The Business of Biotech is produced by Life Science Connect and its community of learning , solving and sourcing resources for biopharma decision makers . If you're working on biologics process development and manufacturing challenges , you need to swing by bioprocessonlinecom . If you're trying to stay ahead of the cell or gene therapy curve , visit cellandgenecom .
When it's time to map out your clinical course , let clinicalleadercom help , and if optimizing outsourcing decisions is what you're after , check out outsourcepharmacom . We're Life Science Connect and we're here to help . Dr Brian Fisk wasted no time moving from academia to industry . In fact , his academic and industrial pursuits show quite a bit of overlap .
His PhD work on cancer metabolism made immediate impact on the clinical development and ultimate commercialization of at least two drugs , and , judging by the entrepreneurial decisions he's made since then , he seems intent to double down on those wins , with a current focus on antibody drug conjugates .
I'm Matt Pillar , this is the Business of Biotech , and I'm delighted to bring you Brian Fiske , who now serves as Chief Scientific Officer at Methic Therapeutics , the company he co-founded in 2016 , and one that's currently embarking on a phase one study of its lead ADC in non-small cell lung cancer . Dr Fiske , welcome to the show , thank you .
Delighted to be here .
It's my pleasure to have you . It's great to see you again . Dr Fiske and I first met at JPM back in January and made plans to get back together and record an episode on what's going on at Mythic . So here we go .
Before we jump into the Mythic story , dr Fiske , I want to get some background on that mention that I made about sort of your overlapping academic and industrial pursuits . It's unique , I think . I mean I've interviewed hundreds of founders and CEOs of small biotechs and often there's a much more clear line of demarcation between academia and industry .
You earned your PhD in biology from MIT in 2015 on the heels of a Harvard undergrad in biochem . That PhD you're going to clear this up for me During and prior to that PhD , you gained experience at Bain , massgen , flagship Pioneering and Agios Am I pronouncing that correct ? Agios Pharmaceuticals , agios , agios , agios Pharmaceuticals . So tell us about that .
Tell us about what looks to me like this pretty unique combination and overlap of academia and industry .
Absolutely Well . You started with undergrad , so maybe we'll go there first . Yeah , and in undergrad I studied biochemistry but also did some work in applied math and economics .
And I think if you had asked me back then what I wanted to do with my life , it would have varied week to week and I would have either said I wanted to do with my life it would have varied week to week and I would have either said I want to go be a scientist , be a doctor or do something in business , and I had the opportunity to do an internship
after my junior year , ended up at Bain . I ended up going to Bain after undergrad and I think I chose that direction , at least initially to go into business you know , general management consulting because I wasn't ready to make a decision on those three things and it seemed like the least committal path . Yeah , realized pretty quickly that I wanted to go back .
I wanted to go back to school and get my PhD in science and take that route . And as a step on my way there , I spent a year as a lab tech in my former advisor's lab , dr David Fisher , who's the head of dermatology at MGH .
He's been a fantastic advisor and mentor to me over the years , advisor and mentor to me over the years and , yeah , left being left my six-figure job there and took a giant salary cut to go schlep tissue samples around MGH and make cell lines . And it was fantastic preparation to get my lab feet under me for a year before going to grad school .
Yeah , while I was in grad school I decided to join Matt Vander Heiden's lab . Matt at the time it was his first year as a professor and I was his first student , so maybe that speaks to some entrepreneurial vision . Starting a new lab in academia is not dissimilar to a startup ?
Yeah , and did you ? Were you conscious of that when you , when you made that decision and found yourself in that situation ? Were you conscious of of sort of the entrepreneurial parallel , or was it just like , hey , this is a cool opportunity , and that that acknowledgement came later ?
I think so . I think so . I think you have , um , you know there's . There's an aspect when you go into a new lab , there's an aspect of focus , but also an aspect of flexibility .
I mean , in your PhD you're driving a lot of the work , but I think in a new lab you have a lot more flexibility and a lot more impact on what the rest of the lab is doing , because you are the lab to start .
So , yeah , I think there are a lot of parallels and I was probably attracted for the same reason that I'm ending up , you know , being a founder at Mythic .
Yeah , yeah , all right .
So that lab experience , I think you know , even along with sort of that entrepreneurial exposure of building out a lab that didn't previously exist , the result of the work you did in that lab also , if I'm not mistaken , if I'm reading this correctly , the work that resulted from that lab work also contributed to , it seems to me right , the acquisition of the taste
for drug development and industry . Would you say that's a fair assessment .
Yeah , absolutely To be clear , I ended up consulting for Agios , and so Matt was on Agios' SAB and also contributed to some of the programs there , and I had colleagues who were working on projects that were directly related to IGOs .
