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Bonnie Anderson is today’s guest on The Long Run.

Bonnie Anderson, CEO, Veracyte

Bonnie is the CEO of Veracyte. It’s a genomic diagnostics company in South San Francisco. The company markets a line of tests for thyroid cancer, lung cancer, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Veracyte got started in 2008. Bonnie, as co-founder and CEO, was recruited by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a couple other venture firms. The VCs were trying to ride the wave of interest in genomic diagnostics, and wanted to know if a business could be built with unique information from gene expression signatures to guide cancer treatment.

The scientific answers didn’t take long to get. Persuading the medical community and the payer community of the value in the information, and getting them to pay for it? That took a lot longer. This is a familiar story for those who follow genomic diagnostics or precision medicine.

Without a lot of notice, Veracyte has made a lot of progress over the last decade. Revenues were up 34 percent in the third quarter. Test volume climbed 23 percent. The company is getting precariously close to break-even. With three marketed tests gaining adoption from physicians and payers, its market valuation up near a 52-week high, with a respectable $720 million valuation the day of this recording.

Bonnie came to entrepreneurship, and Veracyte, after “retiring” from Beckman Coulter. She learned a lot there about how technologies enable new kinds of biological and medical questions to be asked and answered. As a businessperson, she’s also learned the value of perseverance in getting over the many, many obstacles that make it so difficult to get rewarded for creating new diagnostic tests.

I think listeners will appreciate the perseverance you’ll hear in her voice. 

Now, join me and Bonnie Anderson for The Long Run.

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Today’s guest on The Long Run is Karen Akinsanya.

Karen Akinsanya, chief biomedical scientist, Schrodinger

Karen is the chief biomedical scientist at Schrodinger. The New York-based company is a leader in computational chemistry for drug discovery. The company is privately held, and not a household name. But some wealthy and powerful people know it well. Schrodinger counts Bill Gates and David E. Shaw, the hedge fund billionaire, among its major shareholders. Nimbus Therapeutics and Morphic Therapeutic are a couple of young companies that have made strides with its computer modeling to develop new drugs.

Karen came to Schrodinger in 2018 from Big Pharma – Merck, to be specific. She received her PhD in endocrine physiology at Imperial College London. She worked her way from the lab bench to many different aspects of the pharmaceutical business. She was going places at Merck. But as she puts it, she likes new challenges. Karen is focused now on what Schrodinger can enable – how it can put a dent in the industry’s stubborn problem – the lack of drug R&D productivity.   

Karen is a native of the UK, an immigrant, a Mom, and someone who devotes considerable time and energy to youth science education. She recognizes the importance of role models who can encourage young people to go down paths they might not have known existed. I wish I had asked her more about that work, but it was good to at least hear her philosophy on why she makes time for science education volunteer work. It comes up toward the end of the conversation.

Now, join me and Karen Akinsanya for The Long Run.

Today’s guest on The Long Run is Ron Renaud.

Ron is the CEO of Lexington, Mass.-based Translate Bio. The company is working on messenger RNA therapies. You may have heard about this technology. mRNA molecules provide genetic instructions for making proteins. The idea is to restore functional proteins that, for one reason or another, have gone awry in a disease process. If you can inject mRNA directly into people – always a big IF – then theoretically the cell machinery can be harnessed to essentially turn patients into their own mini-drug factories.

Ron Renaud, CEO, Translate Bio

While Moderna captures most of the attention in this subsector of biotech – pulling off the industry’s biggest-ever IPO in December 2018 – it’s not the only game in this particular town. Translate is developing assets that have been tested for more than a decade, stretched back to early stealthy work done at Shire, the rare disease company. Translate actually went public six months before Moderna.

Ron comes to this juncture after a long and successful career on the business and finance side of the house. His biotech career took off at Amgen, and then he took a detour to Wall Street before coming back into executive leadership at Keryx and Idenix. Idenix was a turnaround story that he left on a high note, with a $3.9 billion acquisition by Merck.

Ron is not a scientist, and doesn’t try to pose as one. The important thing is that if you are a biotech CEO who’s a non-scientist, you had better be fluent in the scientific concepts, know the key questions to ask, and hire good people. Ron does all of that. Listening to him, I think you’ll hear a certain amount of humility in his voice. That’s a healthy thing, in my view.

It was a pleasure to speak with Ron about his career arc, hear his thoughts on biotech management, and the industry’s role within the society at large.