mRNA Upstarts With Radar Therapeutics' Sophia Lugo and Eerik Kaseniit, Ph.D.

I went and I checked out the founder's linkedin page and it said something like uh founder of uh schmader schmeripudics , or something along those lines and I was like what , what is this ?

Post on LinkedIn in fact listed a veritable who's who of partners and supporters and advisors and people throwing money , space and time at this company to advance its RNA therapeutics program . And our guests seem to have a pretty cool founding story to tell that I'm anxious to hear from them . Fresh off a Stanford PhD in bioengineering, Dr .

Eerik Kaseniit is shaping his PhD project into a business in lockstep with CEO Sophia Lugo , who brings a super interesting and multifaceted collection of private , public and nonprofit life sciences leadership experience to the table . But I'm not going to tell the story here . We're going to invite them to . Sophia and Eerik , welcome to the show .

We're honored to have you .

You were born . We're not going to go that far back , although , yeah , I'm sure there's an interesting story there . What was it , what was it in your mind that that , that sort of , planted the seed , and then what generated this initial buzz ?

That was a very exciting time . Like I mentioned , crispr had just come out to edit DNA . At the same time , actually , a slightly less known publication came out to show that you can also modify RNA in a guided fashion using ADAR enzymes , which you might get to later .

And that summer I was working in a lab as an undergrad and was right next to Moderna , so Moderna was actually a household name for us as an undergrad , and was right next to Moderna , so Moderna was actually a household name for us .

So in my mind , rna therapeutics was bound to be a platform , if not the platform , and you know it was built as a software for life . But as a computer scientist myself and a molecular biologist , I was like well , if you only have a print statement , you know just . You know just , make something , that's .

That's not quite what software is you would want to do , if then else statements and really control the flow of information and manipulate biology . So I was a card carrying synthetic biologist , really thinking about how do we think of these tiny little machines that are that make up our body and how do we fix when these little engines get broken ?

How do we fix them ? Mrna seemed to be the great solution , because an mRNA can be read by any cell , but that's also its weakness you cannot control which cells get the fix .

And so that summer I spent a lot of time thinking how can we take these genetic medicines , these new mRNA therapeutics that were bound to come out , which , of course , took a little bit of time for that to really emerge . But how do we take these mRNA medicines and control them ? And to me it was obvious that we needed this kind of layer of regulation .

We needed to fix the right cells at the right time . We couldn't take a chainsaw and do cell surgery . We needed a scalpel to really fix it . So I did take some detours after undergrad to be in the DNA world for a little bit , and did find myself at Stanford doing my PhD with Professor Xiaoxin Gao .

So when he came to me with this idea that , hey , I have this neat kind of invention where we could take an mRNA and regulate its expression so that only specific cells , cells that we want to express that RNA , are expressing that RNA . I was a very prepared mind . I already knew that . You know , this was going to be the future .

This was around 2021 , 2022 when this was all happening . So , you know , the vaccines were out , you know mRNAs as a medicine were already proven , but the next step would be how can we regulate how these mra's are expressed ? So , um , you know , that was that vision , had stayed with me , and now we had a way to actually implement that vision .

And it was later also very exciting to hear that , uh , jim collins over at mit was also thinking about this problem the same way . And uh , like I mentioned , I'm a card carrying synthetic biologist . So to see see that the father of synthetic biology was on the same wavelength as us was very exciting .

So Jim and Charging are both co-founders of the company and that's just been very exciting .

So , in terms of Buzz , when we put out the preprint describing this idea , we got calls basically the next day or emails from VCs , from companies looking to implement this technology and really wanting to see how do we take this , this technology , and and bring out the vision that was behind , uh , you know , this idea of how do we regulate and control , uh ,

these genetic medicines more broadly before those inbound calls and emails came in , were you already ?

You know , how do you , how do you take this science idea maybe a preprint or a paper and turn that into medicines ? It's a long process , so I started educating myself . Uh , um , uh on this , on this aspect .

But it is deeply personal to me . And the entrepreneurial bug my family is entrepreneurial . We've always had a family business . My dad started a farm from zero to what it is today when I was young and it was an all hands on deck Everyone's helping out .

