Ep93: Jay Bradner & Andy Plump on Mentoring Young Scientists

Welcome to the long run. This is a podcast for biotech adventurers. I'm your host, Luke Timberman. This episode is a little different. I invited a couple of previous guests on the long run to discuss a specific issue: how the industry can do a better job of mentoring young scientists and creating on-ramps to careers in the biopharma industry for scientists from underrepresented groups. Jay Bradner, the president of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and Andy Plump, the president of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, are a couple of powerful R&D leaders. They are in positions of influence and can make meaningful changes in their organizations in certain situations. They shared a few revealing anecdotes in this conversation, which said a lot to me about how their thinking has evolved on inequities over the past year and what things they can do to make positive changes in their workplaces. I'm thankful they accepted my invitation to discuss this issue, which they didn't have to do. This conversation was recorded live April 15th on Clubhouse. If you're not familiar, it's the relatively new audio-only social network. This recording was specifically part of Biotech Clubhouse, which is a part of the app for biotech conversations. Thanks to Chris Garabedian and Brad Lancar for inviting me to guest host this session in their particular clubhouse. A brief note on format as well. My welcoming remarks and Jay's brief self-introduction weren't captured in this recording. So the episode starts out by diving straight in. If you want to know more about Jay's transition, you can listen to him discuss that in depth in a previous Long Run podcast. I'm providing a link to that episode in the show summary on Timberman Report. Now, I asked these guys a lot of questions in the first part of the episode and then open it up to audience Q&A in the second half. It's a little like old school call-in radio shows, which provides a sense of spontaneity. I like that people on this platform seem to be motivated to have candid and constructive conversations, although that's not always the case. Also, the sound may sound a little choppy at times because people were talking on iPhones with different kinds of microphones, headphones, etc. Not the usual plug-in microphones that I try to get guests to use to ensure high-quality audio recordings for this show. Basically, the audio quality may be a little spotty at times, but I think the value of the points being made is high enough to put up with a little bit of that in spots. I'm curious what you think of the Clubhouse format and what you think of me hosting topic-oriented shows like this versus the traditionally personal, immersive, one-on-one interview format that you've come to expect on the Long Run. If you have any feedback on that, hit me at lukeimbermanreport.com. Consider this an experiment. But don't worry, I have a number of terrific guests lined up for in-depth conversations, including biotech legend Sue Desmond-Hellman. Okay, that's it for now. Please enjoy this conversation on mentoring young scientists with Andy Plump and Jay Bradner on the Long Run.

Now that you guys are in the positions that you're in, how do you view the, let's call it a disconnect of sorts between academia and industry? And let me try to kind of summarize it like a brief history here. Like you know I see Ethan Pearlstein is in the audience and he and I have talked about this before. The post-docalypse, I think was a term that he kind of coined or popularized a few years ago. There's just a limited number of academic slots for faculty positions. There's a lot of graduate students come up with that kind of being their eye on that prize, but you know it's just very, very difficult. There's just not that many. The grant acceptance rate is something like 20%. It's very low. First-time grant winner for an R01 grant is somewhere around the age of 40. So it's just very hard for young people to get established. And you know now this year with the pandemic, there's just been a lot of people struggling, maybe lost a year of momentum in their graduate school or postdoc careers to get those key papers that they need to get that faculty job or to get noticed in some other way. And at the same time, there's all this amazing stuff going on in industry, like lots of money coming in, lots of new drugs and vaccines and things coming out the other end with products. And I hear people in leadership positions whether at small companies or large companies saying we need more people. So how do you guys think about making it easier for people to make this transition or make it more welcoming, make people envision possibilities of what they can do in industry?

Andy, please you first.

Do you think that perception of turning to the dark side has changed in recent years? Do people have a more favorable view of industry than once upon a time? Maybe Jay can tell us because he made that transition a few years ago.

Well, I will be the first to say that, and I'm not putting this on you, Luke, but I find most academia versus industry considerations, proclamations to be underwhelming. My biggest surprise in coming to NIBR was just how similar it is to the other elite research institutions where I had the chance to work and train. So maybe that's the most reassuring thing I could say to people in postdocs in academia imagining what science might be like. There's incredible heterogeneity among academic experiences and there's surely incredible heterogeneity among industry experiences. So just impossible to generalize. That would be the first comment, which is you could find a very scholarly environment in industry and you could find a very spurious environment in academia and vice versa. But things are really changing now. I think through the lens of reproducibility and its considerations, industry has had to become a lot more scholarly so as not to chase blind avenues from minimally publishable units, and reciprocally academia has become radically more translational with startup companies popping up before the index paper is published or the thesis is presented. Both of these things I regard as positives. So there's a narrowing of the disconnect, I guess. And for sure the core businesses are different. When I was in academia, I was totally focused on scholarship, patient care, my chemical biology class that I taught with Ralph Mazich that I just loved and might be the only thing I miss about being a professor. And at Novartis, I'm just unapologetically focused on drug hunting. But at their core, both of these things are in service to the best science and the biggest impact on medical practice that I could be a part of.

Now Jay, when you say that there's more similarities than differences, I mean a lot of people would think that there are different measurements of success in academia. The paper in Nature is the coin of the realm, and you're measured on different things in biopharma like filing of INDs or trial data, ultimately products. And there's the need for communicating more in teams, working in teams more in industry. Again, to generalize, what are some of the similarities that maybe surprised you when you made that move?