I wasn't working on anything like that , but um , I had a lot of skills in um doing so-called hot experiments , radioactive experiments and doing um mass spectrometry based metabolomics where I got into some collaborations with Agyos and essentially ended up consulting with them for two periods and that was super exciting .
That was my first taste of real entrepreneurship , where when I did my first stint with them , they were 30 people , mostly chemists , working on trying to find a lead drug , and then , when I came back a year later , they were 130 scientists . They were in phase one .
They were seeing some fantastic results for really sick patients and it was so amazing to see what had been done in only a year and just got really inspired to do something , get involved with something that looked like that .
Yeah , yeah , when did ? I ? Don't want to jump ahead if I got the chronology wrong , but when did flagship come into the picture ?
Sure .
So , based on my experience at Adios and again thinking gosh , I really want to do something that looks like that , get involved in some way with something that looks like an Adios and ends up having an impact on patients and building a really exciting company , I started to reach out to my network because it wasn't clear at that time that academia was going to be
the right thing for me , the right next step for me . So what would it look like to work in biotech ? And the advice that I got was hey , as a junior person , your career is going to be inflected by how well the company does right .
So if you show up at a small biotech and this small biotech does super well , you're going to have a ton of opportunities to grow .
If you show up at a small biotech and it fails , that's okay because you're a junior person and no one's going to blame you for the failure of the biotech , but you're going to have to go somewhere else to get those sort of growth opportunities . And so that immediately brought the question to my mind of okay , how do I find and start ?
You know , figure out what a great biotech looks like , and people would give me the answer as well , you should go talk to the CEO , or you should think about the science and whether you think it's going to translate into the clinic , and my answer was gosh . I don't know how to do any of those things .
So I got really interested in the question of what makes a really great biotech , and that led me to Flagship , because I felt like Flagship was a place where they were creating multiple biotechs in the same place at the same time , and that I would get some experience to try to figure out what works well and what doesn't work well when you go out and start a
biotech .
Yeah , definitely a good sort of petri dish to play with those concepts at Flagship A lot of opportunity for that . You've mentioned , though , a couple of times so far in this discussion .
You've mentioned a couple of points where it sounds like you , you know , personally sort of had to pause and think about what you were doing , what you wanted to do next , like you talked about at Bain , you know , I'm not sure you know just whether or not this is where I want to stay , or it took you a while to determine .
I want to go back to academia , and then you just mentioned , you know , at Agios , like you know , or Agios , that is what's my next step going to be .
In those moments , the question I have for you is like , in those moments of what's next in your mind , was there ever any sort of anxiety or pressure , or was it a little bit more relaxed , like hey , I've got options . Let me think hard about which options I want .
Yeah , to be honest , huge anxiety , okay , it's huge pressure , right , I love my parents and they've been a fantastic influence in my life , but my parents thought I was crazy for quitting Bain and going to work as a lab tech . Sure , yeah , I mean , I was , you know , qualifying for , you know , like poverty related tax credits that year .
But you had , I mean , you had some assurance in your mind anyway , that this is part of a is part of a step toward a greater plan , right ?
Exactly , exactly , I can to something that inspires me , right , whether that's building . And to me , what inspires me ? Building a company , and building a company that is able to have a really big impact on patients who are sick , yeah , yeah .
Actually , I can imagine I was there . I have a son who's a freshman in college right now and I'm just sitting here like empathizing with your parents . We sent you to MIT for that degree so that you could do what yes , that's crazy . Um , so flagship I want to get back to flagship . Like I said , like I'm a , I'm a big fan of flagship .
I've interviewed a ton of their , their CEOs and founders . Um , and it's interesting , like most of the most of this may be just anecdotal observation .
I'm not sure if there's anything to talk about here or not , but most of the founders and or you know , hired guns that I've interviewed that are with flagship companies now are execs who came from big bio , you know , and the stop atship has been sort of part of their move into emerging .
I haven't had occasion to talk with execs that did time at Flagship like early in their career , right , like coming out of the experiences you came out of , was that unique ? Like to you to Flagship , was that sort of a unique scenario ?
to flagship . Was that sort of a unique scenario ? Great question . So one thing I would note is that flagship has changed over time .
I can't speak for flagship anymore , we're just John . We're just speculating right now .
There you go , I think flagship flagships undergone a ton of growth and they were growing a lot . Um , and you know , when I was there as well , um , but no , my , my role was not unique . Um , I was a you know associate and then a senior associate , and they had lots of other associates at the time , I think maybe around 10 .
Um , but you know , I checked a few years later and they might have had 30 or 40 . So they have a lot of folks who are right out of some sort of grad school , usually PhD , who are working now with many of those execs who have been in biopharma and they're transitioning back to company creation , who work together to get the companies off the ground .
Why did you leave ?
Flagship .
