Doug Drysdale - Cybin - Part 1

Intro - 00:00:01: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee.

Jon - 00:00:23: My guest today is Doug Drysdale, CEO at Cybin. Cybin is a clinical stage biopharma company on a mission to create safe and effective psychedelic-based therapeutics. Their goal is to address the large unmet need for new and innovative treatment options for people who suffer from mental health conditions. Doug is an experienced investor, corporate director, and CEO, who has chaired the board of a NASDAQ-listed company and, as CEO for the past 12 years, has built and turned around three pharma companies. During Doug's 30-plus years of experience in the healthcare sector, he has formed cohesive management teams, recruited board members, completed 16 corporate acquisitions across three continents, and has raised and invested around $4 billion of public and private capital. Before Cybin, Doug was Commercial Products Manager at DuPont Merck, Director of BD at Elan, VP of M&A at Activist Group, CEO of Norwich Pharmaceuticals and Alvogen, CEO of Pernix Therapeutics, and CEO of Tedor Pharma. Doug's extensive background as a seasoned executive, investor, and turnaround specialist gives him a wide range of experiences that founders can learn from. Over the next four episodes, we cover a wide range of topics, including Doug's childhood and early interest in biology, his formative lab experiences, and his progression from business development to mergers and acquisitions to running a public company. We'll also discuss his current role as CEO at Cybin, a startup revolutionizing psychiatric treatments. Today, we'll chat about Doug's upbringing in a working class setting, his life-changing scholarship, and his early passion for the life sciences. We'll also touch on pivotal moments in the lab and his transition to sales at DuPont Merck. Finally, we'll discuss his time at Elan, where he combined his scientific and commercial expertise to excel in BD. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast. Doug, it's so good to see you again. Thanks for taking the time.

Doug - 00:02:08: Hey, John. It's really good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jon - 00:02:10: Of course. So as we were doing our homework and just getting prepared for this conversation, you know, we saw the wealth of experience that you've had in the industry and really thought it'd be fascinating to turn back the hands of time and really just learn about your early upbringing and how it's, one, influenced your business philosophy and two, how it's influenced your leadership style. So if you can tell us a little bit about your early days, we'd love to dig in.

Doug - 00:02:35: Oh, yeah. Okay. I can go really early.

Jon - 00:02:37: Yeah, go for it. Go for it. 

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Doug - 00:02:39: Yeah. Okay. So I was born, I grew up in a pretty poor working class setup. In fact, when I was born, my parents lived in my grandmother's mobile home with her. And then a few years later, she kicked us out. But then I spent all my childhood living in government housing and all the way through. But when I was, let's see, I must have been 10 years old. I had an amazing teacher who encouraged me to take the entrance exams for private school. Now, there was no way we could afford even a penny of tuition. But anyway, we did it anyway. We didn't tell my parents. And I got into this school, and they gave me a full scholarship. I didn't have to pay for a thing, not books, not uniform, not sports gear. But then, of course, I had to go tell my parents what I had done. But that teacher, that event totally changed my life. It gave me just a completely different perspective on the world. So in the little bubble that I was growing up in, pretty much everyone around us were, including my parents, doing manual jobs. Nobody knew anything about the stock market. There were no executives and corporate business people. If you made it as a plumber or an electrician or a tradesman, you were doing really well. After spending some time in this private school, it was clear from the people that went there and their backgrounds that they had no such ceiling on their perspective at all. They were all aspiring to be doctors or lawyers or jet pilots or go into the military. There was no sort of cap on what could be done. And so that was a real eye-opener and showed me that if you've got the confidence, you can pretty much do anything you want to do. So that was a real, probably the biggest bonus, the biggest plus from that experience. I think the other thing is that I then lived in this very strange world where I was going home to kind of the projects, basically, and then going to school with all these kids that were driving their dad's Porsche to school on a Saturday morning. And so I had to live in these two worlds. And for a while, it was a bit odd and kind of uncomfortable. But after a while, I realized that it actually was a real strength, a really good lesson that enabled me to connect with people from all walks of life. It didn't really matter because I lived in both of those worlds. So I guess you could say that that teacher really changed my life.