Well, Luke, these are fair points. I will say that maybe our lab in academia was an outlier. We had an interdisciplinary lab of chemists, biologists, computer scientists, and pharmacologists. We used to joke it was a biotech company at Harvard to create knowledge. And in coming to NIBR, that same team spirit, that same team science, we start a project in my old lab expecting it might be 13 authors and four institutions. We start a project in NIBR expecting it might be 40 scientists from eight of our research units. The biggest similarity, Luke, and I hate to get so ethereal about the whole thing, but maybe as I'm getting older, I start to think this way: what is the chapter in science supposed to be about? I mean, you may mention some incentive structures. I hope that those aren't orienting or motivating for anybody that works at NIBR. I really hope that as for me and my team, this chapter is supposed to mean something, that the rocking chair moment thinking about this time won't be measured in stock options or publications or patents or INDs, but the one or two or ideally 10 or 20 singular moments of contribution that make the whole thing worthwhile. So maybe the difference is that you're in a training mindset in academia receiving that training or providing it, and in a professional research environment there's maybe just that little bit less distraction from delivery against the purpose.

I see. Okay. Well, can we talk a little bit about programs, things that you do? I know that at NIBR you have a postdoc, an industry postdoc program. You probably have other things going on with internships for undergrads or graduate students as well. Can you say a little bit about what are some of the things you do and how they work?

Sure. We also believe at NIBR that having trainees around, graduate students and postdocs, is really vital to the culture of scholarship and truth-seeking that's just totally essential to make impactful medicine, without which you can be really diluted by your own fantasies of thoughts and value creation, which for us is just purely measured in medical contributions. There is no intermediate strategy at NIBR. So having postdocs around gets you to think out loud and gets you to be the best version of yourself and to be kind and to be in a learning mindset and a teaching mindset, and I really believe that those read through to better innovation. So we have graduate students at our academic institute, the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel. We invite graduate students from Harvard Medical School local to NIBR Cambridge in the therapeutics program to do time with us, and we have postdoc programs at each of our large sites that are very organized and run by an outstanding leader, and Granger who puts everything into making this a compelling training experience. But we realized, Luke, that most of the outstanding scientists we recruit were trained in a discipline of drug hunting but not in drug hunting itself. And there might be people who go to a postdoc trying to pick up a tool or a trick to become a scholar and deploy that tool or trick to understand nuances of the human condition. But there are others that want to learn how to hunt drugs, that are interested in the science of therapeutics. And there's no PhD program in the science of therapeutics. So we've created what we regard as just the definitive passport stamp for the aspiring drug hunter in training. It's called the Innovation Postdoc. We have postdocs that are pursuing scholarship and that we will deliver with them the manuscript, the insight, the scholarly contribution. But these Innovation Postdocs, well there may not be a paper, there might be a patent or there might be a drug. And what's interesting to me, Luke, is I don't know the numbers, but I would imagine the Innovation Postdoc in Denver is as competitive as a faculty position at Harvard. We had 1,500 applicants last year for 14 spots.

Oh, that was going to be my next question. Like, how many of these people are there?

We started the program as a social experiment with these 14 brave first class. But seeing the demand for truly authoritative training in drug hunting, I think there's a big opportunity to grow this program within NIBR and more broadly within the industry. I know we're not alone in offering these sorts of experiences, though I think the offering that we have with its curriculum, its all-access path to drug discovery, you know that we don't stand behind 'well there's going to be a paper, you play it safe and maybe become a professor.' I mean this is a springboard into biotech or ideally into one of the elite drug hunting units at Novartis.

And how long are these supposed to last?

Well, this is a bit of a finishing school because all who've entered this postdoc have truly outstanding training with graduate training in the natural or physical sciences. So we benchmark it between two and four years. You might know that a traditional chemistry postdoc is two years. I did four because I was new to the down low and sometimes I get some heat from the chemists like 'you really did a four-year postdoc.' So we're respectful to the clock that people feel they're internally on, but two to four years is a meaningful enough time to make a contribution and to download a meaningful training in drug discovery.

And at the end of that, what is kind of expected? Do you encourage or anticipate that they will become full-time staff scientists or something else at Novartis at NIBR, or is it sort of like in the academic tradition, okay you've learned something, you've made a contribution to the field, and now you can go get a job somewhere else?

It's explicitly not an apprenticeship. So we do not look to our postdocs as a source of cheap labor to do Novartis drug discovery. We are literally focused on their training. And it's an early program, Luke, so I may not have all the answers, but for sure getting to know some of these scientists in this program, we'd be crazy not to find a role for them within our organization. But they would compete for posted roles as any scientist around the world.

Interesting. So Andy, how is this similar or different to what you're doing over there at Takeda?

Okay. How much do these people get paid?

How do you guys do it, Jay?

Exactly the same way, Luke. It's competitive for sure to an academic postdoc. But it is lower than the entry-level Novartis position again because part of the compensation is of course the training opportunity. And the only reason I don't give you a number is I don't have it at the tip of my tongue. But it's better than academia and competitive for sure in this very small marketplace of drug hunting training apprenticeships. And I should say in fair balance, I think very highly of the Vertex program in Boston as well. That is a shorter and more focused program which could appeal to some, whereas we opted for a meaningful download of a new set of skills, concepts, and language skills.

Now, you mentioned, Jay, that there's 14 spots in this drug hunting postdoc program. Lots of demand, 1500 or so applications. Have you guys talked about opening this up? Creating more positions like this?