Yeah . So I left Flagship with nothing other than the idea that I wanted to start a biotech independently . So part of it was , you know , I'd had two experiences at Flagship co-founding , or working on founding companies , creating companies and I wanted to seize the challenge to see if I could do that independently .
And in my vision for what that looked like , I learned things at Flagship that were indispensable for founding Mythic absolutely critical . So Flagship was an incredible experience for me in that sense . But my vision for what I wanted to build was a little bit different than a Flagship company . I think , at least speaking about the time that I was there .
A lot of flagship companies tend to focus on building a technology first and then thinking about what are the therapeutic applications of that technology . And obviously that's worked out really well , sometimes right , like Moderna Thank you , moderna , for the COVID vaccines .
But Moderna was originally , I think , spent a lot of time building a technology that enabled them to go and do that . I think what I was most excited about was building a therapeutics focused company from the start and that being the primary goal and yes , you know it's embodied at Mythic right .
And so at Mythic , yes , we want to use novel technology to make that drug that's going to benefit patients . We know we need to . We want to be doing technology to make that drug that's going to benefit patients . We know we need to . We want to be doing something different than other companies .
But the focus at the end of the day is how do we make the best drug we possibly can for those patients ?
Yeah , when did you feel most equipped ? And then I'm going to ask yeah , I might as well just throw both parts of the question out now when did you feel like most equipped and where did you feel the least equipped in terms of the body of knowledge that would be required to found mythic ?
I would say you know one of the changes right off the bat . It's a very obvious one . You got to be able to bring people on board who are not in the flagship ecosystem .
You know , when you're at flagship doing company creation , you're bringing in flagship resources , you're bringing in people who are in the flagship network , you're bringing in money from the flagship funds and you're working with the partners to pitch them and do that and all of that comes .
That whole ecosystem obviously has a focus and a certain set of goals , a certain set of things that they're optimizing for , a certain set of goals , a certain set of things that they're optimizing for , and it's been very successful . But it's very different from the wider universe .
Right , it's got its own place in the wider universe and so , I think , learning more about how do investors other than Flagship think about investing in a therapy use company over different rounds because you want to make sure you have a company that's investable at every single stage , thinking about , uh , you know , why would somebody join , not a flagship company ,
but a company that's just , you know , two guys and an idea , and how do you bring that , bring that team together and build , build culture ?
Um , and so I think you know maybe I'll end there I think the most challenging thing over time has been how do you bring together a team and how do you build a culture that allows you to be successful in the way that you want to be successful , and it's not only building that in the first instance , but also nurturing it and not taking any of that for
granted . I feel incredibly honored to work with my colleagues . I'm incredibly honored that they came to work at a company that I co-founded , and that's probably been the best part of this whole experience .
Yeah , yeah , okay , and we'll dig into that here in a minute . I feel like I might've got ahead of my skis a little bit because I want to hear the origin story and if you're a listener , and you're listening to this point , lest you be misled into thinking like Mythic is just this tiny little startup Like Mythic's making great progress in a hurry .
I mean , the company has become sizable , well-funded . We'll get into the details , but you know you've done something from nothing in a relatively short period of time . But before we get any further into that , I want to hear about , like the two guys and the idea .
Yeah , let's do it . So I co-founded . I left Flagship . I had a office mate and fellow Flagship associate leave , Alex Nichols , who was my co-founder , and after we both left flagship , we decided to team up and start something , and for the first nine months it was two guys around a living room table .
Funny enough , Alex ended up moving in right next to me without even knowing it . It was just a complete accident . And so we somehow convinced our wives to let us not have jobs and just go order each other's place and sit around the living room table thinking about how to start a biotech .
Wow , that's pretty convincing . We'll spend some time offline . Teach me those . So here you found yourself with the grace of your wives , your wives graciously giving you the opportunity to sit around and brainstorm for a few months .
Where does that even start ? Like , did one of you have a seed in a science ? Or did one of you have a motivation and a specific indication ? Or did one of you have some semblance of a target idea ? Like what was the , I guess , nucleus of the conversation ? Like , where'd you start ? This is something that Flagship had prepared us well for .
Right this stage of you know what do you do when you're at zero and how do you potentially work , build something on paper and then test you know is that going to work or not ?
I think , at a high level , your job as a very early stage entrepreneur who's just starting out is to take bad ideas seriously , and what I mean by that is before something is a good idea , like a CRISPR or ADCs , for example , usually before that . The reason why it's so popular in the hot new thing is because before that it was a bad idea .
Maybe it was a bad idea because no one thought it would work . Maybe it was a bad idea because no one could do it Right , but it wasn't something before it was a big thing .
It was something that in a hot new thing , it was something that not a lot of was the process of thinking about things that weren't in favor , but trying to understand why people weren't super excited , why they weren't a hot thing already , and then evaluating well , how could we be part of and build a company that could be part of changing that ?