Jon - 00:05:21: That's amazing. And I, every time I have these conversations, I always, as we are recollecting our guest journeys and yours right now, I always think about kind of moments in time in my journey where there's like a teacher, a lots of teachers and educators who have these, who really moved the needle and really bet on you early. And I couldn't see it coming. I love that story. And during that time, was that in pretty much grade school? Like you were probably in your early adolescence when this teacher.

Doug - 00:05:54: I was 10 years old.

Jon - 00:05:55: Oh, wow. Okay. And so now you're in this, you're in this new world. You're seeing the kind of the full spectrum of experience. During that private school experience, is that when you started to find your spark for science? Or was that something that kind of coalesced over time as you were going through your studies?

Doug - 00:06:17: Yeah, I think I always had an interest in science and particularly biology, something I was always good at in school. And you tend to gravitate towards the things that you're good at and you like. And then some other pathways in my life were partly about wanting to follow the science and partly about necessity. I think that's just the way things go sometimes. But, yeah, I've always been attracted to science and technical things. And I was never particularly creative or artistic.

Jon - 00:06:48: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I feel the same way. I think for me, the journey, I learned quite quickly I wasn't good at math. So I was more of like a visual learner. And the second I got like the biology textbooks and there's like, here's a cell and then you can kind of like start double clicking and going deeper. I was like, oh, instead of this uphill battle or I'm so bad at this. And I was like, oh, I finally clicks in my mind and this is starting to work for me. And so you're now you figured that you're starting to gravitate to STEM. And as you're progressing, now you're getting closer to university age. Kind of what were your considerations as you were starting to consider higher level education and what you wanted to focus on?

Doug - 00:07:32: Yeah, I definitely wanted to be in science. I wanted to work in a lab or at one point I think I wanted to be in CSI and go and look at crime scenes.

Jon - 00:07:42: Yeah, yeah.

Doug - 00:07:43: So those are things that are sort of top of mind. But when it came to that time, though, Again, this is one of those moments where necessity kind of was the driver. And I guess I was 17 and coming up to my last year of high school and my parents had another baby. I already had three sisters at that point, and we lived in a three-bedroom house. And so I was like, where is this baby going to go?

Jon - 00:08:10: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug - 00:08:12: What are you going to do with this baby? And also my relationship with my dad was not great at that time. So I ended up leaving home. But that meant I needed a job and a car and those things. And so I went to work in a lab. I worked in a hospital lab, a pathology lab. That was a great hands-on experience. I was working in biochemistry for a while, and I did hematology and histology and back to biochemistry. And it was really fantastic. I really enjoyed it, all the technical stuff. I enjoyed the teamwork. I enjoyed some of the urgency, like when someone comes in from the ER and they need cross-matching so they could get blood given to them. All of that kind of drama. And, you know, taking this job, I also, they paid for me to continue my education. So I studied and got what I think you would call it here in the US is probably an associate's degree in medical laboratory sciences. So it sort of helped my job, but it also was a stepping stone to undergrad, to bachelor's. One thing I didn't like about the lab situation was this is working for the NHS, National Health Service, in the U.K. So it's a government job. I think I was being paid $3,300 a year. I could see my salary for the next 25 years because it's all government grades. It didn't matter. It wasn't meritocracy. You were getting what you were getting. That motivated me to go to college for sure.

Jon - 00:09:48: Absolutely.

Doug - 00:09:49: You got to see what I would like to make in the future.

Jon - 00:09:53: I appreciate the clarity, but also this doesn't seem to be enough. This doesn't seem to be enough.

Doug - 00:09:59: It's a big motivator in the wrong way.

Jon - 00:10:01: Yeah. So during your studies, during the equivalent of an associate's degree, were you working throughout at the NHS and then simultaneously doing your studies?

Doug - 00:10:13: Yeah, exactly. I was working during the day, going to college in the evenings and weekends. I worked in the bar in the other evenings as well to make money. It was just a time with no downtime. But, you know, I was in my late teens, early 20s. You didn't really care.

