The Insiders: Building relationships
From the perspective of the CEO of Tacere Therapeutics, an old/new RNAi company, I’m at BIO to lay the foundation for partnering our lead clinical candidate for HCV -- an RNAi “cocktail in one drug.” We started this program four years ago in a small private CA biotech, had an excitingly public diversion overseas for a couple years then returned to our roots in the Bay Area.
So out of a desire to hear other perspectives, I attended a session this morning that was insightfully chaired by Steven Holtzman, CEO of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, on how to structure strategic relationships. His opening presentation was an unabashed comparison of a strategic alliance to a successful marriage, necessarily containing all the same components -- respect, trust, shared values, shared goals, willingness to allow the other to change, desire to see ones’ self and the other succeed. He had then paired four couples representing partnerships from early discovery stage (Novartis/Alnylam) to marketing (Millennium/J&J). And sure enough, there was no doubt that the most successful and inspired partnerships were led by two people that shared a vision and the willingness to achieve it together. There was the couple in an uncomfortable post-honeymoon, still convinced they’d done the right thing, but not really looking one another in the eye anymore. There was the couple that had sort of inherited a relationship to find, much to their pleasure, that it was a thoroughly sound one. The couple that had been on eHarmony for 18 months identifying every characteristic of the perfect partner and when they found them, hightailed it to Las Vegas and were still grinning. And then the comfortable couple that, having renewed their vows in ever more complicated ceremonies, have found that they still rather like one another. All in all a thoroughly enjoyable session with some good insights and atypically candid remarks about how to make an alliance work.
One comment made was that ego is one of the main derailers of a good strategic alliance -- that the collaboration must be able to weather changes in personnel, with a formal and informal structure in place that is focused on the product, on the patient. And that works as a company gets larger and closer to market, as the influence of the CEO on the solvency of the company decreases. But for small biotechs, where your investors have bet the jockey and it's only your perseverance that will yield an ROI, ego is a critical component. What an ask it is of pharma to suspend ego, and yet Steven Holtzman was absolutely right in that these are relationships between people and ego is always disruptive.
And speaking of partnering -- we were wondering why there was no map of the convention center in the BIO program directory. After the fourth partnering session entailing the third trek across the bridge over the exhibition halls in two minutes or less, we concluded it was because they hadn’t actually seen a map of the convention center. Well, at least everyone will leave BIO fitter!
-- Sara Hall, founder, director, president and CEO, Tacere Therapeutics