And that's what we found . With ADCs , we became fascinated with ADCs . On with ADCs , we became fascinated with ADCs I think even back in 2017 , when we started working on ADCs . The clinical trials oftentimes the clinical results were oftentimes nothing to write home about , but they did show that the drug worked .
Oftentimes the typical story would be , let's say , solid tumor indication , 20% response rate , but the responders oftentimes were highly concentrated in these patients that expressed very high levels of the target . So what's going on there ?
Well , eventually we became very excited about that sort of data because it suggested that if you had a patient who could deliver enough ADC to their own tumor by virtue of very high target expression , then they would respond , whereas for even intermediate , especially low expressing patients , you couldn't get a response because the antibody component of the ADC wasn't
efficient enough at delivering the payload to the tumor . And so , with that realization of what was going on , we thought clinically for a lot of different targets , particularly in solid tumors , plus the fact that the antibody side of the ADC equation hadn't really been looked at very much , we got very excited about .
Hey , you know , here's a field that's a bit out of favor , but by taking a new approach we might actually unlock something that's holding the entire feel back .
Was your co-founder a scientist by training as well ? Yep , so Alex is a PhD as well . You know you're you're having an intellectual , uh , discussion about a therapeutic area . I don't . If , if he , if he , didn't have chops to to understand the conversation , uh , it'd be , it'd be a difficult one to sell .
You know , in those early , intimate , one-to-one conversations , you know it'd be , it'd be difficult to , I guess , create a , an environment where you're both sort of rallying around the same concept . What were the concerns ? Like , to your point , the ADC space was established but not thriving .
Like , adc has been around for a while , but it certainly wasn't the ADC landscape that we see today , back in 2017 . So you had a concept that would change the paradigm , change sort of the status quo of what had been happening in the ADC space . But what were the , I guess , maybe red flags ? Like what were some of the concerns that needed to be overcome ?
Right , to put your stake in the ground and say , yeah , you know what ? Like , let's go try to chase this thing down . Sure , let's go try to chase this thing down Sure .
I think there's a general red flag when you're pursuing , maybe a contrarian idea , in that you're going to have to tell your story in order to make people get it , instead of people coming to you and saying , oh , you're an ADC company and it's five years later .
And , of course , I would join an ADC company . Of course , oh , you're an ADC company and it's five . I don't know how warm the VC community is going to be if we just pop up and say , hey , you know these ADCs that people have been struggling with for so long . We think we got to figure it out . Give us some money .
Yeah , there's a good , there's a great story that our lead investor , Brian Roberts at Venrock , tells that when he first did diligence on us for the Series A , he called up his oncology experts and they said ADCs why are you doing something in ADCs , Brian ? This doesn't make any sense .
Yeah .
Go do self-therapy , go do something else . So it's those sort of reactions .
But I think people like Brian were actually able to , and willing to listen to what we had to say , which , you know , I'm especially appreciative of , because we're not the 50 year biopharma veterans coming and saying this is the next thing where the you know guys who spent two years at flagship coming to tell you , you know , we were in the living room and we
thought that this would be a good idea and maybe a little bit of evidence that goes along with that . But uh , yeah , it is . It is something to overcome . On the other hand , you know , I think we're taking such a different approach at Mythic . I still feel like we have , you know , convincing to do .
I think the ADCs are hot right now , so we're kind of in that category , but we're not a linker payload company , and when I think people think of an ADC company , I actually think they're really thinking of a linker payload company , and so I still think we haven't quite hit our hot moment yet .
So yeah , unpack guess , um assumed uh linker payload company , like the company that everyone just assumes when they think ADC . Like what's , what's different about you ?
Right , so maybe , as I was , I started to introduce beforehand um in this conversation . We focus on the antibody component of the ADC rather than the linker payload component , and we design antibodies that can deliver more of that linker payload .
More of that payload , really , to cancer cells where you want it , and less payload to normal cells where you don't want it .
Gotcha , Okay yeah , Whereas a lot of like . I was just looking at some ADC companies this morning in preparation for a project we're working on that's going to show up a little bit later in the year , and I found that many of them , like you know , their antibodies are coming in from an outsource provider . Like .
So you're saying , like you're doing , that antibody development in-house Is the Linker technology , then outsourced at Mythic .
Yeah , so for our first program we're using the CMMAE , which is a well-known linker payload . Our platform is fundamentally agnostic , right . So we've shown our technology works with the CMMAE . We've shown it works with topoisomerase inhibitor payloads . We've shown it works with DNA toxins . So , regardless of what we attach to the antibody , it will deliver more .
