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Today’s guest on The Long Run is Eric Fischer.
Eric is a professor at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. His structural biology and chemical biology expertise has led him down a path to become one of the world’s experts in an emerging category of medicine that includes targeted protein degraders and molecular glues.
Eric Fischer, professor, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
These novel chemical entities can be made to interact with disease targets inside cells that traditional drugs – small molecule compounds and genetically engineered biologics – haven’t been effective against.
This is an exciting new frontier emerging at the nexus of structural biology, chemical biology, and drug discovery.
Eric was one of the key scientists, along with Nathanael Gray, who were tapped to lead a Center for Protein Degradation at Dana-Farber supported with $80 million from Deerfield Management, an investment firm, in 2018.
Some of this research has led to startup activity. Civetta Therapeutics and Neomorph are a couple of the companies Fischer has co-founded.
This episode of The Long Run is sponsored by Dash Bio.
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Now, please enjoy this conversation with Eric Fischer on The Long Run.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
John Archer, partner, Catalyst Advisors
There is a persistent myth in life sciences that once a company transitions from a scrappy startup into a more mature company, its board will naturally evolve to meet those new, more complex challenges.
The reality is that these boards all too often fail to keep pace with their organizations. Those gaps leave management teams without the strategic guidance and governance needed for sustainable growth and enterprise value creation.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Board evolution is typically a gradual process. Early-stage companies assemble boards composed of initial investors, past or current business colleagues, scientific or clinical luminaries or collaborators, and trusted allies. As companies approach commercialization or a strategic exit, they add functional experts to their boards: financial, commercial, R&D, and regulatory specialists.
While these moves are logical, they are often reactive and piecemeal—not part of a comprehensive plan for board effectiveness. These new board members may bring impressive credentials and deep subject-matter knowledge, but they remain focused on narrow functional silos rather than enterprise-wide stewardship. They become “financial guardians” rather than proactive advisors who can help the CEO and leadership team navigate the complexities of a maturing organization and think more strategically about the long-term future.
In short, they may be better suited to be consultants to the companies, not board members.
For companies otherwise poised for growth—that is, they may be developing differentiated clinical assets and a diversified portfolio; they have strong leadership and ample capital—the drag from an ineffectual board can be significant.
Those companies are more vulnerable to missed opportunities and value destruction. They struggle to raise capital in challenging markets and fail to commercialize products optimally. In the most extreme scenarios, these factors can collectively trigger a downward spiral that can be hard to bounce back from—a decline that can even gain the unwelcome attention of an activist shareholder. In these scenarios, the blame for that collapse typically goes to the leadership teams, while the board’s role in allowing that unraveling often escapes scrutiny.
Recent events with Dynavax Technologies illustrate how a sleepy board can fuel an activist challenge. Earlier this year, investor Deep Track Capital challenged the company’s strategic direction, arguing that it should focus on the products that drove its core value, not diversifying its vaccine portfolio. Deep Track wasn’t able to make any headway in conversations with the company leadership, and eventually launched a proxy fight, nominating four new directors to run against those chosen by the board. While Deep Track’s slate was ultimately unsuccessful, its challenge to the Dynavax leadership underscored valid concerns about the company’s spend rate, capital returns to shareholders, and M&A expertise.
Over three decades, I’ve helped recruit hundreds of board members. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and everything in between. What stands out for me is how many boards are stuck with a sub-optimal makeup for their needs and how slow boards are to move on from ineffective members, even when they correctly diagnose the gap. I’m not saying that it is quick or easy to swap out board members. But it’s important that board chairs start that process sooner rather than later.
CEOs can also hinder the development of the board. They sometimes simply accept (or even opt for) a board relationship that is frictionless. A rubber stamp might be what the CEO wants, but it isn’t what the CEO needs. Change demands work, and it’s vital that CEOs are active members in the board succession process.
Even when a board has the perfect makeup, the culture can be problematic. Whether board members engage with each other constructively determines the body’s overall value. It’s important that boards have ways to encourage the less extroverted to comment. There is sometimes an inverse relationship between how long a board has been place and its effectiveness. Boards, like anything else, can get stale over time.
Beyond that, it goes without saying that with any bad behavior among members, boards need to nip it in the bud quickly.
Given all that, what distinguishes an effective board from an ineffective one? In my experience, there are three key areas:
–Enterprise-Wide Stewardship: Effective board members bring not only deep functional expertise but also the ability to think across the enterprise.
–Proactive Recruitment: Boards recruit new members based on a clear, forward-looking plan rather than reacting to immediate needs.