Back then , and moving up to getting familiarized with the US healthcare system and feeling very passionately that it needed to change , I knew going into business school that that's what I wanted to do . So day one I started getting very involved in everything that Stanford Business School had to offer for entrepreneurship , which is a lot .

It is a great institution if you want to be an entrepreneur From . You know , as president of the Entrepreneurship Club , president of the Hispanic Business Student Association I was working with .

I ended up working with a lot of PhDs and professors at Stanford on very exciting technologies because at the time I was working at the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing in a program called the HIT Fund , and I believe it stands for High Potential Impact Translational Program , but I'm sorry , Natin , if I got that wrong but HIT Fund .

And I believe it stands for High Potential Impact Translational Program , but I'm sorry , natin , if I got that wrong , but HIT Fund .

And the idea is that the HIT Fund is supposed to look at the most innovative , most promising , most popular by HITs by the amount of people that request these licenses technologies coming out of Stanford , and I was the Life Sciences Fellow and so my job was get these Stanford technologies into the world .

Part of that was assess commercial readiness , assess commercial opportunity and then a lot of okay , let's make the first pitch deck for this professor , let's take them to their first VC meeting , or let's identify VCs that can actually work well with these professors or other routes of funding . It does not have to be VC .

Sometimes it was talking to PhDs and postdocs about what it would mean to start a company and what they had to think about , and sometimes it was doing customer discovery for them . So this was a really great opportunity , because I had already heard of Radar .

It was a very popular license popular license and I was primed to think about mRNA because I had recently been at the Gates Foundation where I was partly responsible for setting up COVAX and figuring out the financial and operational risks and then tracking COVAX supply chain manufacturing delivery .

Part of that was mRNA vaccines Super exciting time to be watching this new modality work at breakthrough pace through development and get emergency approval . So I was primed to really believe in the power of mRNA . I was also working on some companies on the side , so I'd been in two accelerators on different ideas around innovations I thought could be impactful .

A mutual friend , anayulia . I must have mentioned RNA to her and my excitement about RNA and she insisted that I meet Eric , the best RNA guy she knew , who really wanted to start a company and was in a different class at Stanford about entrepreneurship . So Eric and I did meet and we had lunch the first time and it did feel it felt like the right moment .

I actually in my open book bag I had a book on called the genome defense , on the patent strategy that was crafted for AMP versus Myriad and the case that decided that naturally occurring sequences of DNA could not be patented , and Eric had worked at council and had a lot of thoughts about Myriad , so we won't say them here , but we'll say we had a long

discussion about not about radar even , but it was about science-making , about our values , about our personal motivations , about what is the kind of world we want to see . We felt we had a lot in common . By the second meeting we started talking about starting a company together and then we took that process very seriously .

Over a few months we did actually a trial period of working together where we had a date on the calendar where we said by this day , if it doesn't work out , we can say no , no , no , cut the cord An escape plan .

I brought the paper to them and thought you know , I think this is exciting . I think this could make in vivo reprogrammability work for genetic medicines . What do you think ? And they agreed If you make this work , that is extremely exciting . So I did go through a process of vetting it .

We put our pitch deck together and we just started working on crafting the story and crafting where it could actually be applied . Yeah , that's the story yeah , pretty wild I know I love that .

Let's just talk science like it was literally about your interests , right , and who you are and what you want for sure , I think we should give eric a minute to talk about his uh vetting process .

I would come from Berkeley to Stanford because that's where I've been living for a while , and I would sometimes call Sophia in the car and we would go on walks on campus just to discuss these questions , these bigger questions Not always the technology , not always the plans , but these bigger questions , like Sophia mentioned , because on my side of the story I had

taken this class Lean Launchpad's kind of startup on guardrails and you were doing customer discovery , thinking about the business plan , and the main value I got of it , I think , is not having to pace around the room for five minutes before I pick up the phone to call someone , because as part of it you have to do 100 conversations over 10 weeks with folks ,

and that gave me a lot of confidence .

But as part of those conversations I also talked to a lot of founders and it's been really great to be in the Bay Area Because I feel like every founder here has been super generous with their time and sitting with me , uh , for , you know , up to three hours just just to give advice and feedback and and share experiences .