And you're right , though , in that I think the reason why no one is really focused on the antibody up to this point other than mythic , is because some of the challenges behind the linker payload historically were so difficult to overcome , and I think having overcome some of those challenges is why the ADC field is experiencing so much success right now .
But the question is what's the next generation ? What's going to solve the problems that we have now ? Not the problems that we had 20 years ago .
Yeah , yeah , what are the problems now ? Like you know the problems 20 years ago , you know , I think we could reflect on that toxicity and payload , and trying to get the equation right , you know . So , assuming that we've gotten to a point where that has been figured out , what challenges do you face now ? Like , what are the problems now ?
Yeah , so .
Uh .
One of the most inspiring visions for the field and it's not necessarily my vision , but I will ascribe to it is that ADC should replace chemo , because there are more efficacy , less toxicity . I mean just the word chemo .
We try to avoid even using the word chemo in association with what we're doing with ADCs , although many of the payloads , technically , they are chemo . Just the word chemo makes you think of maybe someone who has cancer , who has the potential to get better , but it's not going to be a fun experience . So I think that's one of the most inspiring visions .
But if we're actually going to do that and we're actually going to replace chemo with ADC , is we're going to have to get ADCs to work for broad segments of patients and many different targets . And right now we're in a place where , at least in solid tumors , ADCs work really well for targets that are very highly expressed .
So HER2 in breast cancer and a couple of other cancers , Nectin-4 in bladder cancer these are very highly expressed targets . But where ADCs don't work currently are lower expressed targets and , specifically , patients who have a target but it isn't expressed at those super high levels .
And so being able to treat patients with intermediate levels of expression , low levels of expression , being able to look at targets that don't have hundreds of thousands of copies per cell , like a HER2 or a Nectin-4 , and being able to look at patients who are inherently resistant to the payload that's really what's going to allow us to replace chemo .
Yeah , and when you so back up a few years , when you were , you gave a great example of Brian , one of your lead investors , jumping on board when you were out there trying to raise that Series A and in subsequent fundraising efforts , I'm curious about what were the keys to winning that favor .
In a market , especially in those early days , was , I don't want to say , frowned upon ? That might be too strong , but certainly not in favor . So what was it sort of your vision for where ADCs go next and the way that you go about putting them together ? What were some of the keys to winning that favor of the VC community ?
What were some of the keys to winning that favor of the VC community , I think , telling a big story really well and very clearly and succinctly and then not giving up Just trying over and over and over again in the face of failure .
So I think I've probably been in 500 investor conversations like distinct investor conversations at this point , and only a handful of those were ever yeses .
Yeah , this is totally out of left field . Just curious , though , because you're young and because your co-founder was young as well , like when you guys , you know you're , you're still young . I don't want to , I don't want to age you , but in 2016 , 2017 , like you know , a couple of years experience coming out of your PhD program , did you experience ?
And , you know , did you ever get any perception from um , from some of the VCs that , like , who's this kid , like what's he looking to do ? You know , go around the block a few times and then come back and see me .
Yeah Well , during that process we definitely went around the block many different times . I like how you , you , you frame that . Maybe I'm a little older now . I certainly have a few more gray hairs . Oh well , the business will do that to you , it will Look . I don't know , I can't say I can imagine different places that maybe have gone different ways .
Maybe people were excited that young folks with our background were trying to do something new and maybe made them listen and pay attention to what we were doing more .
But I'm very thankful for having found people like Brian , like Graham Helmy at Viking , who's one of our other lead investors , dan Farrow at Omix , josh Koppelman at First Round to start it all off in our seed round who were willing to listen to what we had to say .
And I would also say , you know , a big moment for mythic was when we raised our angel round .
Um , and so it wasn't just me and alex , it was me and alex and a group of angels who , for some unknown reason you know well , hopefully for good reasons you know that that they saw something here that , uh , they wanted to invest in mythic instead of doing anything else they could have done without money .
Um , and so during our angel round , we raised about 750 000 in uh in summer of 2017 . And that was about nine different C-level biotech execs , and so , at that point again , it wasn't just us . It was us plus these . You know , we're borrowing the credibility and advice of our angel investors in order to , you know , grow and move forward , yeah , yeah .
So tell us about what you're putting the money that you've raised today toward . Tell us a little bit about the clinical program and or I mean you tell me where you want to start . You talked about how Flagship sort of takes this approach generally around .
Let's build a platform or a technology and then figure out what we do with it from a therapeutic standpoint . Or a technology and then figure out what we do with it from a therapeutic standpoint . You kind of took the opposite route . Yet you've landed on , you've got a platform right . I mean , the company has a platform now , I guess .
tell us a little bit about the build out of that and what it's producing , and yeah , the brick and mortar that's put together as a result of your investment success to deliver more payload to cancer cells and less to normal cells across about 20 different targets .