–Constructive Engagement: Effective boards are hands-on advisors, not passive observers or harsh critics.
To set themselves up for success, the boards of companies that haven’t yet developed commercially and clinically viable products must take the following steps:
–Elevate Board Succession Planning: Boards should make succession planning a strategic priority rather than an afterthought triggered by immediate vacancies or crises. This means establishing a formal, ongoing process for reviewing the board’s composition; identifying gaps in expertise; and forecasting future requirements based on the company’s direction. Tapping external advisors or governance consultants can help the company avoid insular thinking.
It’s critical to cultivate relationships with potential candidates well before seats open up—so there is a steady pipeline of qualified directors. This approach allows boards to anticipate shifts in market dynamics, technology, or business models, and to refresh their membership accordingly.
–Prioritize Enterprise-Wide Thinking: Boards should seek out individuals with a demonstrated ability to connect the dots across the business and who are known for challenging assumptions when necessary. Candidates with experience in major transformations, enterprise risk management, or leading initiatives that span multiple disciplines bring valuable perspective to the boardroom. Diversity in professional background and industry experience is also crucial. I was looking at the board roster of one company the other day where five of the seven board members are either current or former CEOs. While this may sound like a dream team board, it’s akin to an NBA team sending out a starting lineup of five power forwards. The best boards, like the best teams, have players with clearly defined roles – point guard, shooting guard, forward, center, etc.
Once they are brought on, directors should be oriented toward the company’s overall strategy and value drivers, not just their own specialties. Comprehensive onboarding and ongoing education sessions should focus on emerging trends and enterprise-wide challenges.
–Stay Ahead of Activism: Boards must remain vigilant about the risk of activist investors, but they cannot allow fear to drive decision-making. Staying ahead of activism requires a deft and delicate level of engagement with major shareholders. Some shareholders bring a natural balance of short- and long-term vision, while others can be quick to want change just because things aren’t going well in the moment. One big (and often overlooked) role of the chair is well-organized interaction with these disparate shareholders.
BioMarin Pharmaceutical provides an example of a board that deftly handled a potential activist. In that case, outside shareholder Elliott Investment Management was advocating for more discipline with operating expenses and faster performance improvements. After initial resistance from the leadership, Elliott raised its concerns with the board, which negotiated a resolution that temporarily expanded the board and installed Elliott’s nominees. This coincided with a CEO transition, giving Elliott significant influence over the leadership change and prompting the formation of a new committee to review BioMarin’s operations, capital allocation, and long-term planning. The skillful negotiation led by the board—particularly the lead outside director—helped address shareholder demands and headed off a potentially more disruptive activist scenario.
More often than you might think, boards of mature life sciences companies are failing to live up to their responsibilities, and in the process, they are causing long-term shareholder-value destruction. The solution is to build boards that are proactive and enterprise-minded. Only then will they be true partners with the leadership team and make sure the company doesn’t backslide into irrelevance.
David Shaywitz
Outside the glare of hyperbolic headlines, organizations of all sizes – including most in healthcare – are urgently trying to figure out how AI will fit into their workflows and business plans.
Perhaps the most interesting recent discussion I’ve heard on this subject involved a trio of Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) partners — Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado, and Steven Sinofsky — who were joined by Aaron Levie, the CEO and co-founder of Box.
Torenberg, Casado, Levie, and Sinofsky
The entire conversation is an essential listen (or view, since it can be difficult on audio to distinguish the voices of the four men).
The most important takeaway: the greatest productivity gains (albeit self-reported) seem to be achieved by users, generally software developers, who are impassioned, engaged, curious, and forgiving – and who start off with a fair amount of expertise.
As Levie describes it,
“…the biggest gains of AI go to people who have some degree of expertise in an area to know what is actually true, what is not going to work, what should I integrate from the output of this AI … If you don’t have a deep understanding of your particular space or field or domain, you aren’t able to then have the right judgment to make all of those decisions. So I think the experts just get more powerful in this world.”
Or, as Casado says,
“The more senior small teams that use AI are superhuman. It’s like they woke up and they were all f–king Tony Stark and it’s unbelievable. And like, their productivity is insane. But they’re all they’re all super senior [i.e. experienced/expert].”
Levie notes that the most successful adopters of AI can also be really young engineers who are AI native and super engaged with the technology. He explains,
“They would have been maybe 10x engineers in a prior world, but now they’re like 100x engineers. And so, senior in terms of in their own kind of relative cohort, but like the way that they are building their startups are just like completely different.”