Well, you know, Luke, we would love to make this program quite a bit bigger. We're obviously not an academic institution. And so by the way, there aren't 14 postdoc roles at NIBR; that was the entering class of that one year of the Innovation Postdoc. We have the established Novartis and GNF postdoc class, and there must be over a hundred postdocs at Novartis in our labs, still comparatively small to an academic center, but again we're ruthlessly focused on drug discovery. What I would love is if anyone in this community would love the design principles and stamp out a tailored program in their environment. I can only imagine that the biotech environment in this town could serve as a wonderful training opportunity. It's a role reversal, but the elite science, the structural biology, the atomic resolution of disease, the delivery of high biotechnology to dissect pathways of human disease in industry is on par with the best in academia and therefore should be an outstanding training environment.

Yeah. Well, that's the idea that there's interesting work. I mean once upon a time people might have thought well there was like crank turning going on in industry and it's kind of dull and the really people who move the frontiers forward are in academia, not really the case anymore for some of those reasons you cite. I mean the tools, the ability to ask and answer questions with the keys to the kingdom there at NIBR, right? This is intellectually stimulating work. I'm sorry, go ahead Andy.

Why more of the focus on cultivating, mentoring people rather than just sink or swim? Why are you doing that?

How are you guys? You brought it up, Andy, and I was going to ask about this. The diversity and inclusion question. This is on a lot of people's minds. This is obviously a great place to start if you just think about on-ramps for young scientists, whether it's internships for undergraduates or work for grad students and postdocs. What have you guys done on that front differently maybe in the last year or two?

What's an example of one of the metrics on your dashboard that you look at and that you want to improve for the next year or two?

Uh-huh. Jay, what are some of the metrics on your dashboard as you think about creating on-ramps for more diverse young scientists?

I think this is an area of real leadership to be honest with you in industry. You don't see results of what you don't measure. We very closely track and increasingly disclose our successes against measures of the gender pay gap, which I'm proud to say at our company is negligible, if measurable at all. Gender balance at every level at entry, at mid-career rock stars as I call them, all the way through to our board of directors. We measure the number of diverse candidates on every final slate for every role at NIBR because it has been learned that if you don't have a diverse slate, you have no real effective chance of hiring the diverse candidate in the end.

I want to give you well those are companywide kind of principles you're discussing there, but specifically for the young people, that next generation of young scientists that hopefully will fill up that pipeline and become the R&D leaders of tomorrow like you and Andy.

Yeah, let me double click on that for you. If you look at the heads of R&D and we assemble quite a lot through co, you would be hard-pressed to find a less diverse group of people. And think about this in a field that is entirely predicated on innovative impact, to have such a lack of diversity is quite jarring. The workforce in the natural sciences begins with total parity, 50/50 men and women in the gender dimension. The parity is I think less apparent along ethnic and racial lines. By the time in academia in the sciences that tenure is allocated, 24% are women. In biotech in leadership, 30% are women. Board of directors in biotech, 18%. And we actually just read a study by Deerfield that 48.5% of biotech companies don't have a woman on their board of directors. So we can do a lot better, especially in an environment like NIBR, which regrettably for me and my leadership team is a source of many CSOs in the biotech industry. We have stated the goal across actually all of Novartis but in particular in the sciences that we will achieve 50% gender balance in leadership in management in this company. We're 50/50 in the workplace. We're 45/55 women and men in management right now. Over 149 nationalities in the business and there's an awful lot of diverse thinking around the table and innovation that is required. Our board of directors is about a quarter female. This is a work in progress, Luke, but in my five years here, we have made year-on-year progress against these stated metrics that are baked into our strategic plan, into our bonuses, into reports that we give to ESG investor communities. These are real targets and we're actually organized around hitting them.

You sound like you're talking mostly about gender there, though. What about people of color?

No, this is an equally important question. And I'd be the first to say that there are for sure altruistic reasons to care about gender, racial and ethnic diversity, and beyond diversity to make the culture inclusive enough that you're benefiting from this diversity. We actually need diversity in all dimensions around a table of project team leaders in a drug discovery institute. Chemists with different perspectives in training, and of course black, white, Hispanic, Asian as well. And it is, as it turns out, Luke, harder to measure the dimensions of race in a multinational company and to have accurate data just based on what is ethical and legal in different regions of society. So it's harder to navigate through the numbers there, except in some local, but I can tell you we care equally about diversity in that dimension. And it's actually quite a bit more challenging in the physical sciences to achieve our goals in racial diversity, though we are hard at work at this.

Okay. All right. Well, hey folks out there, I want you to know you're welcome to raise your hand, chime in with questions of your own at any time and I can call you up onto the stage to ask your questions of Jay and Andy. Could we come back a little bit before we wait for questions to come in about pandemic times? You know, Andy, you kind of looked at this that you know this need for more understanding for people. Have you discovered something about mentoring or staying in touch with people during this time that's actually helping them stay engaged with their science and be more productive?

Do you see it amplified among young people, especially kids at home, getting your career established out of sight out of mind from the boss, all kinds of anxieties that get rolled up?

Okay. We got a few folks raising their hands. I'm going to call you up on stage. Emmanuel.

You're up there. What's your question, Emmanuel?

Yeah. Thank you for this discussion. I just wanted to find out where you stand on international students for these programs.

Well, thanks Emmanuel. I'll start. We are a global company. Novartis operates in more than 40 countries around the world. We have research sites in six countries, six global sites, and we have manufacturing facilities in 40 or more. So we hope that through connectivity to global communities of science and medicine that we can attract scientists from just all over the world. So we have just no bias at all around where scientists come from. In fact, I actually think from both the lens of diversity and bringing something new to our environment, we tend to be more excited about scientists who have traveled a great distance.