We inserted our engineering into over a hundred different clinical stage ADC antibodies and we're on candidate number I think , 16,000 at this point . So we've done this a lot and we built a platform and a team that's very good at at , you know , doing this very quickly . Um , that's very good at doing this very quickly .
Out of that effort right , because I think what we saw was a potential for this type of engineering to result in a therapeutic that would have an impact on these lower expressing , less sensitive patients , we very quickly found where that technology worked really well , and one of those was MET , which is the target of our lead drug .
We also found where it didn't work , and I think that's part of you know , in my vision at least , even if you want to make just our interest in making the drug , if you have some sort of an insight on how to do that , you're never going to avoid a messy car accident between your technology and target biology .
Some things science allows them to work , some things it doesn't , and so we went very broad , very early to try to figure that out . Where was it working the easiest , the quickest , the fastest , the best ? And so that was MET , at least initially . And so our lead ADC is ADC targeted against MET .
It's currently in a phase one dose escalation , dose expansion trial as monotherapy a non-small cell lung cancer and we're nearing the tail end of the dose escalation portion . We're working with a number of sites and I'm just incredibly grateful to the sites and the patients who have been on this journey with us so far .
Yeah , how big is the company ? Now ? I mentioned that your growth was pretty rapid . I mean , once things got rolling , I mean you've got a pretty sizable outfit now . So how many employees are with Mythic ?
So we're at about 40 right now I'm at our world headquarters here in Wolfham .
Yeah .
Yeah , just one location to date .
Yeah , what are the I guess intentions ? I mean , obviously it's early , you're in phase one , but what are the intentions longer term ? And this is the question that I always love to ask , because I can can take to a certain point and actively sell , or partner , or we want to take this thing to the finish line .
You know we want to build a full service biopharmaceutical company that works in specific . You know a specific area of indications and you know , with the caveat that opportunity presents itself and those plans can all change .
So I never hold I'm not holding anyone to anything , but , like you know , this is your first , your first go at at founding a company around a molecule and an idea that you and your co-founder , you know , kind of put together on your own . There's gotta be a strong sense of ownership right around around what you're doing .
I'm sure you've put a lot of time , money , uh , and and intellect into it . Um , what would you like to see happen ? Like , let's put it that way , like , what would you like to see happen with this company ? Where , where would you like to take the company ?
I'd like to see , I'd like to cure some patients or at least make make some patients feel a lot better . Uh , and it's exciting to be be in clinic and doing some of that right now , but obviously we have to go through a number of stages of development before we have an even even bigger impact .
And so where I would want to go with the company is building an enduring multi-product oncology company . We've seen , we've done a lot of engineering , like I talked about , and we've seen the impact that this sort of an approach can have .
We started out with so-called pH engineering to accomplish this effect of more delivery to tumor cells and less delivery to normal cells . But we have subsequent generations of different types of engineering that we can also achieve the same effect and combine it with pH engineering , and so it's great to have a lead program , but we're building a pipeline behind that .
We have a second program which will come to start , IND , enabling work this year for a potential IND file at the end of next year . And so building an enduring multi-product oncology company that can have the full impact of what we've discovered with our technology and our approach .
Yeah , that technology , the discovery , I mean . You mentioned 16,000 iterations .
Right now , one clinical candidate , someone who isn't intimately familiar with the way that this business works and discovery works , would look at it and go if I made 16,000 widgets today and none of them were quite right and walked out with one , that'd be a pretty frustrating experience and this is going to lead back to .
I mean , and obviously most of our audience understands how this business works but at the same time you build an organization . You know 40 people now 40 people in growing plus partners and you know manufacturing partners growing , uh , plus partners and you know manufacturing partners . Um , and you mentioned this earlier , you know the , the culture of method .
You know the , the team and sort of the mission . Um , it can be a frustrating industry to work in if , if you don't embrace those odds and that you know quote , unquote failure rate . So share , share with me a little bit about that . You know it's a young company led by young people . Um , you've , you've built this organization .
Uh , it's a tough business to be in . What does , what does Brian Fisk do to maintain , to build and maintain a culture of positivity and momentum and and excitement about what you guys are doing there ?
So , first off , it's the't cost us much to do multiple cycles of iteration with hundreds and hundreds of candidates , thousands of candidates on any given program , and we keep a very high bar for what we take in the clinic .
Essentially , it's got to be best in class , it's got to be treating some very sick patients , of whom there are a lot of them in order for us to get motivated to bring something into clinic , and I think that's very motivating for people .
One of the and we may have talked about it before in general terms , but one of our core values in Mythic is what we call patient-centered science , in that we get really excited about science that's going to have an impact in patients , and letting that impact in patients lead like what that drug looks like and the effect it's going to have , lead us to what
sort of technologies would we have to do in order to accomplish that , rather than the other way around . And I think that's been very motivating to a lot of folks .