These pioneers – I’ve favored the term “lead users” — are able to guide the AI thoughtfully and constructively, in an intrinsically bottom-up approach. This is exactly what I’ve advocated (see below, reproduced from a recent TR column), but not necessarily how many biopharmas are tackling the problem.
Flashback to TR column from 11 September 2025.
As Casado notes, a recipe for failure, and what might account for the astonishingly high (95%) observed in AI pilots, is precisely this top-down approach favored by large companies. As he describes it,
“If you actually look at the reports on ‘enterprise things fail’ and look at what they were measuring, it’s clearly some internal project pushed down by the board where they hired some consultant to do it – it’s going fail.”
Sinofsky adds that AI is the latest example of “bottom-up adoption…really changing the productivity equation,” noting, “Big companies do not know how to deal with that because they need to control it. They worry about safety and security and privacy and all of their corporate rules.”
The distinction between AI adoption in established organizations and startups can also be observed in healthcare.
Dr. Karandeep Singh
For example, in a recent (and resonant) NEJM-AI podcast, Dr. Karandeep Singh, the Chief Health AI Officer at UC San Diego Health, emphasized the lived complexities of AI adoption he’s experienced in an established healthcare system.
A key learning, offered by the NEJM-AI episode blurb: “the best AI is guided by patient care, deep expertise, and humility about the limits of technology.”
Contrast this cautious, thoughtful incrementalism with the disruption emphasized by a16z healthcare partner Julie Yoo in this post – not to mention a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen’s declaration, on the “Cheeky Pint” podcast, that “ChatGPT is in fact a better doctor than your doctor today with almost 100% certainty.”
Andreessen added that a key limitation in the speed with which AI can transform medicine are pesky regulatory and licensure requirements, adding that the fields that will move the fastest, and attract the best and most ambitious talent, are those like many areas of software development that aren’t so encumbered.
A reinforcing example of Silicon Valley’s belief in the inevitability of AI transformation in healthcare comes from a recent job posting from chip maker NVIDIA, a company now worth about $4.5T (yes, that’s a “T”). Keen to expand AI adoption in healthcare and life sciences, they are hiring a “Director, Healthcare AI startups.”
In particular, they “are seeking a passionate Global Healthcare Life Science (HCLS) Startup Director to scale NVIDIA’s developer ecosystem worldwide…This role centers on building programs that drive adoption of NVIDIA technology by the HCLS startup community.”
So far, very reasonable.
Yet it turns out that in this role centered on enabling technology for drug developers and healthcare providers, actual experience in drug development or healthcare is apparently not required (other than industry/ecosystem contacts).
In contrast, helpful attributes for candidates to possess include “prior experience with AI, machine learning, or high-performance computing” and “background in venture capital, startup acceleration, or developer advocacy.”
In so many words: “AI is all you need.”
—
Additional recommended AI-related content:
Human Values Project that Zak Kohane is spearheading.
NYT on Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI’s “Prophet of Doom”
“Click Here” podcast episode (“AI’s giant pool of hype”) featuring AI skeptic Gary Marcus
With access to two leaked a16z LP decks, Leslie Feinzaig explains in Fast Company why a16z is “moving upstream,” pursuing bigger and bigger funds (you probably don’t need AI, just a rudimentary understanding of management fee math, to figure out the reason).
Incredibly captivating new “Acquired” podcast episode on Google and AI.
The Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation had a spectacular experience on Mt. Katahdin in Maine on Saturday.
Weather was glorious. Fall colors were vibrant. The team was fit and mentally ready for rocky, rugged terrain. They got a rich outdoor experience with a steep rock scramble on Cathedral Path, then crossing Katahdin’s famous Knife Edge ridge.
This trip represents an iteration of the Timmerman Traverse. Expect more of this type of outing in 2026. Many are expressing interest in shorter trips closer to home, but that still combine giving and community building. I’m listening.
My vision is to explore trails for the Timmerman Traverse in naturally beautiful places in Washington, Colorado, Wyoming, Maine, New Hampshire, British Columbia and the Eastern Sierras of California.
These trips are about getting out in nature. Doing hard things. Making friends. Supporting good causes.
This work strengthens community.
Please enjoy a few photos from a memorable day on Mt. Katahdin, Oct. 4, 2025.
Want to participate or sponsor in 2026? luke@timmermanreport.com.
Participants on Katahdin 2025:
David Shaywitz
While “nutrition science” often seems to cry out for air quotes around “science,” we are fortunate now to have a new book on the topic written by one of the most thoughtful and deliberate nutrition researchers of the modern age: Kevin Hall.