Great. Thanks, Emmanuel. Next, let's call up Mitch.

Hello. Thanks for doing this. So, I'm a science policy reporter for the American Institute of Physics. So I'm out of my wheelhouse here being in the biotech rooms, but I like comparative discussions of workforce issues in the sciences. And I was wondering if anyone on stage could reflect on the experience of the doubling of the NIH budget. And I've heard anecdotally that there was kind of a cliff in terms of a whole bunch of I think you referenced earlier kind of the post-docalypse and I'm wondering if you can speak to what went wrong in terms of how that was done in terms of how the money was allocated. Part of the reason I asked this is there's a discussion going on right now in the context of the National Science Foundation and pumping quite a lot of money into that agency perhaps some others as well. And I think there's a similar fear going on about how do you do this sustainably so you don't create these cliffs of people who have nowhere to go. So I'll stop there.

Yeah. You know, I've written a little bit about this, no expert, but I think there was a time when those budgets were going up really fast and creating lots of positions for grad students and postdocs in academia. And then one day when that budget then plateaued and the postdoc fellowships were running their course, there just weren't new positions being created, particularly faculty positions that they could graduate into. And it may have been compounded by the fact that there were a lot of baby boomer faculty members who were not ready to retire or didn't retire and create some spots. And then a lot of people just found themselves in these kind of semi-permanent postdoc difficult positions. I don't know, Andy, Jay, your thoughts on what happened there?

Well, I'm no expert on public policy. That is for sure. And Mitch, to your comment about joining a biomed discussion, if there's anything worse than a physicist talking biology, it's for sure a biologist talking physics. So you're welcome here. An influx of resource into biomedicine through an expanded consideration of the NIH budget would be, as it has been before, a powerful stimulus package that probably would do more to resource science as it is staffed today than to create a pig and a python, a cohort of expanded trainees. The scientists would be better resourced. Now, this pandemic might rightly with the increased curiosity about science and the increased familiarity with scientific language that the lay press has so effectively delivered and captured for global populations of non-scientists, I think we can expect more interest in science than ever before. But an investment in the NIH to me creates only an opportunity and it's a great read-through of funding into the economy because having held any number of NIH budgets, that money needs to be spent every year into supplies, into reagents, into instruments, into contracts. So I see only good that can come out of this.

You're a man after my heart. I've gone on record advocating for a tripling of the NIH budget for many of the reasons that you cite. Yeah. And I think there's only one last important thing to say, Mitch, and that is if you talk to biotech investors, they'll say they've never had more money available for companies in support of new ideas, but that it's talent that's rate limiting. So even if I'm wrong, and this did serve to increase a generational cohort of scientists, there's more than enough resource in the overinvested biotech industry to support them.

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Raj Venaya from Takeda, thanks for joining us. What's your question?

Yeah, hey Luke. Good to talk to you and hey Andy and Jay. Just so folks know, I work at Takeda with Andy. You guys have really provided a really accessible understanding from my standpoint of what it's like to take this career path, an industry career path. But one of the questions that often comes up from young scientists is what's the right time frame to go the biotech route versus the big company route? Is there a best time to do that? Can you reverse course or change course midstream? I think all of us have seen different people be successful doing things in different orders. But can you give any topline guidance to young scientists that are debating should I join this really hot biotech at this really hot moment in time or go to a big company? And if I do something, could my decision somehow be irreversible or foreclose opportunities in the future?

Yeah, Raj, that's a great question. It's great to hear your voice. This question comes up a lot after seminars at academic centers these days at these hilariously entitled lecture invitations I'm sure you get as well called 'Alternate Career Day'. I mean I'm interested to know what the alternate career is. There are so many more people going into biotech these days. At the Harvard Medical School at the HST I gave the alternate careers day lecture five years ago. There were about 20 people in there. Last year there was like 140. So things are changing. As I think about it, there's definitely more lanes in the off-ramp from academia than in the on-ramp. So if you're serious about being a scholar for one chapter of your time in science, it is best to do it in adjacency to your

Training. It's such a perfect springboard from a rigorous basic science postdoc to start a lab and to really defend your ideas in manuscripts and in grant submissions at conferences of scholars. And that's what I did, and so I might be influenced by that, but it was such a rewarding time that I would just never trade away. The cool thing about science these days, as you indicate in your question, is that it is bidirectional. You know, Nathaniel Gray is one of my closest friends in science and did a postdoc, had an incredible career in industry at GNF, and then went to the Dana Farber to become a professor, now at Stanford, and has had an impact in just every chapter of his time in science. Uh, Phil Jones at the Ajax and MD Anderson story, drug hunter from MD Anderson. The list goes on and on. And so it's more bidirectional than it used to be. Um, but my bias is that that chapter of scholarship is a really nice icing on the cake after training. Andy, what are your thoughts?