So I talked to folks who had kind of gone out at solo , uh , had co-founders with them . Uh , understand the dynamics , you know things that went well , things that didn't go well . So , um , that's just been my approach , like , really , you know strong preparation , understand what I'm getting into and we're sorry , go ahead .

How do you think about bringing in new people , expertise from the outside ? There's a million choices you have to make in the lifetime of the company and how do you go about making these choices ? What's the kind of North Star , the ground truth that you always lean on ? So we just kind of discussed a lot on the past experiences .

I wanted to see like how Sophia , you know , dealt with challenges or sought them out .

And I think the very first thing that maybe I actually haven't shared with you , but I think it was like day two or three where we were working on a one page or description of the company and we were working on it and I think we were kind of like mid-pager description of the company and we were working on it and I think we were kind of mid-sentence typing

something out and Sophia was like , all right , let's go , let's go to the business school quad and just talk to people , see if this resonates and that kind of go-getter attitude was actually what kind of ? But in some ways , check the box with me .

Most of the rest of the discussions were identifying any red flags , but Most of the rest of the discussions were identifying any red flags , but also understanding how to work with someone In the future , when things are going to be a lot more intense , a lot more involved , a lot more high stakes , a lot less time to think about things .

Can we use this time right now to really get to know each other , how we communicate , how we disagree ? We tried to have a little bit of a disagreement on you know how much should we raise ? You know , just something that you know was so , so far ahead of us that it didn't quite matter , um , but I wanted to see , like , how do we work through it .

I think we were , you know , seeing where we pulled you know this , uh , these plans , um , so that it's not just all kind of fun and and you know but actually working through a model conflict in a way that was kind of low stakes in some ways , but to understand how we how do we come ? come out of it the other way .

Because I think you know , having heard that co-founder dynamics are just so important for the success of a company , that was really important for me because , you know , my job is to make sure that we actually make it through all the way and and and grab the right people , and so you know my job is to make sure that we actually make it through all the way

and grab the right people , and so you know .

The combination of your individual and collective ambition and diligence is a key element of this , sophia , the programs that you're referencing from Stanford I imagine that there are a bunch of jealous listeners right now , aspirational , you know , would-be first-time founders who are thinking back to their PhD projects and the institutions they went to .

They've told me I mean , they've been on this very podcast . I've heard it time and time again that the translation I don't mean translational science , I mean the translation of a concept to industry and the support to enable and nurture that that translation is missing .

And and , like I said , big I'm not going to name names , but big , public , you know and private , important research institutions Sounds like Stanford had that in spades . I mean it sounds like Stanford , you know , supported the mission from the outset .

You know I had my professors in licensing negotiations we're also on the phone when we had to negotiate our first license . I have my professor in VC on the phone when we have to negotiate the first term sheet . We have the world's best people and I think that's a common theme .

If you can't control biology , you can definitely control the caliber of people that you have around you . And you have to , like Eric said , you have to be willing to pick up the phone and ask them . But at Stanford people are so primed to do that . I'll also say that it's also true for Berkeley . Stanford and Berkeley , I think people are so primed to help .

You know I had another professor , howie Rosen , who's been a CEO and chairman of several biotech , biopharma companies , and he was also there to help me on a very specific journey . Think about how to think about things and VCs as well . We , our first engagements for VCs were all very much advice seeking , all very much advice seeking . You know the VC has a .

They have an incentive to work with you and to help you figure this out and start to form a relationship , whether for this company or the next . And I had , you know , several VCs that really spent a lot of time with us thinking about well , you have a platform , where are you going to point it ? This is how we can think about it .

You know we bounce back and forth on our thinking , so how we can think about it . You know we bounce back and forth on our thinking . So really being able to pull in all that support has been really important for us and , yeah , stanford and the entire environment of Silicon Valley has been super helpful .

Of course , this idea ended up being a real company and she's an advisor to us now as well , but just this generosity and time has been wonderful .

I have no idea how these people find the time , because you know they're negotiating all these complex transactions and doing the actual work they need to do , but also making sure that they they this next generation of folks and pass on their knowledge and wisdom and experiences .

