine Hamm with us. She's the CEO of Ascend Bioventures, the executive in residence at Tulane University School of Medicine. And today she's here to talk with us about building a biotech company outside of one of the major clusters. Welcome to the show, Elaine.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Well, let's just get right into it. We've known each other for a long time and through many different roles in several different organizations.

Many.

Which is amazing because we started when we were like 5. But you've been a scientist in academia and industry, you've been in tech transfer, you've been an investor, you've been the COO and the CEO of biotech companies. What made you want to run biotech companies?

I was kind of forced to, to be honest.

How so? Tell us why.

There was no one left. No, nothing about me says start a company, lead a company. I have a very risk-averse executive profile, but Everything that you just said, scientist in academia, tech transfer, investor, all sort of led me to this point where I can take all of those skill sets, and that's exactly what you need as a CEO. How I became a CEO is that I had great ideas for companies, and I couldn't find someone to help me with it, so I just did it myself. So, like a true not— person that doesn't delegate well.

Well, I think that's what a lot of folks who are outside of the major clusters hear. When it comes to life science, everyone immediately thinks of the hubs of San Diego, Boston, the Research Triangle, San Francisco, but you're in Oklahoma where we claim you as Gulf South adjacent.

I like that. Yep.

Yeah. What are the challenges you've experienced building a business outside a major cluster?

The biggest challenge is that the business development still seems to occur on the East and West Coast. So if you're trying to raise money, if you're trying to do a partnership, you're still Kind of forced to go there or to pitch there. But I will say, after the pandemic, I think we're all a lot more used to a virtual world where you can do things by Zoom and people are okay with that. And they're also realizing that there's this huge swath of research available and just ripe for the picking, and taking advantage of that and leveraging that is going to be very key.

And now that we've examined some of the barriers that you saw, I know you can always look on the positive side as well, despite, you know, being risk-averse.

Is that true? I don't know about that.

Well, you have learned how to do so. So what are some of the benefits you see being outside the booming clusters? Because there have to be some.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can find a lot of seed funding because of the desire to invest in science and making a big difference. And so I feel like there's a lot more accessibility to capital at the very, very early stages in the Midwest. And also your competition is, I mean, you're a small fish in a very large pond in that sense. And so that makes it a little bit easier. And people just really want you to succeed in the Midwest. Midwest. So they're always willing to help in a number of different ways and providing resources or money or whatever it is that, that I have needed, I can usually find very easily in the Midwest.

So you've mentioned accessing programs to help some of your startups advance their science. Are there specific examples that come to mind you'd recommend other CEOs look at, especially the ones that don't cost money?

That's key. And especially when you're a CEO in a startup in the middle of the country, you get very scrappy. I'll give a very specific example. When I was developing a new antibiotic, we took advantage of a lot of federal programs that actually would do studies for you. So the NIAID, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, they have a preclinical and a clinical stage program offering that allows you to send your drug to them, and they will do these studies for you. And they're usually the really long and sometimes boring studies. So, I mean, we can do studies in our own labs and get those done. And meanwhile, they can be in the background kind of checking the boxes of safety and toxicity and those kinds of things, so.

And outside of those things, we all know startups need money to advance their science and keep operations going, the lights on, and hopefully pay themselves a salary at some point.

You know, eating.

Right, yeah, basic life stuff. So how do you approach fundraising outside of those free programs for your companies?

It depends on the company, I mean, and the indication that we're going after. I think a really good resource that a lot of people don't think of are foundations, so within a disease, There could be a very specific disease foundation, and they have a lot of resources, and they have a lot of passionate people that want to help cure a disease, and they can be an incredible wealth of information and resources. So—

Nice. And you have, even before COVID been able to be a virtual CEO for some of your companies, leading to some of your funniest lines on stage ever. How did you make that work?