Sorry to interrupt. I would agree with what Andy said about finding a place where you can really learn, being and grow being more important than necessarily the small or the large. But you know, one thing I remember speaking interviewing Vicki Sato years ago when she was on the faculty at Harvard Business School teaching a class on biotech, and she advocated for finding a midsized company, one of these where I don't know 200, 300, 500 employees whatever, where the company is going through a transition and you know a young person kind of establishing his or her career can really learn a lot of aspects of the business while also still having a chance to interact with senior management and really learn about the big issues in industry. So there's lots of different places to go and learn, but like don't get stuck, you know. And Luke, I think you've hit on something really important, and that is probably on the list of critical factors about where to work, the number of employees is pretty low on that list. You know, there is what's the science? Is it something that really resonates with you? What's the culture of the group? Do you really respect the people that you're going to be working with? Do you respect the resourcing of your organization? Is it in a town that's right for you and your family? You know, there's a lot of dimensions I think that are more important than if it's a pharmaceutical company or a biotech.

Yep. Totally agree. Hey, Chris, you came up on stage. Do you want to ask a question? Make a comment.

Yeah, really great discussion and um look, both of you have achieved what I think are very enviable leadership positions to lead R&D for large organizations. But, you know, as I talk to people earlier in their career, I'm really almost shocked how many who have scientific backgrounds where even I met somebody who went in to get their MD from Harvard and they knew right away they didn't want to use it and they wanted to go into venture capital. And so I see a lot of people early in their career, they want to go into business development, they want to go into venture capital. Many of them say, "My goal is to be a biotech CEO." and you know they want to get out if they have a research background they want to get out of the lab as quickly as possible to start building their business bona fides to take a leadership role. So just for both of you, what's your vantage point? What advice would you give somebody of what's the best pivot from research and maybe if there are any examples you have from your own organizations where someone moved out of the R&D role, how would you advise all these people because I just I'm surprised how many people complete their degrees and then they just want to be on that business track.

I'm with you, Andy. And not that you're saying this, but I really encourage folks not to become a dilettante who when they introduce themselves in a business development interaction it takes 45 minutes to hear all the jobs they did for 20 minutes each. To really think in chapters of what can I do to become quite interested. But Chris, I would add to all of the opportunities that Andy shared, business development which for many of our scientists is really stimulating to go from thinking deeply about one project and delivering a therapeutic to taking a job in search and evaluation or closing deals where they see a broader range of projects. I'll give two quick examples. I know a physician who at the end of medical school instead of doing a residency went to McKinsey for a short time, got interested in the pharmaceutical industry, took a low-level managerial job, worked his way up like the UPS driver that becomes the CEO, and actually he is the CEO of Nevada Vos Nar Simon and Voss, you know ran vaccines in the commercial unit, ran development and global drug development, had a really rich career that he built and navigated all through one organization, but in each chapter picked up a new tool set that would ultimately make him as effective as he is today. In a second example, maybe more accessible because not everyone's going to be a CEO on this call. Prakash Raman who was one of our very best medicinal chemists and got interested after making many important molecules in looking at external science and he worked in business development. Then he led Novartis oncology business development. I recruited him to be the head of neur business development. He built an incredibly strong organization, led that organization for several years, closed many important deals. Now he's a partner at Flagship Pioneering. And so I think and what I love about Prakash and our current head of business development, Phil Gotwalls, is that they're hardcore scientists and so they see the non-confidential deck and already have deeply considered insights around the opportunity for the business and importantly feedback for the innovators. Great feedback.

Great feedback. Yeah. I just want to say thanks guys. Those are great feedback. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. First comes the depth, then you can think about the breadth. I like it. Well said. Um, okay. So, we got a few more people been very patient. Susan, uh, Susan, what's your question? Susan Ward, are you still there? Um, if not, Aaron.

Hi. Really enjoying this, Jay. Always great to see you and listen to your thoughts. Both of you spoke earlier specifically about the postdoc programs at your two companies and the training associated with them for young scientists. I was wondering if each of you can comment on the training that happens more on the job for young scientists who join your organizations as junior lab heads, group leaders, both in terms of technical drug hunting training but also as mentors, mentoring training, how to be a supportive, impactful mentor as they progress throughout their career.

Um, you know, Aaron, I hate to put you on the spot, but I would love it if you'd be willing to weigh in on your question. You know, Andy, you may or may not know that Aaron is a cherished colleague from my time at NIBR, now on a new adventure but was one of our very best, most scholarly, most effective scientists and honestly Aaron group leaders and mentors. And so I would really welcome your sense having actually served in that role for early career scientists to get a sense of what you felt like we did well and what where you felt we could do better. Unlike your program, Andy, we don't have an automatically assigned mentor for every associate in the building. And I'm going to bring that back and explore the feasibility. We do expect that the managers of our associates take seriously mentoring in the dimensions of feedback and inspiration and curiosity. We have a very structured program for leaders called the unbossed leadership experience where we give people some tools to build psychological safety to empower associates to carry themselves in the best way that they can which is by just being themselves. All right Aaron, what do you think? How did they do at Novartis and what could they do better?

Well, first I'd like to say Jay, the check is in the mail. Thanks so much for the flattering kind comments. Um, you know, I think one thing that Jay said earlier really resonated with me and my experience in Novartis, which is at least from the science side, I'll get to the mentoring in a second, but the scientific scholarship, there were way more similarities between my experience in academia and in industry than I had been led to believe by discussing it with other peers, including my father, who's a scientist, but came from another generation when industry was the booby prize and that's absolutely not the case now. In terms of mentoring, I think like many large organizations, if you keep your eyes open, there are fantastic examples of very supportive, very thoughtful leaders at Novartis. I found those leaders to be extremely accessible and Jay may remember that in his first maybe month I think I had lunch with Jay and talked about his path. So at NIBR I found that people were very open if somebody wanted to learn and grow, there was a very supportive environment for that to happen and some of it was organic, some of it was more structured as Jay pointed out the mentorship training. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

Great. Thanks, Aaron. Um hey, Luke, before you open the next question, I paid someone from TED also to join the call. Can we reach out to that individual? You can have them step up. Already had your turn.