Jon - 00:10:29: Yeah. And I love hearing these stories, too, because I think the grit and the hustle that is required to do that is something that is incredibly formative in terms of professional development and personal development. And I think this is like, it's the baptism of fire. And you're in a real lab, too, which I think is, you know, for me, I kind of stumbled into my wet lab and I got lucky. But you got in at a very real where the stakes are high and you're seeing ER stuff. Whereas for us, at least for me. I kind of got lucky. My friend just happened to kind of be like, hey, you should check out wet lab research. And it was a very different experience. And so as you were starting to cut your teeth in wet lab work, what was your consideration to continue your studies? You know, did you know what was next after this NHS lab?

Doug - 00:11:24: Not really. I knew I needed to get a degree in order to move up to the next level and move into the private sector in some way or maybe further up in academia. I didn't really know, but I knew I couldn't stay in that government job. And so I went to university because I narrowed my options at that point. And so I was definitely in biology. There was no going off of that course. But the most fascinating, most interesting part of biology back then and probably still now is molecular biology. It was just so fast growing. There was so much we didn't know. You know, the Human Genome Project was underway, right? We were mapping the genome for the first time. The polymerase chain reaction had just been created back then. So we were just starting to be able to replicate DNA in a lab. And to be in the cutting edge was really fascinating because I'd go to lectures and some new paper would come out and they'd have to change everything that we talked about the week before. It was that fast moving. So, yes, I ended up studying molecular biology, which I still think is really cool. Cool stuff.

Jon - 00:12:37: Absolutely. And so I know you're at East Anglia. And while you're studying molecular biology, did you transition out of that government lab and now you're full time study? 

Doug - 00:12:47: Yeah, exactly.

Jon - 00:12:48: Awesome. And while you're doing your full time study, did you continue to do wet lab research or was it more textbook based kind of lecture series?

Doug - 00:12:58: Oh no, there was a lot of lab work. I had crazy scheduling. My kids are in college, and I look at their schedule, and it's a joke. I think I had 37 hours of scheduled classes. And then on top of that, we had labs that would run in evenings and weekends. So lots of lab time. Lots of study time. It was intense. And then I also did a research project in the final year, which was really, really cool. And that was also something very novel. It was working on transposons. So pieces of DNA within bacteria that can jump out and then incise themselves into another genome. So it became a tool for being able to get the bacteria to do whatever you wanted it to do. So in this particular case, the bacteria was Lactococcus lactis. So the bacteria that makes milk go sour. And we took a gene for niacin, which is an antibacterial agent, and put it inside this transposon. And so when the transposon excised, it took the gene with it. So theoretically, you could create self-preserving cheese doing that.

Jon - 00:14:12: Interesting. 

Doug - 00:14:13: That's my claim to fame. That's my science claim to fame. Very cool. Very cool, though.

Jon - 00:14:17: That's like, I love that. This early exposure is really cool. And I kind of, when I look back on my experience, I kind of was kind of more of like a late bloomer and kind of had these late experiences. And I'm super, I'm just jealous of having this so much hands-on experience early days because I was like, dang, how much more could I have like gone kind of into this wet lab? Like it's almost like seeing a brave new world. And also, I love this example of they had to change the lecture because the technology was changing. And it makes you realize how much you're on a lot of what you're being taught is kind of at the forefront. And you have to continuously revise. And so during your time in East Anglia, were there any mentors or professors that kind of like took you under their wing or inspired you to kind of continue this journey in the STEM and the sciences?

Doug - 00:15:08: Yeah, definitely the two leaders on that research project, Helen Dodd and Nikki Orne, who I believe are still there. They were just super supportive. I didn't know what I was doing. I was an undergrad student, and they were really supportive. We ended up using new technology, Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis, which now is quite common to elucidate this transpose on. The work got published, so that's pretty cool as well. So they were great mentors. They also showed me that my presentation skills sucked.

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Jon - 00:15:42: Yeah. You need that too. You need that too.

Doug - 00:15:44: So I did all this work, and it was, on any measure, a really successful research project. And then most of the grade, though, on it was the presentation of the work. And so I did my practice run through with them. And their faces at the end were just, what's that? It was just so bad.

Jon - 00:16:04: Yeah.

Doug - 00:16:07: I could just see the disappointment in their faces. So, yeah, they made me go back and do it again.

Jon - 00:16:13: And sometimes that's what you really need. It's just like you need to have that reaction. You're like, oh, okay, I'm going to try and revise this so I don't get that next time.