Hall has consistently steered a course of thoughtful rigor, leading a succession of highly impactful studies at the NIH before departing earlier this year, citing concerns about censorship from the Robert F. Kennedy Jr regime.
Kevin Hall
In September, Hall, together with journalist Julia Belluz, published Food Intelligence, a much-anticipated, highly engaging book reviewing the current state of nutrition science, including Hall’s critical contributions to our current understanding.
Key takeaways include:
“The evidence on optimal nutrition has been clear and consistent over decades; it’s boring by this point: Eat more vegetables, along with fiber, legumes, whole grains, and fruits. Limit sodium, sugar, saturated fat, and junk foods.”
Julia Belluz
The authors are deeply skeptical of platforms offering “cutting-edge” putatively precise approaches to healthy eating, and suggest the term “imprecision nutrition” might be more apt. In particular, they report:
Beyond their robust summary of nutritional science, Hall and Belluz offer recommendations that are mostly focused on broad, structural changes to alter the way we encounter food in our environment.
As Hall explained to me,
“…we did not want to write a book filled with diet advice for individuals… Rather, we wanted to focus on explaining the fascinating world of nutrition & metabolism science, including how food intake is biologically controlled and the influence of our food environment in likely driving the increased prevalence of diet-related chronic disease.”
Their emphasis on the impact of environmental factors that influence health aging reminded me of the work of UK researcher Michael Kelly, in particular the paper “Why Is Changing Health-Related Behavior So Difficult,” as I’ve discussed with TR readers.
A key conclusion Kelly and Baker reach is the importance of deeply understanding the specific context in which behaviors occur; abstract away these pesky details, they write, and you miss critical insights.
When pursuing change – including health-promoting behavior change, such as reducing smoking or improving how we eat — there’s an enduring tension between whether to focus on individuals (bottom up) or on structural obstacles (top down).
While Hall and Beluz acknowledge that there’s some individual responsibility in healthy eating, they predominantly direct their attention to what they see as powerful external dynamics that have rendered resistance to unhealthy deliciousness virtually futile.
A useful discussion of exactly this type of tension can be found in the latest episode of the (always worthwhile) “Excellence, Actually” podcast – in particular the insights offered by co-host Brad Stulberg
Stulberg cites a September “Excellence, Actually” episode featuring sports psychologist George Mumford, who has famously helped athletes such as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant stay mentally fit and resilient.
George Mumford
On the September podcast, Mumford poignantly described examples of racial discrimination he endured earlier in his career, but to Stulberg’s surprise, Mumford emphasized the importance of focusing on individual agency.
In the latest episode, Stulberg describes what happened when he pressed Mumford on the point:
“And he’s like, damn right there are structural issues, but you got agency and you can’t control the structure. What you can control is your agency. And if you want to sit and complain about the structure, see how that’s working for you. What’s that getting you? And you can’t go fix a broken world if you yourself are broken, if you, yourself aren’t working on self-improvement.”
Stulberg adds that if you “actually look at people who have reason to … complain about structures, they’re the ones that are like, ‘I need agency. Because if I don’t have agency, I got no one there to help me.’”
Brad Stulberg
That said, Stulberg also emphasizes that in deciding whether to focus your energy on changing individuals or structures, it should be “both/and” rather than “either/or”:
“If you want to be a badass performer and a badass person in the world, you need to realize that you have agency and you have responsibility and you need to get your sh-t together and you want to commit to getting better and taking on big goals and striving for them… You also want to make sure that you’re checking in on your neighbors and your community and you don’t want to bury your head in your sand and turn a blind eye to structural problems.”
Hall and Belluz, explicitly inspired by the long, difficult, and ultimately successful effort to depopularize smoking in the United States through top-down changes (Sid Mukherjee’s discussion of this effort in Emperor of All Maladies is a great read on the topic), believe a similar approach will be required to improve our eating.
I would have appreciated a deeper look at what individuals might do, particularly enabled by technology. Such approaches, if widely adopted, can also drive broader change, from the bottom up; the Yuka app, as I’ve highlighted for TR readers, may represent an example of how technology can help drive broader change by integrating the voices of many individuals.
Of course, the same bottom-up approach can also lead to scientifically questionable outcomes, such as the stigmatization of GMOs (to say nothing of essential childhood vaccines).
I appreciate – deeply, viscerally appreciate – the challenges of healthy eating, and the difficulty of resisting temptation in a world where you are constantly surrounded by meticulously engineered, hyperpalatable, calorie-dense highly processed deliciousness.