What advice would you give to the folks who I referenced earlier , who maybe don't have so much resource immediately available to them , in their quest in terms of going out and seeking out advice and guidance on things early , thinking around IP protection and VC engagement and even moving towards early CMC decisions and manufacturability , like , do we , you know , do we

have something that we think is even worth taking that next baby step ? Can you , can you rattle off maybe any , any resources that might be available to people who don't have them handy ?

So you have been close to people who have been affected by the problem , have tried to solve the problem , are solving the problem , or might have really good expertise and be unaware of the problem , but you have probably been around those people .

And so , beyond the infrastructure , I think as a founder , you , or as an executive , you have to bring your whole network into the endeavor .

And so , you know , even beyond the Stanford community , I had my very first job was in biotech , was actually in China at BGI Genomics , and my boss at BGI Genomics , the head of the health division at the time , ko Chin hi Ko . I'm going to send you this podcast .

But he , you know , now he's a managing director at Isai Innovation and he's been , you know , he's been an operator , he's been a founder , he's been an investor , he's been in the pharma side , he's been on the traditional institutional investor side . So he has a lot of experience and you know , it's , it's I was . I've been so surprised .

Every time I pick up the phone he's like if he can't talk to me , then he calls me back in five minutes and he takes the time . He was also one of the people that was looking at Eric's paper telling me like , oh idea , but he's from you know , he's from a past experience . I think biotech is a very it's a very complex field .

You do have to have a reason to be in the position that you're in . I think it is . It is really hard and it needs the proper set of experiences around the table . So anyone in a founder position or executive position has a set of experiences , have to be willing to go back to them .

So Co has been like a guardian angel in this process , walking me through this how pharma thinks about it . This is how institutional investors will think about it . This is how you have to think about it as an operator . In his experience you know others from my life too my , my manager from Gates foundation , also on the phone with her .

She has a lot of experience . I really believe in health equity . So how do we innovate in a way that's scalable ? She brings in her deep experience on design Even my undergrad lab PI . I get on the phone and I call him and see what he thinks about it , and he's an innovator in his own right .

He identified GABA as a neurotransmitter , so he knows how to manage . He knows how to manage a lab , he knows how to parallelize experiments , he knows how to take calculated risk , and so you can bring all these elements of your life into it . You probably are one or two degrees away from somebody who is very deeply experienced in whatever problem you're facing .

And as the company grows , our network multiplies . Everyone at the company comes with very , very deep experience or is highly connected . And then you bring on folks like Jim Collins .

I felt like I needed to pinch myself when Jim agreed to join us as a co-founder , because he's the father of synthetic biology and he either knows it better than anyone else or he can point us to the best expert . So , yes , that your network multiplies and you have to be willing to use it .

Sophia I mean I mentioned from the outset has public , private , nonprofit academic experience . Every single one of those experiences that you've had along the way has expanded that network . And you find yourself , you know I could look at it and go well , I mean , sophia brought those perspectives herself . She brought , she worked in all these , all these places .

But then it's the extension of that to the network .

I mean it's it's from a place of , of trying to improve access and make medicines for patients , but from a leadership perspective , it's the exact same thing right , right and quality of decision-making .

But make the decision is our viewpoint , but yeah .

As you guys formed up this , you know scientific concept and translated it to a business , obviously you don't do that without paying attention to what's going on around you in this particular space . So how have your perspectives on the RNA space at large , on where it's going , what it needs ?

perhaps , anxious about ?

Of course it's a lot of effort to make all these medicines , but in terms of the thinking around what you're making and how your application , space is limited . So you asked us to detangle a little bit from the company .

But I do think the most exciting part is being able to say where and when we're making these genetic medicines Ultimately , the proteins that affect the function , that are encoded in these mRNAs . So , having looked at and now lived at the mRNA space a bit more in more detail , big challenges are still delivery .

But what's exciting , there has been maybe a shift in the business model a little bit . We're seeing a lot of companies who are innovating on the delivery space , who don't necessarily have the ambition to make therapeutics themselves .

They want to work with other folks who have other innovations on the mRNA molecule or the disease to go after and they can provide the vehicle to get there . So we're kind of seeing a little bit of progress there Now having the thing you need to encapsulate your stuff in .