Doug - 00:16:23: I just fell flat on my face. It was awful. It was terrible.

Jon - 00:16:26: And so you've kind of wrapped up this kind of like cornerstone, which this cornerstone research for you and ended up getting it published. At any point in time, did that kind of make you consider staying in academia? Or did you know that academia is not in it for you?

Doug - 00:16:45: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, another instance where life kind of takes its turn. So I had applied for two different PhDs. I was really into this stuff at that point. So I did molecular biology. There's so much that I could have studied and got involved in that was leading edge. So I applied for two PhDs. But then in my final year, unfortunately, my mom passed away. She had lung cancer. And it just was kind of an awakening. You know, I just felt too indulgent to stay in academia. I kind of felt like life's too short. Just get out there and start your life and stop messing around in the lab. You know, do something real, get a real job, that kind of thing. So, yeah, so it was that was just my perspective at that point in time. So I took that experience of falling flat on my face with the presentations and got a sales job at DuPont Merck. So I went from this awful presenter to forcing myself to present about 10 times a day.

Jon - 00:17:43: Yeah, all the time. I was going to say.

Doug - 00:17:46: It was just the best way to learn. That's how to overcome that.

Jon - 00:17:50: I love that. You kind of ran you ran towards the kind of the challenge. And I love hearing that. And for me, my presentation skills and particularly my sales skills, early days were God awful. God awful. And I still have like scar to who built up from my early kind of sales experience just like not knowing what I was doing.

Doug - 00:18:13: I hear you. I hear you. I remember having this extensive five-week training for sales training course. I've never professionally sold anything in my life. And they take you through the whole selling process, overcoming objections and buying signals and all this stuff. And you have all these phrases and terms in your head. And so I remember the first time I was out seeing a doctor to talk about some drugs with my manager in the room. And every time the doctor said something, in my head it would be, is that a buying signal or is that an objection? I was literally trying to follow the training. And I absolutely sucked at that as well. I really did. And I didn't get good at the selling part until I kind of let all of that mechanistic stuff go and just be natural and focus on building the relationship. And so I ended up just throwing out pretty much everything they told us to do in training. They spent all this money.

Jon - 00:19:10: Yeah.

Doug - 00:19:11: Pretty much threw it all out and just spent time with the customers. And all that pressure of having to follow the script went away. But yeah, it's pretty ugly to start with.

Jon - 00:19:22: Yeah. I remember reading books online. I was like, just beginner sales books. Like, what is sales? I went to like a Barnes and Noble and just getting like, they're like, I don't know. One of the books is like, you need to ask 20 questions. And I was like, okay, 20 questions. Like in my head, I was like going into my first meetings. Okay, that's one. That's two. That's three. And the person must have been just like, what are you doing? Am I getting interrogated here? And so I have a very similar style of sales in that. It's kind of like, I kind of lean into that same kind of relationship building versus, you know, there's like styles to it all and kind of like what your personal philosophy is to it. So I totally understand that. And just to go back a little bit, how did this opportunity at DuPont Merck come about? How did you land this first gig?

Doug - 00:20:11: So again, I was in this phase where I just gone through this shock with my mother and just kind of just wanted to do something. And a good friend of mine at the university had just gone. He was a sales rep in the pharma company. I thought, okay, well that'll do, you know? They're going to pay me nicely and they're going to give me a free car. And so, all right, I'll try that. I'm still in the pharma industry after that. So that was my decision-making. It was not strategic at all, you know?

Jon - 00:20:43: Yeah. And I love that because sometimes it's just serendipity. You're just like, hey, like a colleague's doing this. That looks decent enough. Like why not? And also sweet that they gave you a car. That's like, that's a nice perk. And so you go from university academia into massive organization and into also sales, which is a brand new muscle for you. What was it like navigating a really big organization like that as well?