It’s a constant struggle at so many levels, from the social to the subcellular – a complex challenge Hall and Belluz help us more completely understand.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
David Shaywitz
Consumers are taking increased ownership of their health.
As Laura Landro recently described in the Wall Street Journal, this trend is driven in part by necessity — specifically by “a shortage of doctors, long wait times for appointments and an increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes earlier in adulthood.”
But our push to manage our own health is also motivated by a number of interrelated, encouraging factors as well, including:
The result of this convergence – or collision – of increased patient need and science-and-tech enabled opportunity has led a range of digital platforms to pursue what’s seen as the Holy Grail of consumer health, a “personal health operating system” (personal health OS) — a single dashboard you turn to that continuously integrates and helps you optimize multiple health parameters.
The current model, first discussed with TR readers in June, is summarized in the figure below.
Once we recognize that a personal OS is the goal, we can understand why wearable manufacturers Oura and WHOOP have each recently announced partnerships with Quest enabling members to obtain a battery of clinical labs, with results that read out in the associated app; these wearables already capture and leverage physiological data; now they want to add lab data to approach what they would view as the complete picture.
WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed has elegantly described the company’s ambitious vision for a “health operating system” that leverages technology and AI to monitor relevant health parameters.
WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed
This platform of the future, he writes,
“…will track how sleep fuels recovery, how recovery shapes performance, how performance generates stress, and how stress cycles back into sleep. But the technology won’t stop at observation: it will intervene, nudging behaviors, adapting routines, and even initiating care when risk rises. In this way, new technology will transform hidden feedback loops into an intelligent, always-on system for extending vitality and preventing crisis.”
He anticipates that in the near future, “Care will no longer be episodic and institution-centric, but literally centered and personalized within each person and driven by the continuous biometric signals their own body produces.”
Ahmed acknowledges many companies are working towards this goal, and anticipates,
“Success will belong to the few that can fuse massive, continuous health data with cutting-edge AI and deliver daily, trusted engagement that becomes inseparable from people’s lives. It is easier to envision the Health OS than actually build it, but there is no question this will exist in just a few years time.”
He concludes, “At WHOOP, we believe we have the ingredients and the team to tackle this opportunity.”
A few reactions.
First, I emphatically share Ahmed’s enthusiasm for the moment we’re in, for the promise of technology, and the believe in the promise of digital health – as Denny Ausiello and I envisioned back in 2013, when we wrote:
“Digital health [enabled by sensors and other mHealth tools] provides a way for medicine to break out of its traditional constraints of time and place and understand patients in a way that’s continuous rather than episodic, and that strives to offer care in a fashion that’s anticipatory or timely rather than reactive or delayed.”
I’m also thrilled that so many consumers find themselves inspired to improve their own health. As Harvard professor and primary care doctor Tom Delbanco tells Landro, “The evidence shows that the more a patient gets involved in their own care, the better the outcomes” – a sentiment that aligns with the focus on agency this column has been emphatically championing, as well as a piece I wrote for the New York Times in 2006 embracing the engagement of patient families as well.
Appropriately, digital health platforms have come in for their fair share of (generally deserved) criticism because of their approach to comprehensive evaluation, in particular their promise these evaluations will lead to meaningfully personalized health guidance.
As University of Pennsylvannia researcher Anna Wexler tells Landro, lab tests “often don’t meet validated clinical standards and may mislead consumers or lead them to buy products that they don’t need.”
This echoes a frequent warning about many of these comprehensive lab testing and/or imaging approaches, reviewed by Eric Topol in his “Ground Truths” blog highlighting the perils of false positives, and the associated evaluations they can gratuitously trigger.
The problem of comprehensive genetic testing leading to potentially abnormal findings of uncertain significance – the so-called “incidentalome” – has been classically described in JAMA by Kohane, Masys, and Altman in 2006.
Unfortunately, far less attention has been devoted to what I suspect may be an even greater limitations of these platforms: their reflexive embrace of a remarkably reductionist view – it might be uncharitably characterized (or more accurately, caricatured) as an engineering mindset, a technologist mindset, or a managerial mindset — that essential treats us as if we’re merely pieces of factory machinery that can last longer if constantly mechanically surveilled, with performance scrutinized and parameters tweaked by AI algorithms.