That's very important , versus having to now build an RNA company and a delivery company at the same time . And that's what we've maybe seen before , where there's a lot of mergers , where there's a delivery company and an RNA therapeutics company and they encourage to have more efficiencies .

But we really see that the delivery vehicles could be reused in other applications by other people and nobody has the bandwidth to do everything . So I think it's exciting to see that this is becoming a bit more usable by other folks from that perspective .

At the same time , mrna has been around for a while , so there's certain innovations that are coming off patent and I think that can invigorate some innovation or using of these components as well , and I think that's exciting . You know , mrna is a platform and these delivery vehicles they all are platforms and that has benefits and has challenges as well .

You know the FDA has been thinking about the platform regulation quite a bit and I think there are many nuances to really think through there . For example , if you think about an mRNA therapeutic , there's three platforms there .

Typically there's the delivery platform , there's the payload platform , the mRNA molecule , and then there's the thing you're encoding , say that it's a genome editor or something like that . Each of those is a platform on its own and could be de-risked in different ways .

So how do we , you know , in the future I would like to see , like , how do we think about these , all of these components coming together and really efficiently de-risking all of these components on the regulatory side , so that we actually can get to patients quicker , so that they can benefit , versus having to start from scratch again every time we're making a new

therapeutic , even though we change just one aspect , or brought together these , these different components . So that , to me , is exciting . I am still a molecular thinker , uh , you know in my heart , so I there's just so much interesting molecular biology that's happening , being either invented , uh discovered .

We are , of course , on the front lines there , having used existing biology within cells , but also discovered new biology , which has just been exciting because it really can make a difference to patients that currently don't have any treatment options . That's my take .

You would like to shape your own strategy right as you're entering the space as a brand new company and trying to carve your own niche right .

So there's biasing and there's specificity , and I think that there's a lot of progress on the biasing front and I think specificity by you know , modulating just the vector has been very hard for many reasons . We have an op-ed on Celanjeet , so go read it .

It is the information that tells you how static genes , so static DNA that's the same in all cells is translated into the dynamic protein profiles that are really driving individual cell behavior . So if you can read this RNA profile , the AUCGs that make it up , you can really be reading that universal code that tells you what the cell is doing .

Why don't we use that code to find specificity ? Why don't we use that code to tell us exactly what cell we're in or what that cell is doing ? That makes it our target of interest , and so we like to think about it a whole different way .

Instead of making your vector find a cell surface marker that potentially defines a cell type might be shared by others , let's think about it Just reading the code . Let's read the code straight , and so these are . It's very clear . The entire field is thinking about this . It's thinking about in vivo , going in vivo .

That is the way that we're going to make these genetic medicines scalable . That's the way that we're going to make them cost effective .

That's the way that you're going to be able to take them from just being able to be delivered at very specialized academic centers to clinics that can do just IV transfusions or subcutaneous injection to modes of administration that can be available to more patients . It's the way you're going to drive down cost . Everyone is thinking about taking things in vivo .

It's the next frontier .

To do that , you need to have exquisite specificity , particularly to get at very complex , high burden indications that affect broad populations , and that's why we at Radar and I want to say when you found a business , you can take your values and make them into strategy , and our strategy really is to make medicines for all people , as many people as possible .

We have to have design criteria that say we're going to innovate in a way that makes a step change in safety and a step change in accessibility , and that means we have to drive down costs . We have to do this in vivo . We have to be able to target diseases that are affecting broader populations and I'll say this is a shift .

I think about five , six years ago I was in China actually still , and I remember giving a presentation on the promise of CRISPR-Cas9 . But at the end of that presentation on the technological promise there was still an understanding that this would be a technological feat to most patients affected by diseases they were going after .

And you know , I think CasJvia is a huge . It's a huge success that we have Castravia approved now for sickle cell disease Most . But sickle cell affects African-Americans , africans at a higher rate . Are they going to be able to access a medicine that it's , you know , on average $2.1 million or more .

That has to be delivered at an academic center where you have to have your cells removed from the body , isolated , re-engineered , put back into the body 30 days later and then potentially have time in the ICU . Oftentimes the hospitalization cost is half the cost of that treatment and that's just not going to be accessible for most people .