Okay. Thanks a lot, Erin. Um next up, Amber.

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for the great discussion. My question is for young scientists who are joining on the R&D side. How do we, while going deeper into understanding the technology and how to apply that in an industry setting, but also to be mindful of the additional career paths that are available to us and how do we go about being more mindful of designing our careers and setting up goals for say every two years or every five years. Should we consider taking additional classes and how do we go about identifying mentors that could help us achieve our career goals? Thank you.

Maybe I'll start. Jay. So, Amber, I've been very opportunistic. I've never really ever had a goal. I've just tracked and followed my heart and things have come my way. I've learned over time that my demographics being a white male trained as I have been make that easier for me than for other people. So I do think you need to have goals and you do need to position yourself. But the one piece of advice that I'll give is create a network as robust a network that you can because in the end, especially in a town like Boston, this is a town, right? It's all so much of what happens and so much of what comes to us comes to us through our network.

Okay, great. Thanks a lot, um Amber, for your question. Everyone, um next up, Karen.

Yeah, thanks so much Andy. Really appreciate it. Take care everybody. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. So Karen, if you're there, would you like to ask a question of Jay?

I will. And actually, I had two questions, but I'll just have Jay answer both of them. So, first of all, this has been a great clubhouse. You guys have tapped into so many different topics that it could lead to multiple other conversations. You've talked about a number of things not only for entry level scientists but even mid-level people. Jay, I'd like to go back to what you had said at the very beginning where you were giving some of the summary of the baked in concepts and things that NIBER is practicing relative to diversity inclusion and you mentioned a resource material something that you had pulled all this really interesting statistical stuff from. So I'm curious if you could share that piece of material. And secondly, which was the question I was going to ask both of you, which is relative to the pandemic that we're sort of midstream in. We're still dealing with all of this and companies are still wrestling with when do you go back into a bricks and mortar environment. Could you comment a little bit on how this is affecting your culture and how that's affecting the talent landscape being so competitive?

Could you just double click on the second question a little bit because I want to be sure I hit it correctly.

Yeah. Okay. The second question is really sort of dovetailing on this whole concept of we're still in this midstream of the pandemic and how are we really bringing our employee populations back into a bricks and mortar environment. What are we going to do with that etc. But how is that affecting the cultural shift that you are going through and addressing in this war for talent? Because it really is a war for talent before the pandemic hit and now it's becoming even more competitive and I'm curious as to how that's affected your culture.

That's so helpful. Um yeah, times like this I wish I had my co-pilot Andy here but for all on the line, you know, when you work for a Japanese company it's 9:00 a.m. and in Switzerland it's 2 a.m. and one of us can still hang out in the clubhouse. Just something to think about. Always recruiting. Diversity content. I did make reference earlier to an analysis, a new report from Deerfield Management that talked about a gender gap in venture-backed healthcare companies. And I learned about it on Business Wire. But for sure at a time when I'm not focused on my iPhone but on a computer, I'd be happy to send a link to that if you can't find it online. I will say that regrettably this topic is well-considered and the numbers are every bit as stark when Forbes or HBR or Inc. cover this topic. There have been a couple of recent reports on women in science from the National Academies and the AAS, and they all year on year in my five years here where this is just baked into our strap plan, if I, it feels like there's just so little movement in aggregate of the numbers. And so we work really hard on our local environment at NIBR. I mean it's 5,600 scientists, and so we think that we can make a big change within our organization that creates ripples. Another way is, you know, we're a really good customer, Novartis. We're a big customer for some really big companies and we've started to explore how to make clear our expectations of those that we work with and contract with that they must meet certain standards of diversity. And I can tell you that there was a very memorable business deal last year that I did not support because the constituency on the leadership team lacked diversity and it was a watch out to me for groupthink and potentially a challenge in innovation. These aren't formalistic policies that we're exploring the feasibility of in our broad and international business, but I think that we can influence even from this singular organization where we are. But right now we're just trying to set a good example. That's really interesting Jay that you've said no to something on these grounds. Was that has that been publicized or are you just telling us that now? I'm just telling you that now. I hope that's okay to those from Novartis listening. I don't have a lawyer next to me, but I'll go one step further. There was a company starting and we were asked to participate in this company and the leadership team being assembled was in the dimensions that we're speaking of on this call about as undiverse as you could imagine, and I would not support participating until this was remediated. And you know what? They were appreciative of the feedback and they became a more diverse leadership team in a matter of two weeks. And so I do think that this community wants to do the right thing. And there's no question that one of the challenges to gender inequity and for sure it's true for race as well at in the boardroom is that management diversity isn't good. But management diversity we have no excuse for because the input into these laboratories is so well balanced. And this really gets to your second question in part Karen, although I know it's an independent thread, is what kind of organization are you trying to be for the associate? They're experiencing an associate doesn't experience Novartis, they experience a project, they experience a manager, they experience collaborators. It can be really easy for them to get things done or really hard. They experience work life balance in a wholly individualistic way. And so we actually have a really strong HR organization called People in Organization, PO, incredible strategic partners that have created a choice with responsibility. We call it a way to approach your job. That's a discussion with your manager, but it starts with what brings the best version of you to the lab when you need to be there. And then where do you want to be to be most effective in those moments you're not in the lab? Now Karen, I will tell you plainly and honestly that if two years ago you were on my team and you said, 'Hey Jay, I think I'm going to work at home for 13 months.' I probably would have said, 'Okay, okay.' you know, and I would have to be a good guy and a good manager and be supportive. I would have gone along with it, trust but verify, but I wouldn't have been comfortable with it. Now, we've had this pandemic experience. We all know how to use Microsoft Teams and Zoom and we've got printers and fax machines in our bedrooms and we've seen shockingly minimum business interruption to our portfolio work by making the labs safe for scientists. We've been able to keep the labs open through the pandemic, knock on wood, without any workplace transmission, but we only achieve that by depopulating them, densifying, building a structure, a climate, a culture. And actually, honestly, in some ways, it's a more inclusive environment because of the chat function on Teams. You know, no longer does the loudest voice in any discussion carry the weight of the room because everybody's in 9.5 font on my screen. And there's a lower activation energy to get a word in edgewise. So we actually have learned a lot through the pandemic. I would be lying if I said we know exactly when and how we're going to emerge from it. But I do think if we start with the cultural imperative and then we start to build clarified expectations for associates as to what distributed work and work from home mean and look like, we'll be in a much stronger place. Now you asked about the war on talent. I Go ahead, Lucas. Sorry. Let's be real quick because we have a couple more questions I'd like to get to. War on talent. It's a war on talent. Yes. We have been very lucky through the pandemic to have about our lowest voluntary turnover rate in several years. And people on average stay at NIBR for 10 years and they are in their role less than three. And so we work very hard to make this a lively work environment with a good sense of acceleration. But when people do leave and they go on to lead organizations outside of NIBR, that is baked into our talent development model and we just work to have the strongest conceivable bench.