Because of my intense, like, fear of people, very easily. I ran an accelerator that had— I mean, we had the full nine yards. We had a lab, we had a chem lab, a wet lab. I started an animal facility in the basement. We had a coffee pot. I mean, all, all of the things, right? That's real expensive, even in the Midwest where things are pretty inexpensive compared comparatively to Boston. But it was such a huge overhead. And so when the board asked me to sort of take the accelerator concept and reboot it, my first thought was we have to kill the space because That was our biggest expense and the thing that was really dragging us down, and we were spending more money on a coffee pot than getting science done. The first thing we did was make everything virtual, and to be honest, we were outsourcing a lot of our lab work for many, many years. The pharmaceutical industry has been doing things virtually for quite some time, far before this, of having specialty contract research organizations, or CROs, or contract manufacturing organizations, or CMOs. And so we've been doing this for a while. It's just— Now with the pandemic, it sort of put a spotlight on this of like, no, you don't even have to have any lab. Your people can be in their home and we can outsource what we need to get done to a contract research organization. And it's so much easier. It just requires really good project management skills.

Mm-hmm.

There have been challenges with the pandemic, particularly as it relates to, for example, primate studies. I mean, there's just a backlog of primates. And so You do have to plan ahead of knowing that you're going to have to get into a queue, but again, it just— you have to get really good at project management.

So, and you've mentioned outsourcing a lot of stuff and basically finding those labs, finding those CROs, the CMOs, etc. How do you identify the best partners for those projects?

You really have to interview them very, very well and know what's really important to you. So for me, I like constant communication. I want to be kept in the loop, and so Even though a CRO may be very, very good scientifically, if that isn't in their genetic makeup of their company MO of like, we have a project manager dedicated to you and this project, it makes it very difficult for me to want to use them because I— that's what I prefer. But some people don't care about that piece of it. They just want to like set it, forget it, and they get a report later down the road. So you have to spend some time really understanding what it is that you want in a partner.

Mm-hmm.

And then finding that person.

That makes perfect sense. And that's probably, I would guess, that that approach is what has led to the success that you've had recently. And you had one that received a lot of press. Can you tell us what it took to make that happen?

Weirdly enough, I mean, we had a partner. So that was my hearing loss company, Otologix. We have 2 drugs in development. One is a clinical-stage asset that we partnered to a Korean company, and then another is our preclinical drug that we recently started a collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, and that has been a little less of the virtual model in the sense of hearing loss is such a highly specific area. There's not a lot of CROs that specialize in that. So we really relied on our academic partner to make it work. And that collaboration didn't start with wheeling and dealing in a boardroom. Where it started was the science. And so we actually, in talking to BI, they had very specific questions scientifically of will this work and answer that they wanted us to provide. And so what we did was we started out with a really simple service agreement, and we answered a very specific question for them, and that led to a really good collaboration. So it was a good sort of coffee date before we decided to get married, which I highly recommend. It's a good way to test the waters and see if you would make good partners together, so.

Yeah, and as we close out, Elaine, I know you hate to give people advice.

I do, I really do.

But if you could give yourself advice, which is different, if you could go back to younger Elaine and give her one piece of advice to help her prepare better to be the CEO of BioJet Companies, Start Prozac earlier.

No, but in a lot of ways, I mean, I say that flippantly, but honestly is that, you know, startups are chaos, and that can be very frustrating for a scientist. And so you just really have to, you have to be okay with a little bit of chaos. And I now have enough data to assure me that despite the chaos, that we will get through it one way or the other. So just be to relax.

Yeah, so it sounds like self-care, which I think people often forget about. Like, they're so focused on the business, they forget about the self-care.

Themselves. Yeah, absolutely.

So awesome. Well, Elaine, thank you for a great conversation. I'm going to ask you back soon to delve in a little more on your executive-in-residence role.

Would love to.

Yeah.

And so for our listeners, if you'd like to connect with Elaine, myself, or the podcast, check out our show notes on biofromthebayou.com. We'll see you next time on Bio from the Bayou. Thanks for joining us. for Bio from the Bayou, and we hope you'll join us again.

If you'd like to learn more about the emerging biotech scene in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, visit us at biofromthebayou.com, where we have more info on who we are, how to get involved and connected in biotech in New Orleans, and the industry events we'll be hosting where you can meet with us in person.

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We'll catch you on our next episode of Bio from the Bayou.