A lot of folks have come to us , come to work with us , from other companies where maybe they had a really exciting technology but it never really translated into a drug that had an impact on patients . And so that's not everybody .
Some people like to work on technology , some people like to do other things , but that's the folks that we've attracted at Mythic and so keeping that really high bar , being really sure that we are giving ourselves the best shot possible to have something that could really impact patients when we make that decision to put something into I&E enabling studies that's been
a core part of who we are enabling studies .
That's been a core part of who we are . Yeah , yeah , Very good . You mentioned 40 employees . I said 40 employees and growing . That growth was recently marked by the addition of a new CEO . Yeah , so tell me a little bit about that . What went into the determination that you needed a new CEO ? Was there any you know ?
Was there sort of an inflection point around that , around that hire ? And tell me about the hire itself .
Sure . So we're incredibly excited to be working with George . So George Eliadis joined us . From jazz he was formerly chief transformation officer and head of business development at jazz of business development at jazz .
Uh , brings a ton of experience in commercial launch , mna , um , you know product strategy , et cetera , um , so I think he's the right CEO to take what we have , which is some interesting proof of concept and a platform , and scale that into multi-product , enduring oncology company .
You know , and yes , you know , maybe I said he'll be doing that He'll be leading the team to do that ?
Yeah , yeah , yeah , definitely leading the team . I mean , this is interesting to me as well , like you're the chief scientific officer . Chief science officer scientific or science , scientific , scientific Okay , chief science officer , chief science officer Scientific or science , scientific , scientific Okay .
I don't know if there's anything different between those two words , if it's just semantics . But you're the founder and chief scientific officer . What kind of goes into the thinking around that You've got two founders .
You say , okay , we're going to form up a company Like you just hired a CEO who you think is going to be equipped probably better than you , you know , to , to , to go do those , you know , um , building oriented things .
What goes into the thinking around , like , who's going to take what role when you , when you found a company with a scientific background like yours ?
I in my thinking it's really about so . So to my co-founder , alex was CEO for a period of time and then transitioned out of the company about two years ago , and so we had that as sort of an open role .
And then we had a search open and then ended up hiring George , who we're fantastically excited about because he's really the right person fantastically excited about because he's really the right person . In terms of picking roles from the get-go , we didn't have roles for the first year or two , we were just co-founders .
And then , in my thinking about how you pick roles , again , I would go back to something I said earlier , which is what's the role from which I can have the most impact on what we're doing ? And for me that was a science . I had a background in oncology from my PhD .
I felt like it was something I was uniquely strong at , and Alex had his own set of strengths that we ended up deciding he would go be CEO . Yeah , I .
I was just curious . You know when you're forming things up , it's interesting . You know who's going to play what role . George you said . Is he right there in your world headquarters with you ? You guys kind of in lockstep right now , like on the daily .
He is , yeah , so he's been here for two weeks and then this week he's in SF packing up and moving .
Oh , very nice . Yeah , it was a two-year period between Alex's departure and bringing George on Mm-hmm . Was that an active search the entire two years ?
Yes , and how did you go about ? Like what were sort of the strategy and the keys to landing the right person ? Someone , maybe very secondarily to that , who had a set of skill sets that was complementary to our existing executive team ? So we haven't talked about them yet as much .
But Sander , who's our chief operating officer , also does the COO thing but also runs manufacturing for us , has had an incredible career in that and very , very skilled . And then Gilles Gallant , who's our chief development officer , comes to us from Daiichi . Sankyo .
Daiichi is the company that created Inher2 , which probably kicked off the current EDC craze , as it were , and Gilles was actually the program lead for a year or two , so that went well . And then he was promoted to head all of oncology clinical development at Daiichi and then came to work with us .
Yeah , yeah , building an all-star team . My frequent guest , alan Shaw , says investors don't bet on horses , they bet on jockeys . And it sounds like you put a pretty good team of jockeys together there at Methic . Absolutely it sounds like you put a pretty good team of jockeys together there at Mythic . Absolutely , what's next ?
Who's next on your I shouldn't say who , don't name names , but what role is next on Mythic's , I guess , hit list in terms of executive development or you know , for that matter , even scientific advance ? Like , who do you need ?
I think we're . We have a pretty complete game right now . Um , you know we are a private company . I would bet that at some point , you know , we're already starting to think what it would take to become a public company . I don't think we're committed towards that path at all , but it's something you got to think about ahead of time .
Um , you know , the thing that comes to mind is maybe there's a chief financial officer in the works if we decide to go down the public company route . But right now Sandra's running finance and doing quite well at that .