The word “merely” is important here, since rigorously monitoring health parameters of course can be valuable, especially when enabling potential problems to be headed off before they cause real damage. To the extent digital platforms integrate useful metrics, help us stay on top of our health, and motivate us to engage in health-promoting activities, digital platforms can be enormously beneficial.
But what platforms like WHOOP, Peloton, Oura, Tonal, and others seem to have astonishingly overlooked – as I’ve discussed with TR readers and in the Boston Globe – is a more capacious vision that recognizes the difference between metric optimization and true flourishing, a pursuit that involves connection and purpose, meaning and engagement. The substantive stuff that matters to most people.
This deeper vision of consumer health, shared with TR readers in June, is summarized in the figure below.
The apparent inability of digital platforms to embrace attributes that they can’t measure almost certainly has a negative impact on the metrics they’re so keen to quantify and optimize.
For example, major studies of longevity — such as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, as well as Northwestern’s “Super Agers” study– find that the quality most strongly associated with longer life is warm relationships with others. Yet most digital platforms remain strangely indifferent here – as if the topic too soft, too woo-woo, or (most likely) not easily quantifiable with a watch, strap, or ring.
In overlooking what truly matters, digital platforms are missing out on meaningful opportunities to significantly expand their user base and improve the health of more people.
I’m not sure most of us want to be relentlessly optimized, but I think most of us would embrace the opportunity to flourish and would welcome a platform with the vision and insight to appreciate the synergy between improving health metrics and deliberately cultivating connection, purpose, and agency.
Expanding from counting steps to cultivating agency (which I’ve described as “the motivational currency of behavior change) and enhancing our sense of connection and purpose feels like an important and, frankly, obvious opportunity that just happens to sit in a real blind spot for many metric-obsessed digital entrepreneurs and investors.
The health impact of purpose has been nicely highlighted by the work of Victor Strecher, who has spent his career studying the subject.
University of Michigan Professor Victor Strecher
A professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, author of Life on Purpose, and the founder and CEO of Kumanu, a digital tool focused on “purpose-powered wellbeing,” he recently spoke at The Harvard School of Public Health, in a lecture series organized by the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness; you can find the video here.
Key health-related takeaways include:
On a more personal note, I’ve been struck recently by the impact a sense of purpose can have on an organization, in this case an institution of higher learning. One our children recently started attending Boston College (BC), which describes itself as a “Jesuit, Catholic University…rooted in a world view that calls us to learn, to search for truth, and to live in service to others.” (The school conspicuously welcomes a range of faith traditions, including ours.)
What’s been most striking in our early interactions with BC is how deeply this commitment — and clear mission — permeates campus life. Purpose seems to infuse everything they do, and belief, along with values like service and gratitude, isn’t trotted out as a buzzword but lived in a personal, palpable way.
Boston College
Consequently, BC has a markedly different feel from many campuses, and its authentic, purpose-driven approach seems especially well-suited to the fractious, often divisive moment in which we live.
Bart Giamatti
Many universities today seem both rudderless and reactive, existing (like a number of companies) merely to continue to exist. They feel more managed than visionary, and (as I’ve argued) could use a dose of the inspirational leadership Bart Giamatti brought to the university president role.
Particularly against this backdrop, a learning environment like BC’s, guided by a powerful, positive, and substantive sense of purpose and mission is a palpably powerful thing.
Moreover, by thoughtfully integrating a lived sense of mission with an admission and financial aid policy guided by strategic intentionality and informed by data, Boston College, the New York Times recently reported, transformed itself from a “struggling commuter school running a deficit” to an ascendant institution with “a $4.1 billion endowment [that] rejects 87.5 percent of applicants.”
It’s an integrated approach to attracting and inspiring college students– combing a true sense of purpose with deep analytics – that could and should serve as a model for digital health platforms seeking a similarly profound impact.
Note: Readers seeking additional reading and resources on health and agency might find this site I’ve created useful.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Today’s guests on The Long Run are Bruce Levine and Mags McCarthy.
Bruce is a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He’s one of the world leaders in engineering CAR-T cell therapies for cancer.
Bruce Levine, scientist, University of Pennsylvania
Mags McCarthy is a country music star.
What do these two have in common? A shared desire to sing from the rooftops about genuine hope for cancer patients.
These two have formed an unusual creative collaboration. They co-wrote a country song called “Ring That Bell.” It’s a testament to the power of engineered T-cell immunotherapies to save lives. When these treatments work, they do a beautiful thing. They enable people to “Ring That Bell,” free of cancer and free of fear, when they leave the hospital and get on with their lives.
Mags McCarthy, country musician
It’s a song about science and how, at its best, it can offer hope.
