Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

Bisnow on Business: Were you interested in science as a kid?
I got into science as a consequence of my mother thinking she needed a doctor in the family. I was the oldest girl and the oldest child. I took on her agenda and thought I would go to medical school. I signed up for pre-med. But I found out that I didn’t like anything that I was studying that would have to be repeated in medical school. Then I landed on microbiology and that just turned me on completely. I ended up not going to medical school but going back to graduate school to study more about microbiology and immunology.

Did anyone in your family have a science background?
My father was an engineer for the Army. He had gone to West Point and then got a master’s in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. I’m very good at math so we used to play math games when he was in Vietnam. We would take a problem that was really difficult and he would solve it his way and I would solve it my way when I was in high school. I never wrote him a letter but solved math problems with him. It probably kept him amused while he was there and certainly kept me on my toes.

Did you envision yourself leading a biotech company?
I worked for 18 years for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research as a scientist moving through the ranks. I never worked for money and that’s important for entrepreneurs. My motivation for going to work everyday was not because I was getting a salary, but because my work was exciting. On the other hand, my salary was consistent because it was government. I didn’t envision myself as a head of a company any more than as a leader within the government. I was given the opportunity to leave Walter Reed and come to a startup biotech company, EntreMed.

You were an executive with EntreMed for three years. What made you go out on your own and launch Sequella?
I had been allowed as a part of my growth within EntreMed to sit at the table with the chair of the board, who had put together a number of biotech companies and had taken them public. He let me sit in and learn as we were developing EntreMed. One of the things entrepreneurs need as a personality trait is the inability to see the problems and instead the ability to see the opportunities. When I was at EntreMed, I saw what it was to be able to develop a company with a specific focus that you were very interested in. When I discovered tuberculosis, it became very clear that what would be exciting is to develop a company focused on new products for TB, which melded my microbiology, infectious disease, and immunology background with biotech. You have to think you can do it. I don’t think anybody recognizes the difficulty of the problems until they’ve already solved the problem. They look back and say, “I had no idea it was going to be that hard.” If what drives you is solving problems and getting to the next step, then being an entrepreneur is fun. If you’re looking for financial security or security at all, it will just be painful.

Why focus on tuberculosis?
In 1996, the NIH had been ramping up funding on tuberculosis from about $5 million to $30 million over that previous five years. There had been a mini-epidemic in New York and San Francisco and in other urban areas where a fair amount of tuberculosis was being transmitted that was a surprise to the public health community. In response to that, the government began refocusing its attention on TB. The NIH had been ramping up its granting program in an effort to get people involved in thinking about TB and they came to the end of a five year program. They wanted a review of the previous five years and they wanted to set the goals for the next five years. At that point, I had been at EntreMed and out of academia for about three years, which really is not enough time for people to recognize you’ve made that shift out of academia. NIH asked me to come back and be the immunologist on the review board. Until that point I thought we had cured TB. Then I got there and saw the statistics and I was completely floored. Two billion people in the world infected with TB. That’s one out of every three. The number one killer of women of child-bearing age. Who knew that? Ten million new cases and two to three million deaths per year. Those were extraordinary statistics to me. I figured if I did not know this, being an infectious disease immunologist in the United States, then most people don’t know. That’s why there was no attention being paid to TB in this country. I had both the experience and the interest in the infectious disease aspect, and yet the entrepreneurial lack of understanding of the difficulty of the problem, associated with starting a new company.

Is TB a problem here?
It’s always a problem in the United States because we have open borders for travel. Twenty-five percent of tuberculosis resides in India. There are 2,000 people de-planing from India every day in New York. We constantly import people who have TB, that have latent tuberculosis and many of those people become our citizens. There’s an undercurrent of tuberculosis which we simply won’t get rid of in this country until we solve the TB problem outside our borders. We do have transmission of tuberculosis within our borders as a natural consequence of people who reactivate their TB sometime during their lifetime. There are 10 countries which have really huge TB burdens. The United States is not one of them. But we have a constant burden that just doesn’t go away because we constantly import TB.

What are the biggest misconceptions about the biotech industry?
The biggest misconception is that a very exciting new idea is going to translate into something that can be used by humans in a short amount of time. I remember how sad and upset I was at EntreMed when the New York Times reported in May 1998 that angiogenesis technology was going to cure cancer. The next Monday, we had lines of people with macular degeneration and various cancers lined up to get us to give them something that would help them. In the meantime all of this was predicated on a mouse study. There was no product to offer them. It was so disturbing to see people who really needed something today and it wasn’t going to happen for 10-15 years. The other misconception is that there’s a lot of money out there for startup biotech companies. Right after the dot com bust, everybody pulled their money back. There’s a lot of money out there waiting to be deployed, but the financial industry itself has become very risk adverse.

What is the biggest challenge of running a biotech company?
To keep enough funding on hand to pay for the very expensive clinical trials that are required for registration of products in humans. Finding that money is just so difficult because a single phase 3 clinical trial for a drug is $25 million to $50 million. To find that kind of money is very difficult for a small biotech company. You have to make decisions about what kind of company you are. You can’t make it assuming you’re going to be able to get your products all the way through from start to finish. Many biotechs unwisely spend their money. That’s a shame because it causes anxiety in the financial community for funding other companies.

How do you balance your role as a scientist and a business person?
Balance is something no entrepreneur knows how to do. Everything is done at 100 percent. I’m fortunate that I have very good scientists that work with me. I like to review the science and help write the papers and keep current. That’s the pleasure part of my life. But I really enjoy the business as well. The raising of money is stressful but I relieve some of the stress by thinking about the science at the same time. If you have your mind focused, you can do both. You don’t have to do them sequentially. You can do them simultaneously; it just takes a little bit of practice.

What is your reaction when people recognize you or pay tribute to you because you are a female entrepreneur?
I was not raised to think of myself as a woman scientist. I always thought of myself as a scientist with indoor plumbing. I don’t see myself as a female followed by “scientist” or female followed by “business person.” I see myself as someone building a business. That does not mean that’s how the world sees me. I’m of that generation where the year before me in college, women were expected to get married and to have children and then perhaps go back, finish their education and have a career. The women after my group were expected to have careers. We expected to have careers but everybody who was in positions of power thought we should be doing otherwise. In my particular generation, there’s a lot of scrambling for the top because there’s not that many of us that were in positions and positions were few and far between. To be selected in a group of other successful women by people who include women who are successful is very honorific for me. We’ve made it to that level where we no longer have to feel as though everybody is in competition with us. We can turn around and pat the backs of people who are equally successful. On the other hand, my male vice presidents and officers of the company always give me a hard time about things like Women in Bio. They want to start a Men in Bio club. I do get a little bit of grief from them.

In what ways are you treated differently in the business world because you’re a woman?
In our business there are 4,600 biotech companies. Less than 100 are led by women. We’re in a huge minority. There have been many occasions where people have assumed that I’m the secretary of the guy standing next to me, only to discover later that I’m the CEO. I don’t take offense to that. I’m old enough that that’s very commonplace. There is a tendency to assume that I will be more emotional. There is a tendency to assume that perhaps I’m a kinder, gentler person and that’s not true at all. Women tend to make harder decisions than many men can. We’re much more practical about the decision-making process.

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]