Lots of great stuff in that answer there, Jay. Thanks Karen for your question. The only thing that I would add real quick, I'm a solo entrepreneur, so I don't have cultural issues to attend to with a team, but I am very mindful of diversity and inclusion in my extracurricular type activities. I mean, I am for my freelance writers and the people who I quote in my newsletter, for sure. That's one of the most important things I do as a journalist, but as a person who raises money for good causes in the biotech community, I just announced last week this Timberman Traverse for Life Science Cares and it's a team of 20 people in the biotech community. And to the point that one of the earlier questioners raised about the importance of network, if I'm going to take a group of people on a bonding experience in the outdoors for two and a half nights, it's 20 people, it's going to be 10 men, women, there's going to be some young people, some older people, people of color. Because this is going to help people build the kind of meaningful relationships that advance careers, it's on me to make sure that that is an opportunity that's open to everyone. Okay. So, I don't know how much time we got left. We got a lot of questions in the queue. Thanks, Karen. Um, Garma, can you uh, you've been very patient. What's your question?

Yeah, I'll get to the questions directly. Thanks for the great discussion. My question as an early career scientist is we touched upon this earlier. The specialist versus generalist mindset and which has more impact and I'm asking this in context of target discovery or pre-clinical research. We see that it's becoming more and more data-driven and I see a lot of fellow scientists, biologists who want to cross-train in machine learning or data science. I've been conflicted on this: should we focus on the biology aspect and that brings more value by specializing in that area and collaborating with a specialist from the data science side, or at early career stage actually cross-train and that is more impactful.

That's a great question here. I have a strong opinion so it's a watch out for me. I feel that in our line of work the coin of the realm is to have a grounded foundation as a specialist. Now that gets you to the table sometimes, but that's not necessarily what you deliver at the table. So you need to start as a deep and grounded specialist and become a multilingual generalist. This takes a long time. There's no shortcut. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes. And science is not interdisciplinary. It is non-disciplinary as we practice it at NIBR. So to download the concepts, the language, the experimental trajectories, it took me a long time. But as I look around my leadership team table, at a project team meeting, there's the chemist, biochemist, cell biologist, pharmacologist, data scientist, project manager, financier, but at that table, everybody is tasked with serving the science in all of its dimensions. And about collaboration, it's a skill and you just have to perfect it. The only way to do that is to get feedback when you're doing it right and feedback when you're doing it wrong.

Great. Thanks, Korea. Um, yeah, I like the metaphor of collaboration being like an exercise. It's a muscle. You have to exercise and the more you do it, the better you get, the stronger you get and the less you do, the weaker it gets. Um, thank you so much for the insights. Thanks. Um, Osaz, what's your question?

Yeah, it's Oaz. Hi, how's it going? I feel bad that Andy left. I actually spent some time in Cicada and their center for external innovation, so I guess I would have plugged in as a panelist. In any case, I also consider myself part of the young scientist demographic. Question for you, Jay: if you were to pick three big buckets of technologies or themes to focus on as somebody who's really early on, if you were to talk to yourself 25 years ago, what would you focus on knowing that you wanted to focus on big problems in the drug development space and why?

Oh man, Oaz giving me only three. I'm going to answer your question, but it's painful for me. The one that comes to mind first is quantitative methodology. I feel that the ability to with command line scripting to be comfortable dealing with primary data today, really having strong quantitative methodology is just really really important. It's actually too late for me to go back to really learn the languages of computer science necessary to interact with the data my institutes generate all the time. But I wish I could, if only to be able to communicate with data scientists. This is going to serve you well whether you end up in epidemiology, clinical development or drug hunting. The next two need to be quite specific to your curiosities. For me, I was always enamored with molecular recognition, the way small molecules bind proteins and the way that sometimes those interactions contribute to a positive medical consequence. So for me, I needed to learn the biology of diseases called pathophysiology, which I learned in medical school, and organic chemistry, chemical biology, the shape, structure, design, and to a certain extent the synthesis of molecules, but paired with quantitative methods. Your choice could be stem cells and biotherapeutics. It could be force fields and protein structural biology. But I do think quantitative methodology is something that an early career scientist just must must must must today learn.