It elucidates a lot of biology . It makes us know that it could be possible to move forward , but I think everyone knows we have to bring it in vivo . Same for the very promising CAR-T therapies . Also , when I was in China I was on a . I was I wasn't always in China , but it just happens that a lot but I was on a panel a .

You know , through the National Committee on US-China Relations , there was a panel between Chinese regulators and US regulators talking about CAR-T , the promise of CAR-T . I think there was almost a competition between the US and China . At the time they were already doing CAR-T trials , but even then we were talking about this has to be ex vivo today .

So these are the kinds of patients we can serve the very , you know , with very severe cancers . There was , you know , this idea that maybe one day it could be in vivo . It was just an idea . Now it's a big idea . Now people are trying to make it happen , and so in vivo is definitely the future .

That's what we believe at Radar and we believe we have a very you know , now I'm moving to the Pitch to Radar , but I do think that's the future . The Pitch to Radar is that we really think that you need , if you want to get that exquisite specificity , read the entire code of the cell .

Read the entire code of the cell and do it in a way that you can make it accessible to people . So think about the cost of the , think about the route of administration , and the last part I'll say is that what's also exciting is there's always been this idea of platform versus single asset and platform , platform , platform and what is a platform technology ?

To be a platform technology , you have to be able to develop multiple products from a similar concept .

You have to be able to develop multiple products from a similar concept and I think you know , at the end of the day , what matters to patients , what matters to pharma , what matters to VCs , is the eventual quality of the product you generate , and the promise of the platform is that you could generate one product , then multiple products after that , and I think

with Moderna we have this first products , the code vaccine , the RSV vaccine and the promise of more . You're starting to actually see platforms fulfill the platform promise , which is high quality products staged . That's also what we think is very promising at Radar . We want to form high quality products .

We really believe that if we get it right the first time , those wins will translate to more medicines . So I still think that there's a lot of promise in platform , as long as we make high quality products well , I asked , I asked the last question and you said I asked the wrong question .

We'll backpedal if we need to , but can you share any thoughts on early thoughts on what the pipe , what a potential pipeline , might look like for radar therapeutics ? Yeah , I don't mean to paint you in a corner , ask you to say anything that you're not .

We are looking at very complex , high burden diseases , so the logic has to be these cell types cannot really be isolated in vivo or targeted in vivo without an element like radar , without an element that really gets to the universal code and then selectively activates that mRNA , which are the cell types that are currently inaccessible by other technologies or not able

to be truly specifically targeted without a technology like radar . Those are our guiding principles . We have identified a few areas as very promising . I think I won't mention them , but you know , if you dug in to certain public places you could see what we're really excited about .

Because in these complex environments within the body many things can go wrong . You know , you have a complex engine and any of those parts , parts breaks down , you get a disease state .

So , uh , that's how we thought about it , that there's kind of a franchise , a pipeline behind each of these efforts , that where we can reuse the components , reuse the learnings , reuse the expertise and capabilities we've built out and really fulfill that platform promise .

Yeah , and we , we are always gathering insights from our advisors , from their experiences , particularly in the nucleic acid therapeutic space , where sometimes , um say , a mouse model might not make sense because you're dealing with sequence-sequence interactions and you really want to deal with the human versions of these transcripts you're interacting with or other components

within the cell .

So we're looking to see how have other companies addressed this challenge , maybe working really heavily in primary cells and then maybe doing an NHP safety study to prove to the regulators that this is safe , but then convincing yourself on the efficacy side , mostly with primary cell data , looking at actually donors , patient cells and seeing how your mechanisms work there

. So by working in similar systems , it can help us accumulate this data on safety and performance and I hope that this can lead to acceleration in the path to approval .

So are you seeing any , you know specific trends in the RNA funding space and how are you leveraging them and what's that kind of looking like for radar ? Yeah , so I'll say in the RNA funding space , and how are you leveraging them and what's that kind of looking like for radar ?

So there is a good , healthy level of caution . I think investors are getting more and more sophisticated . I think you still see a lot of excitement from pharma as well in the mRNA space .

