Baisong Mei’s Immigrant Journey Through American Biopharma
29 Feb 2024
Drug ApprovalExecutive Change
Pictured: Baisong Mei/Nicole Bean for BioSpace
Baisong Mei is no stranger to leadership roles. At just 15 years old, he was already in medical school leading a group of students 10 years his senior. (In China, medical students skip undergraduate degrees and instead go straight to a doctoral program.) That was just one of many instances of leadership peppered throughout the career of Editas’s current chief medical officer.
Mei was born in a small town in the southern part of Anhui province in China. He skipped grades a couple of times, which allowed him to start college at Bengbu Medical College (now Bengbu Medical University) at just 15 years old, the first time in his life he went to a bigger city, Bengbu. Because he had done well in high school, scored reasonably well on the college entrance examination, held leadership positions and participated in competitions, he was made the head of a group in the class. This entailed leading older students in group activities, an experience he called “challenging.”
But that didn’t discourage him. After graduating from Bengbu Medical College at the age of 20, he went on to earn a master’s degree at Wuhan University School of Medicine, where he then worked as a faculty member for five years. At 28, he left China to move to Ohio with only two suitcases. There, Mei earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of Toledo. He then completed fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley; held leadership positions at Bayer, Biogen and Sanofi; and co-invented an approved drug, Jivi, an injectable medicine from Bayer for people with hemophilia A.
Mei’s laundry list of accomplishments goes on. But he said that one of the most rewarding successes of his career is seeing patients in clinical trials that he runs sign on for an extension. He explained that this usually means patients feel like the drug is working for them without too many complications, which is a huge success in the R&D world. It’s happened many times throughout his career, he said, the first time with a hemophilia B drug at Biogen that was later approved by the FDA and marketed as Alprolix.
Learning to Adapt
Mei’s position at early-stage biotech Editas is more entrepreneurial than his earlier career, allowing him to remain close to the science and to clinical trials. But after coming from academia and Big Pharma, learning how to operate in a genome editing biotech with a few hundred employees involves a learning curve, he said. Fortunately for him, his formula for success is all about continuously learning and adapting.
The most valuable thing he’s learned since starting at Editas in 2022 is how to communicate in a way that inspires confidence in the company, he said, so that stakeholders know that it has a solid strategy and can deliver helpful products. He’s been part of the executive leadership team working to transform Editas from a technology platform company to a commercial therapeutics company and leader in in vivo programmable gene editing. The team made changes to sharpen the company’s strategic focus and emphasize execution of clinical programs.
“When you become a CMO in a private company, in addition to driving all these clinical trials, you also [have to think about] how the company can grow and what is the strategy of the company so that [it] can help more patients and help the stakeholders of the company,” he said. With these additional responsibilities, “I feel that I’m able to make more impact, not only to the company, [but] to the patients.”
Mei categorizes the challenges he’s encountered in his career into two types: cultural and career-related. Most of his cultural challenges happened when he first came to the U.S. and had to adapt to food, language, TV, interpersonal interactions and many other aspects of daily life that were completely different from China. And his cultural environment has varied greatly even throughout his time in the U.S., he said, since he’s now lived in the Midwest and on both coasts.
“The education system in China really . . . set a foundation for me to be able to adapt here in United States,” he said, by emphasizing math, physics and chemistry, and putting a lot of value on hard work and discipline. For example, in high school, he often studied past midnight and in medical school he had over 30 hours of classes each week. “This allowed me to really focus on learning and be humble, and that really helped me a lot.”
When he first came to the U.S. for his Ph.D., it was uncertain whether he would be able to remain in the country to work after his student visa period. So he viewed it as an experiment, completing his Ph.D. without knowing how the rest of his career would turn out. If he couldn’t stay in the U.S., his backup plan was to bring his learning back to China.
“And now, of course, after more than 30 years, I feel I’m American,” he said. “I feel the United States has given immigrants like myself so many opportunities. I feel so grateful for that . . . this is actually an amazing place [that] can provide people opportunity. And I understand why many people want to come.”
Mollie Barnes is a freelance science writer based in Los Angeles. Reach her at mollie@100yearsco.com. Follow her on Threads and Instagram @shejustlikedtogo and see more of her work at molliebarnes.contently.com.
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