I love that answer. The passion. Thanks for asking that. Osaz. Um we I know we're almost out of time. I'd like to get a couple more in here from AJ and say. Um AJ, what's your question?

Hi. Yes. PhD student here at Berkeley. Finishing up hopefully within a year. I have a question stemming from some of the toxicity in academia that I've seen. In academia, labs are small really intimate settings where the experience in research is completely dependent on your PI. So I have a question on what do Novartis and Takeda do either culturally or structurally to improve access to mentorship and ensure an even playing field in research in the face of research choke points.

I hold Berkeley in such high regard and we have as you may know with our Emeryville facility such a inspiring collaboration with Dan Nomura and colleagues there covalent chem proteomics. I hate to hear that experience of yours or of your colleagues that you reference could be characterized as toxic. I just know that in that environment there is an inspiring and caring and supportive place to train. I think that it isn't in this case academia versus industry but I will answer your question. We're really serious about culture. I hope every scientific environment is. We describe it. We talk about it. When I started at NIBR: brave, open and kind. Every town hall: brave, open, and kind. Every person we hire: are they brave? Are they open? Are they kind? And then you have to walk that talk. Brave: let our science be brave. Open: let us be curious to ideas from the outside, the inside, the literature, your direct report, my direct report, a different unit. And then kindness, which to me is the universal truth of leadership, affiliation, collaboration. So we're really serious about culture: inspired, curious, and unbossed. Mentorship, as you may have heard earlier, Andy has a really structured program. We embed it into the reporting relationship and then we avail mentors to scientists for their development beyond the reporting relationship so that the advice you're getting isn't influenced by the workflow. We've made it very easy to talk about interests within the organization or beyond in a way that's not offensive. Even the playing field is hard because it takes real discipline in leadership to close projects that have great champions and possibly some momentum but are hitting a fatal snag. I struggle with this. I believe so much in these teams and I know that they can fight through walls. How do we know when we're no longer doing a team a service by having them work on a project that is either core of strategy or likely to deliver a medicine? I always felt the weight of responsibility for my grad students to get them a paper, get them a job. I feel this weight of responsibility to get our scientists a drug, which is ironic because they're going to invent the molecule. So I think we could do better helping project teams more nimbly pursue other science but we can't kill too early because then we just serially follow narrow threads. A big part of it is culture and managers learning to be both a manager and a leader, being both a supervisor and a mentor. That is a big part of the required learning at NIBR.

Great stuff brave open and kind to jot that down. I think a lot of the most successful people that I've met can check those boxes. Um thanks for your question AJ. Uh last up uh say what's your question for Jay?

Hi, thank you for letting me to talk. Actually Jay touched on most of the things that I wanted to talk. But I have a few comments. One is that a comment that Jay made a few days ago about drug discovery being an artisan field made me a big fan of Jay and I started to follow you. Today also when you talk about mentor and networking, I think it's a big factor to having a good network and a good mentor and sometimes you don't expect where to find your mentors. The things that happened to me was that I was working with a bioinformatician you might know him Gant Belgard and we had a paper in pipeline and suddenly he became my mentor, and that was the inspiration to start thinking about coming to R&D and pharma and thinking about being in academia because some things happened. For example, I wrote a grant application and it was rejected based on a paper that we had in pipeline and everyone was happy with it and everyone was telling me that you need to play the game, build your track record, publish more papers then reviewers will fund you. Then I started thinking, why should I waste my time? Should there be another way to raise money, do the things that I want to do? It happened when I started listening to podcasts and learning from the old biotech academy I would say and that was the biggest thing that I decided to think seriously about biotech. I just wanted to thank you for coming into clubhouse because someone like me would never be in touch and know about your club. I live in Sydney and there you go.

You listen to podcasts to learn the ropes of biotech. Jay has been a previous guest on my podcast, so was Andy, and it's really a pleasure to have Jay and Andy here today on clubhouse and sharing their thoughts. Was there anything else that you wanted to say Jay?

No, I just Hey, um say thank you. You know, Luke, I'd follow you anywhere. Maybe not over Everest. But I really appreciate the invitation to join. I will admit plainly that the challenge of reflecting on mentorship for an hour and a half was substantial so as not to be too preachy. But it is wonderful that you organize thinking around this because this is a vital dimension that we just can't take seriously enough and look forward to being a listener on this show for weeks to come. Thank you.

Thanks Jay. Last thing that I wanted to say is something that when AJ brought up this point about a difficult faculty member and I was just reading the first few pages of the new Code Breaker book by Walter Isaacson about CRISPR and Jennifer Doudna and there's a new face in science and there's a reference early in there to James Watson and you know Watson has his history right. I just think gosh there are so many people who have so much to contribute and people like Jennifer Doudna, the world's open to her now to form all kinds of companies and collaborations based on that groundbreaking discovery and there's just a whole group of people coming up that are going to do amazing things like that and hopefully follow in her footsteps. Great. Well everybody I know we've run over so thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for listening to The Long Run, a production of Timberman Report. Pedro Rossado of Headstepper Media was the sound editor. Music is from DA Wallik. See you next episode.