So and pharma is always a good investor , because they really had a VC , tell me , a very sophisticated VC , tell me before that in the bad funding environments that there have been in the past and there have been , you know , we're in one now and there have been in the past as well pharma continues to have a strategic interest in making sure that their future

pipeline is getting taken care of , and so at this time you are seeing pharma is investing a lot of money there . A lot of their deals are going earlier and they're going in first in class new modalities . They're investing in mRNA , they're investing in genetic medicines a lot . So you still have you still have a lot of funding available .

I will say , as a general trend for those in the mRNA space , you do have to have data . The bar for data now is higher . It's also a very complex space for IP , I think for anyone in the mRNA space yes , I still think it's trendy with a lot of caution around those working in mRNA .

There are very known problems that the entire industry still needs to solve for mRNA , but you have to have the best people around the table . You have to . We haven't mentioned , you know , ramesh Subramanian is also one of our new advisors and he was former CEO and founder of Ascidian and many other RNA companies .

You have to show that the best people in RNA are there to support and believe in this mission . You have to build confidence . You've done something breakthrough , something actually meaningful in order to have the , I think , the right to start a company . There are different ways to prove that .

We like to prove that through showing that pharma cared about our technology and we'll say that's why Eric called it Schmader , schmeripudics , because we kept winning all these awards from pharma and so posting our name out there . So we were stealth , but people kept putting our name out there .

So we were self , but people kept putting our name out there so people kind of knew who we were . But you have to show that people think that sophisticated investors and sophisticated strategic partners think this is a breakthrough . You have to have a moat , usually around IP , so your IP has to be very strong , differentiated , novel .

You're making guesses as to whether you're making guesses as to how the patent office is going to view this , but you have to have a strong , educated guess and the business matters . So the application will really matter .

Of course , at the end of the day , it's all about the patient , but at the end of the day , you have to produce a high quality product that can compete with other modalities , with small molecules , biologics , whatever it is . At the end of the day , it's going to come down to the fundamentals .

Whether you exit via M&A or you exit via IPO , those fundamentals will really matter as to how you are assessed and the excitement you're able to generate , and investors have to know that , and so I think the most important decision you can make as a platform which I think mRNA companies are is where you point the platform first .

Are you finding , as you're talking to investors , that the excitement is predominantly there for mRNA as this broad technology right , as one that has been proven within the vaccination space , but there's caution on the therapeutics front ? Or are you finding that we're kind of , you know , oh , vaccinations , old hat , now it's therapeutics .

This is hot , you know , like this is the exciting trend ? Or , and are there areas that that narrative needs to be reshaped , right ? Or that you're educating on the role of mRNA in therapeutics as opposed to vaccines ?

Vaccines are very important too , but there are some we think could be features that are specific to mRNA . For example , it's transients , where you have to be very clear about which indications . Is transients a feature ? Which indications do not need a permanent change , like you have with DNA editing techniques At Radar .

We do believe that there are indications where you do want , in case a mistake is made or you want that washed out , you don't want that change in all of your daughter cells . You can make the reset at the RNA level and don't need the permanence . So you have to be very clear on the transient . So you have to be very clear on the transient story .

You have to be very clear on how you're going to be expressing enough protein to get the effect that you want , and you have to be very clear about specificity , of course , as well . So there are parts of the mRNA story that investors are very cued in on . You will always get that question on transients . You'll always get that question on level of output .

You'll get the question on specificity . You'll get the question on immunogenicity . These are also questions that the vaccine developers had to answer too . You have to be very ready to answer those questions and include them in your hypothesis as to which indications are currently available or will become available , based on the rate of progress in the field .

I mean you've won some awards the AbbVie Golden Ticket Award , the J&J West Coast Allogene Therapy Symposium Award , even the Amgen Diversity , inclusion and Belonging Award , which may be maybe not directly related to the science but is still awesome and important I'm curious about . I've got a number of questions about that .

We could probably go long on , like one how do you , you know , how do you balance that when you're trying to fly under the quote unquote radar ? But then , but then how do those early acknowledgements sort of propel and create momentum for a company that's at your stage ?