This episode digs into how scientists can build bridges to the arts and humanities to tell stories that resonate. Watch the video at ringthatbellsong.com and on YouTube and Spotify.
Please enjoy this conversation with Bruce Levine and Mags McCarthy on The Long Run.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Dr. Lachelle Weeks is today’s guest on The Long Run.
Lachelle is a physician-scientist in the adult leukemia program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She treats patients who have precursors to myeloid cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia.
Dr. Lachelle Weeks, physician-scientist, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Her research is looking at ways to detect the early warning signs of blood cancer early, when these malignancies are most treatable.
I first became aware of Dr. Weeks when she was awarded a Damon Runyon-Timmerman Traverse Clinical Investigator grant. She is one of the first three young scientists who received biotech community support through the Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon team that climbed Kilimanjaro and raised $1.2 million in 2024.
Dr. Weeks’ project is focused on using computers to identify small changes to the shape and appearance of blood cells and using that data to predict an individual’s risk of developing cancer later in life.
This is a fascinating potential use case for predictive and preventive medicine, enabled in part by the confluence of widely available blood samples, powerful computing, AI analytics, and the vision and persistence of Dr. Weeks and her colleagues.
Dr. Weeks also happens to be African-American, and of course she’s well aware that people in this group suffer from blood cancers at a disproportionate rate. If her project is successful, it theoretically could make screening for common blood cancers inexpensive and widely available for people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Please join me for this conversation on The Long Run.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
Please subscribe and tell your friends why it’s worthwhile. Quality journalism costs money. When you subscribe to Timmerman Report at $199 per year, you reward quality independent biotech reporting, and encourage more.
David Shaywitz
“… When I’m with her I’m confused
Out of focus and bemused
And I never know exactly where I am
Unpredictable as weather
She’s as flighty as a feather
She’s a darling, she’s a demon, she’s a lamb…
… How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”
The lyrics, of course, are from the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein musical (1959) and later film (1965), The Sound of Music, sung by the Sisters of Nonnberg Abbey as they try to make sense of the remarkable force of nature who has appeared in their midst.
Biopharma leaders grappling with AI can relate — and they’re not alone.
As John Cassidy reviews in The New Yorker, executives across many industries are trying to square the extravagant expectations for AI — especially GenAI — and their lived experience, which from a business perspective tends to be far more muted.
Cassidy highlights a pair of recent findings:
As Cassidy notes, the contrast between activity around a new technology and its demonstrated business impact was famously observed by Nobel laureate Robert Solow, who wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” (For economists, that’s a sick burn.)
Readers of this column are familiar with this “productivity paradox,” and with the gap between what AI has promised and what it has delivered (so far) to the biopharma industry.
As I just discussed, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan has been explicit about the gap; speaking recently before a group of Harvard MS/MBA students (disclosure: I advise the program), he emphasized the promise of AI to improve the efficiency of some discrete processes, but he didn’t seem to feel that AI was on the threshold of substantively improving the efficiency of either discovering new targets or developing original medicines.
Apparently, Narasimhan is not the only one. He described (as I recall) a recent event where biopharma leaders were asked whether they saw AI impacting either their top- or bottom-line forecasts for the next 5-10 years, and none did – though discrete opportunities for incremental impact were mentioned.
The biopharma experience aligns with both the MIT result and with comments Cassidy reports from respondents:
Where has success been achieved? According to the MIT report, “These early results suggest that learning-capable systems, when targeted at specific processes, can deliver real value, even without major organizational restructuring.”
This echoes Narasimhan’s point and the approach this column has championed: seek “pockets of reducibility” (to use Stephen Wolfram’s memorable phrase) — discrete opportunities where the powerful but still-emerging technology can be gainfully applied.
(I’ve also discussed the concept in the context of developing personalized approaches to health.)
For some reason, many CEOs seem genuinely shocked (not Captain Renault shocked) that the productivity gains promised by the tech companies developing AI and the consultants implementing AI have not materialized. In a recent survey of two thousand executives by Akkodis, the share of CEOs “very confident” in their companies’ AI implementation strategies fell from 82% in 2024 to 49% in 2025.
I have seen a version of this up close: the allure of AI-enabled productivity gains, presented seductively by skilled management consultants and amplified by boards worried about falling behind, is powerful. Given a choice between (a) embarking on a grand AI-inspired productivity initiative, led by confident consultants and producing slick progress reports for the board; or (b) pursuing modest, specific opportunities where technology can be applied gainfully – without promising profound cost savings – you can guess which option most C-suites will choose.