So no immediate need there , and I think we're going to focus on onboarding George , working with him to figure out next steps in the next few months , and then , yeah , build and grow from there .
Yeah , any big next steps or inflection points on the horizon for the company on the whole . Obviously , this trial is probably keeping you pretty busy right now .
Yeah , it's an incredibly exciting time at Mythic . So we're wrapping up the dose escalation phase of our trial . It was done in unselected patients , which we know is not our patient population , but we learned a lot of things about safety , about PK , about dose and some early signs of efficacy . We were also able to go fast .
I mean , that was why we chose to go unselected to begin with was to go fast , and we've achieved that . We've had incredible enrollment up to this point . That's also a credit to the investigators and patients , very thankful for them . And so there's that whole package of data that'll come together this year .
There's also the package of data that we're going to use to motivate , starting ID , enabling work for our program too . So , uh , I'm incredibly excited about that and what we're doing with program too .
Uh , and so , from a data perspective , we're , uh , it's a good time to think about another financing and , with that financing , focus on getting into the dose expansion portion of our trial , funding a path to pivotal for the lead program and then bringing that second program to ind yeah , and I'm assuming you've shared all that you're willing to share or can't share
about that second program for now , yes okay , all right , you know , but I had to ask , of course , what haven't I asked you that I should have if I were a better interview , brian . It's been a fantastic interview , I think you know .
Maybe the message I would leave with or that I would focus on is again , or that I would focus on is again , we're a very different type of ADC company , focused on the antibody component .
We're not a linker payload company , but we're hoping to stand on the shoulders of what's been done and what will be done on the linker payload side to have this very unique ability to deliver more tumors and get a broader set of patients to respond , so that we can replace chemo with something safer and with something more effective .
Yeah , all right , so I lied . I have one more question for you . Maybe I didn't lie , I don't think I said that was my last question , but you just brought up this .
you know you brought up this point , we and we alluded to it earlier the fact that , like , the ADC space has sort of exploded in in recent months , you know , if not like you know a short number of years , it's only only recently just kind of blown up and and because you just made sort of your final , your final statement around you know reiterating this , this
idea that Mythic is is a different ADC company with a different approach . What is your take on sort of the crowded landscape and cacophony of noise in the ADC space that's happening at this very , very moment ? What's your take on it ? Is it good for Mythic and the industry ? What's your take on it ? Like , is it good for Mythic in the industry ?
Is it challenging to be heard and noticed and seen and differentiated ? Is there a bunch of noise out there that needs to positive clinical proof of concept data ? There are a lot of deals happening and they're big deals .
It's hard to find a deal that looks like that , that is less than a billion dollars up front , and that's because ADCs can address large indications and they're highly manufacturable at this point . They're not a bespoke manufacturing process like cell and gene therapy , for example .
The other thing that's going on is more in the preclinical space , where there is a lot of I don't know if I'd call it noise , but a lot of activity . But there in the preclinical space it's hard to find a deal with an upfront greater than about $50 million .
And thing that you have to think of is you know , with like a cell and gene therapy , particularly , let's say , cell therapy , when those deals were happening in the last five years , very few larger companies could do cell therapy Right , and so they were looking for partners to bring that as an expertise . With something like an ADC , farmers can do ADCs right .
They , something like an ADC Farmers can do ADCs right . They can make an ADC , they can make antibodies and they can conjugate it to a payload . And so you have to bring something different or you have to bring clinical data to the table , and I think that's what we're looking to do .
We're looking to bring both , but I think that the preclinical spaces , which is very frothy , is inherently capped . We're looking to sort of put that aside and take things to clinical POC where we can generate that usually value inflecting data set .
Yeah , yeah , very good , very good . I like that response Thorough , honest , um assessment of the space and your role in it . Um , yeah , we're , uh , we , we're . We got to wrap things up here . I've been abusing your time , brian , but it's been a fascinating conversation .
I appreciate you coming on and spending some time with us and giving us an update on Mythic and you know we'll be paying attention .
I hope to have you back on the show , you know , maybe once you've got some more data coming in from the clinical trial , maybe when you can share a little bit more on your second program , because it's an exciting space and your approach and the uniqueness of your approaches is it's great fodder for the conversation .
So thank you for coming on , I appreciate it and we look forward to doing it again . Thanks , matt . I enjoy that . All right , I appreciate it and we look forward to doing it again . Thanks , matt , I enjoy that All right . So that's Mythic Therapeutics . Co-founder and chief scientific officer , dr Brian Fiske . I'm Matt Pillar .
You're listening to the Business of Biotech . We're produced by Life Science Connect and available to hear anywhere you listen to podcasts and available to watch at bioprocessonlinecom under the Listen and Watch tab . Subscribe to our newsletter at bioprocessonlinecom backslash B-O-B and , in the meantime , thanks for listening .