I'm so excited that others share the idea that this is an important vision , share the idea that this is an important vision . And as to the momentum , the great thing about pharma is they are a very sophisticated investor where VCs go very broad . Pharma goes broad and deep .

They have people that are really working on every part of the process that you will have to work on the entering the clinic , the getting through regulatory approval . They really understand patient populations . They have probably diligenced a lot of similar technologies .

They've maybe tried them out in-house , and so I think the pharma , what these mentions did to us and what these relationships bring one is , in early stage therapeutics you don't really have a go-to-market motion . You don't really , you can't really test directly with your eventual customer , which is the patient , as to whether this is going to work .

You do have to show an investor that the idea is breakthrough and it's worth putting so much capital into because it's going to create a product that will be higher quality than others available . This is you know , and breakthrough means it's a combination of this has never been done before . Nothing else can really catch up to us .

People don't like competition in biotech because it's just too expensive . We have a unique know-how . We have unique know-how . We have unique IP that will help us build a moat , and pharma will be very good at diligencing this .

They'll be very good at understanding the landscape of other technologies that could be similar to yours or trying to solve a similar problem .

It also has been super helpful in helping us do customer discovery , because they just hold a lot of information , and so I think the earliest you can start talking to people with regulatory experience , start talking to clinicians and start talking to pharma , because they will know the performance metrics that will show that your technology is significant .

They will have opinions on the best translational models , the best animal models . They will even have opinions on what experiments they need to see that really tell the story . You don't want to get these wrong . You don't want to have to go back and do them again .

So I think it's part of this really deep customer discovery process to get those relationships with pharma going . They are very willing to guide you , if they're interested in your technology , on how to make the best technology possible in the fastest way .

And remember , while sophie is talking , yeah , he starts rolling around in his chair to get the lights to come back on , like this guy that's some co , that's some real partnership going on right there . Yeah , that's demonstration demonstration .

But , uh , you know , especially as we start switching from the research to the development side , that's my , my main goal is to make sure we have .

We have , uh , you know , bring in the right people that we need and and reduce , uh , any friction to , you know , get things done and and get the get the science rolling um and move forward um all right , I lied , not question Cause .

It's probably a challenge to understand what is in store , and I do think the job changes not quite every day , but week to week and certainly month to month as we grow and take on new things that we need to do to make the medicine . So it's been exciting . I've learned just so much .

You know , whenever I do have some free time I like to doodle on new molecular designs and things like that . But at this point in the company we're moving and getting more serious about our individual projects and the things we're going after . So that's an evolving process , of course , and it is a different mindset .

My grad school experience was very different , All the experiences before that very different , and I I'm sure that every company is a little bit unique and different as well , depending on the problems you're tackling , the team you have around you .

When we say recruit the best people in the world , it includes everybody at Radar , so other employers do not try to steal them , but they're all approved , great people who work at Radar Therapeutics there is at Radar , now that we're moving a couple months , that we can move a bit away from fundraising , because that really is always the job .

But there is more active management . The team is growing . We're also moving .

We'll have a research function , but we're moving more towards a development function as well , and so it takes a different style of thinking , a different way of parallelizing experiments , and you know , eric and I have to make sure that everyone is really aligned on how we're moving towards where we're going .

So there is you know I look forward to that too spending more time actively with the team thinking about these problems and then on the related side , I think right now there are a lot of government policies and rulings that are very consequential for our industry , and these have always been on my mind . I've written about them before on .

You know , biomedical innovation cannot be involved in geopolitical warfare or domestic , you know fights . It's not worth it .

It's our mission's too important , and so I hope to get more involved there from the position that we're in , and I think all biotech executives need to make their voice heard right now on how some of these policy changes could be affecting our industry .

I uh , I'm gonna link to that op-ed that you referenced on salen gene in the show notes . Since salen gene's a great friend of ours , we'll link to that . Keep an eye on Radar Therapeutics . Sophia , dr Kassanet Am I pronouncing your last name correctly ? Or even Claude ?

Sign up for the Business of Biotech newsletter at bioprocessonlinecom , backslash B-O-B , Drop us a line with your guest and topical suggestions and be sure , get in touch with a lot of snow . Which episode you're picking , which you're panning ? We'll be here next Monday . Thanks for listening .