Biotech veteran Jodie Morrison on building drug ‘platforms’ and a support group for CEOs
21 Feb 2023
AcquisitionExecutive Change
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about job changes for many people — including biotech veteran Jodie Morrison.
Morrison has been in the business of building young biotechnology companies for many years, with executive stints over the past decade at startups like Tokai Pharmaceuticals and Syntimmune as well as more mature drugmakers such as Keryx Biopharmaceuticals. More recently, she was the CEO of Cadent Therapeutics, a small biotech focused on developing brain drugs. But even that role was one sale to Novartis, two new jobs and three years ago.
These days, Morrison is the acting CEO of Q32 Bio, a startup based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and making drugs for autoimmune conditions. She also has an advisory position with Atlas Venture and sits on the boards of several biotechs, a role she believes to be crucial to the progress of young companies.
“Driving shareholder value starts with conversations with your board, especially in small private companies, because they represent your largest shareholders,” Morrison said. “Make sure that you’re having frequent conversations and you're managing the board properly to get the feedback points you need.”
Morrison is also a convener for fellow biotech executives, starting and building a group that meets regularly to talk through the ins and outs of leading an emerging company. It now includes about 150 members and meets monthly, she said.
In an interview with BioPharma Dive, Morrison discussed her latest job, the challenges of running a biotech with a technology “platform, and the goals for her grassroots executive group. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
BIOPHARMA DIVE: Can you give me a snapshot of what Q32 is doing?
MORRISON: Q32 is focused on tissue-targeted complement therapeutics as a platform. The complement therapeutic space has been a huge success for the industry. We've seen a lot of substantial acquisitions by pharma, and there's a great deal of interest in righting the ship in a complement storm where the immune system is over-responding to something. We have a lot of autoimmune conditions that are tied to complement as a backbone to the cause of the disease. All the complement therapeutics that are in development and are in the market now are focused on systemic complement blockade.
The special sauce at Q32 is that we've come up with a way to direct that to tissue. So it actually takes the complement approach directly within the affected tissue, as opposed to systemically. We think over time that's going to be a much better mousetrap, if you will, as far as how to address these diseases.
In the past, you’ve worked with different types of therapeutics and indications. Why pursue this route?
MORRISON: I'm attracted to interesting, cool science that's breaking new ground and, most importantly, has the potential to really help patients. That has crossed a lot of boundaries over the years — transplants, oncology, neuro and now in the inflammation space.
When it comes to that science, what are common themes in your experience as an executive?
MORRISON: Because of my background running clinical trials, clinical-stage companies are the ones I'm most interested in simply because I can provide the deepest background and experience that's relevant. I spent the first 15 years of my career running clinical programs across different companies and indications, but they tended to be orphan [drug]s.
I've run early-stage science; I've run a commercial-stage company. I've learned that my fit is in that clinical trials phase, from [preparing for trials] to Phase 2. That's really where I think I add the most value as a CEO. From a leader standpoint, it’s deep expertise, and the ability to drive strategy and think about how investors and physicians are going to think about the things that you're doing. Both are critically important to getting to the end game of helping patients.
There’s been a lot of talk about whether platforms are still an attractive investment in the current depressed market for emerging biotechs. How do you feel about them?
MORRISON: Q32 has a platform. We have the ability to build these over time to target different tissue types and different immune challenges. I'm also chair of the board of Ribon, which is also a platform play in oncology and inflammation.
They come with an added challenge, though. At the end of the day, investors need to know what they're valuing. When you get to the clinic, they tend to look at the lead asset you're taking forward as the primary way to value the company. Platforms don't really get the value they deserve until later, when we have multiple assets that are being developed. It can be a long play, but I think it's important. I've run companies that had a single asset. There's tremendous value in particular in markets like we're living through today to have the optionality of the platform.
When you get into the clinic for the first time, the value of the platform comes down because everybody's focused on the clinical leads. There's a time point where companies have to adjust to be prepared financially and focus on the clinical programs. If you do it right, they're able to maintain their roles and continue that basic science, but also inform and direct the clinical programs in the lead until you're far enough along that you're getting value you can then feed back into the platform.
If you don't do that right, you end up with a situation where you've got a big platform and no money to fund it.
You created a support network for biotech CEOs during the pandemic. How did that come about?
MORRISON: In early March [2020] I was running Cadent. We started getting an influx of emails from board members about what other companies were doing, specifically from the Atlas ecosystem. It was [about] what people were doing with their lab personnel, who was taking people out of the office, how they were managing payment, how they were managing Zoom — all the things that we were all dealing with in the early days.
So I said to the two I’d talked with, “Why don't you just give me the list of the CEOs within the Atlas ecosystem? I’ll coordinate discussions among us, so you guys don't have to be the go-between.” The first week started with 14 of us on a call at 7:30 in the morning, simply because it was not going to conflict with the stuff already on our calendars. By the second meeting, we had 30 to 40 people. By the third, it was over 100, and it was well outside the Atlas ecosystem. It was all of us inviting people in. We were all dealing with the same thing.
There’s a lot of first-time CEOs in the industry. I kept thinking to myself, I'm on my third time [as CEO], dealing with a global pandemic, and I still don't know what I'm doing. If I was a first-timer, I'd be that much more concerned about it. So it felt like if we all came together, we could share resources, experience and legal advice. And it was non-competitive — so no matter if there were five CEOs doing the same programs I was doing, it didn't matter because we weren't actually talking about the science, programs or the market. We were talking about how to survive as organizations, how to keep our staff healthy and committed to the mission of our organizations.
Is that group still around?
MORRISON: By the summer when George Floyd was killed, we started having discussions about community impact. We had a subcommittee called “community impact” that was focused on raising funds for COVID relief, which started with [personal proective equipment] and getting it to hospitals in need. Over that summer, we converted that to be more of a diversity and inclusion effort. That’s continued to today.
We've cut back to monthly meetings. We have “CEO best practices” and “future of work” subcommittees, and “community impact” remains a critical feature. We have a [contract research organization] mitigation task force addressing the fact that we still have all these global issues, including the war in Ukraine and continued COVID lockdowns in China where a lot of our sub-vendors are.
More importantly, it's become a community for people in the industry. It’s mostly CEOs or CEO designees — we have about 150 active people. There's a WhatsApp channel that people use for communication about all sorts of topics: What website designers do you like? What's your pay scale for SAP members?
It's a community of other CEOs you can ask those questions to. It's a total volunteer effort. There's no fee structure. It’s good old-fashioned camaraderie and working together to make sure our industry is moving forward in a positive way, and that we have resources at our disposal when we're trying to figure out things that we haven't done before.
It's a great feel-good effort for an industry that's been really good to me over the years. It feels good to have built something that seems to have found a home and has helped build a community within the industry. I kept thinking it would sunset at some point. But it has lived on in different iterations.
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