somewhat first-hand. To take people and give them a project and let them run with it. It’s a very different model than the pharma model. You can get surprising results from people driving forward on a single project. They don’t have a portfolio. They have one or two projects, and they live or die by that. They put huge energy into those projects. Capturing some of that energy, and drive, for global health seems to me like a great idea.
But you do need a portfolio. We know the risk in each one of those things. We’ve chosen some very high-risk technologies. Liquidia is a very early technology. Genocea Biosciences has a lot of science in it, and there’s inherent risk. The perspective we have, like with the pharma groups, is to see whether we can turn some of the energy to the global health areas. Otherwise they’d be totally focused on where they’d get the biggest financial return in developed countries.
X: This is why you see biotech going into rare diseases as well.
TM: Yes. We want to change the fundamentals. It’s great when you have a platform with broad application, like Genocea, like Liquidia, to turn toward developed country problems as well as global health problems. What we see on the global health side is, if you have proof of concept, like with a TB vaccine or pneumococcal vaccine, it validates their technology. It doesn’t detract from the value of the company.
For us, we think about, ‘how do we take intellectual property issues off the table?’ Essentially, we are buying out the intellectual property for global health usage. To the extent the company is successful, it doesn’t impede its opportunities in developed markets. We are looking at markets they’d never be looking at. In fact, if it’s pharma that’s the likely purchaser or partners, they don’t focus on the global health markets, so there’s no value subtraction for the biotech company to do this with us. I think we’ve got a good formula now. We’re fairly explicit about what we buy, and what we don’t buy. We’re interested in vaccines for the GAVI Alliance countries. The 70-80 poorest countries. And we’re interested in a set of diseases that are most prevalent in those countries. Outside of that, we’re not interested in middle-income countries. We have a clear playing field.
X: What worries you about dealing with biotech?
TM: All that enthusiasm and energy is great, but they don’t have all the capabilities that a big company has. They may not have the sequencing capabilities. It’s all virtual. You have to think about that in terms of the team you’re dealing with. First of all, they have to be technically competent. Typically they are. Maybe the inventor at the university isn’t spending much time on the biotech. so you have to understand who has the technical competency inside the startup. Then the other question is ‘how are they going to access the technologies they need?’ We are paying attention to this.
We have people like Bob More now [a biotech venture capitalist formerly with Frazier Healthcare Ventures and Domain Associates]. He’s experienced at putting together the teams. He’s been constantly telling us ‘your team is absolutely critical,’ and it absolutely resonates with me. People have to know what they’re doing, they have to make good decisions on how to invest their resources, and they have to have access to high-level capabilities.
The difference between us and a venture investor in the old model, in terms of making an investment and exiting as quickly as you can, this only has value to us if it actually works at the end of the day. We’re the best partner, from a biotech point of view. We are in this for the long run. It only has value to us if it gets to the end patient. Whereas a lot of venture investors are looking for that early exit.
X: Right. Their idea is to get those Phase II results and then sell it to somebody else, and let the other guy worry about getting it over the finish line.
TM: Yes, and that’s pointless to us. We are not in this for any kind of return. We are in this for the product, and the outcome.
X: One last quick question: What will success look like for you in this job in 5-10 years? How do you define it?
TM: What we’ve said—and we’ve gotten a bit quantitative and people hate this—but we want to be delivering 3-5 major interventions into the global health space per year. One example of a successful intervention would be a successful rotavirus vaccine in India. There is no rotavirus vaccine in the public health system in India. You can debate how much it is, whether it’s 100,000 or 200,000 kids a year who die from rotavirus in India. An effective vaccine would have a huge effect. Something like that is unarguably impactful.
X: Wow, 3-5 of those per year? That sounds like a lot.
TM: Yes, 3-5 per year. With the current portfolio we have, we would be lucky to get 1 or 2, maybe 1.5. This is doubling to tripling what we do in terms of impactful interventions. That would be success.