Ultimately, the anticipated productivity gains generally don’t materialize, and cost savings are achieved the old-fashioned way: by cutting programs and reducing headcount.
Cassidy considers several reasons why GenAI has disappointed most businesses so far. One is tool fit: the MIT study found some of the most successful AI investments tended to be highly customized, narrow tools aimed at specific processes; less successful efforts chased generic solutions or attempted to build capabilities internally. Another possibility he raises: “for many established businesses, generative AI, at least in its current incarnation, simply isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be.”
Finally, Cassidy brings up what strikes me as the most compelling explanation, and the one I’ve often emphasized in this column: it takes a long time to figure out how to use powerful emerging technology. We systematically underestimate the time and change required for widespread, productive adoption.
Part of this is infrastructure: you can’t scale electric-vehicle adoption without widespread charging stations; similarly, the spread of Watt’s steam engine required railways to move coal.
Another factor is workflow: initial adoption of new technologies tends to involve the substitution of new tech into existing processes. Replacing a steam engine with an electric generator in compact factories built around a single power source didn’t boost productivity. The game-changer was radically reimagining the workflow – Ford’s assembly line, an innovation enabled by electricity but not an obvious or inevitable consequence of it.
Moreover, forcing a new technology into old processes can even reduce productivity, at least at first, before improvements (ideally) start to accrue. This pattern is called the “J-curve,” Cassidy informs us, observing that “the journey along the curve can be lengthy.”
This brings up another important, very human challenge I’ve encountered firsthand. Senior management, having been sold on the putative productivity benefits of AI, often believes the technology needs to be imposed upon a benighted workforce. More often, I suspect, the lack of adoption reflects discernment more than ignorance. The right move isn’t to jam AI tools, gavage-style, into every workflow because of an abstract commitment to “do AI.” It’s to de-average implementation and focus on energized lead users who are passionate about solving a particular problem — and where an AI tool could make a real difference, especially if developed and refined as a partnership between the tool developer and the lead user.
Adoption should be pulled by palpable utility, not pushed by executive edict.
At times I find myself resonating with both the optimism of evangelists, who accurately perceive technology’s potential, and the skepticism of seasoned biopharma professionals, who accurately perceive the magnitude and complexity of the challenges the technology must overcome.
I continue to believe in the extraordinary, transformative promise of AI. But it’s not magic. The most substantial early wins will come from tactical, high-leverage applications – pulled by motivated lead users and enabled by high-EQ technology partners — rather than pushed by decree.
Top biopharma R&D talent is drawn by the prospect of creating meaningful new medicines for patients. They may be most familiar with techniques they trained on, but, like everyone else, they adopt compelling tools (from the iPhone to ChatGPT) when those tools actually help. If AI enables a scientist to be more effective, or a team to make better decisions, they’ll use it – especially when they see peers doing so with palpable effect.
My two cents: an approach to AI adoption that is strongly supported by top management but fundamentally driven by lead users represents the best path forward – for companies, for technology, and for the medicines we aspire to create together, trying to hold a moonbeam in our hand.
The biotech industry can do amazing things when focused on an audacious goal.
Like curing cancer.
I’m fired up to announce the next Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. This group of 23 biotech executives and investors are training to hike up to the summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa (elev. 19,341 feet), in February 2026.
Together, we’re raising $1 million for the next generation of bold and brave cancer researchers in the US.
Each person is committed to raising a minimum of $50,000 for cancer research. Click on their names above and read their personal statements on WHY they are relentlessly pushing the frontiers of cancer research. You can donate directly to their campaign on Qgiv. You’ll get an automatic receipt for your tax-deductible gift.
Your investment will pay dividends for generations. This is our chance to support science.
We are committed. We’re pushing ourselves physically, mentally, and spiritually for the cause.
Through it all, we’ll raise awareness, raise funds, and forge meaningful relationships through shared sacrifice for something larger than ourselves. We’ll have fun along the way.
Interested in sponsoring this team? Reach out to any member of the team, or multiple members. For the full sponsor package, see Elyse Hoffmann: elyse.hoffmann@damonrunyon.org.
Thank you for your support in this moment of possibility against cancer.
Luke
L to R: Henry Kilgore, Luke Timmerman, and Will Chen on Kilimanjaro, Feb. 2024. Henry and Will are Damon Runyon Fellows who participated in the inaugural Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon on Kilimanjaro, Feb. 2024.
Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Summit of Kilimanjaro. Feb. 2024.