Doug - 00:21:10:  Yeah, I'd say it was very lucky there too. And this was pure serendipity in that this organization, DuPont Merck, was a joint venture between DuPont, 100,000 employees, Merck, 100,000 employees, two massive organizations. But the joint venture was this little startup. So it had all the resources of these two massive conglomerates. But we were this small kind of autonomous unit that was pretty entrepreneurial and flexible. So I fell right into that. And again, pure luck that it ended up being there. And got to know some great people, got to meet some incredible marketers, some people that I'm still friends with today that were very inspirational. But that was just incredible to be in. And I've been through a number of startups since then, but none with the level of resources. Pretty much unlimited resources.

Jon - 00:22:05: Yeah, yeah.

Doug - 00:22:06: Yeah, pretty cool.

Jon - 00:22:07: Absolutely. I can imagine. And I love that that's your first kind of experience because it's nice gliding in. It's kind of like you have the ability to have the resource behind you. And you can experiment without it being the stakes being incredibly, incredibly high. It's not life or death for DuPont Merck. So you kind of have the ability to figure it out on the fly. And as you are starting to work this sales muscle, can you talk a little bit about maybe some memorable challenges or triumphs while you're in that role?

Doug - 00:22:40: Yeah, I mean, it was quite awful for a while. I was not very good at it.

Jon - 00:22:46: Yeah.

Doug - 00:22:46: Well, I thought I wasn't very good at it, but I apparently did think I was good at it because I kept getting promoted and moved around. I ended up moving up to the north of England and working in a couple of different cities then. And when you're wearing a fancy suit and carrying a briefcase and having to walk up the steps of a project like apartment building. Because the doctor's office is one of the apartments in the building, the elevators don't work, and there's all kinds of stuff on the stairs that smells pretty bad. Yeah. I'll tell you what that is. Yeah. Yeah, that school, sort of like bipolar experience, I came crashing back.

Jon - 00:23:27: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Doug - 00:23:30: I'm like waving my briefcase. Hey, I've got drug samples here. And in my car too, there were drug samples. You know, just some really interesting experiences. But then we ended up finding ourselves in a kind of a strange place where we had a drug approved. And it was the same as another drug that was being sold by AstraZeneca. So same molecule, two different brands. Now, we're this little startup. So we may have had the resources of DuPont and Merck, and we were able to make sure we could make payroll. But they weren't going to spend unlimited amounts on the marketing budget. So we had this tiny marketing budget, and we were trying to compete against AstraZeneca. They had 95% market share, and we had five.

Jon - 00:24:15: So, wow.

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Doug - 00:24:17: But we started to figure out that rather than having to go convince the doctor to write prescriptions, what if we just switched out at the pharmacy? So let AstraZeneca generate all the prescriptions. And what a substitute. At the pharmacy, cut the pharmacy a deal. And so we started doing this. And, of course, back then, sales data is all recorded by third parties. It's all up to the arm's length. And most of the sales data is one or two months out of date. So it was many months before AstraZeneca figured out that we had taken 30% market share from them. But it was really, really fun. And that led to the next role because that was going so well. They created a new role, this commercial products manager role. My job then was to run a team that was doing the same thing across the nation and going to big NHS centers as well and scaling the whole thing up. So it was quite an innovative way of competing. And we weren't spending anything on marketing. We didn't need to at all.

Jon - 00:25:21: Interesting. It's kind of like a Jedi mind trick or like judo.

Doug - 00:25:27: It's fairly basic stuff, but it was kind of non-traditional back then to go that route. And it was definitely thinking outside the box. Yeah.

Jon - 00:25:34: And I love that, too, because I think going in and knowing your competitor has 95% market share, you can almost as easily just throw in the towel. You're like, what are we doing here? Like, ow.

Doug - 00:25:48: The only way is up from 5%.

Jon - 00:25:50: Yeah.

Doug - 00:25:50: That, too.

Jon - 00:25:51: I guess that's another way. I immediately went to like, oh, my God, like 95. But I love how you went to, oh, like, this is all gravy from here. Like, we can't go any lower. So that's amazing. And so now that you started as an individual sales rep and you now have a team and I'm going to imagine this might be your first team, like first time managing. How was that experience for you?

Doug - 00:26:17: We were a pretty spread out team working remotely back in the days when I think we just about had cell phones at that point. There was definitely no internet.

Jon - 00:26:28: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug - 00:26:29: And these are all folks that are used to working by themselves day to day. And we had a bit of it. We didn't really have this formal. There's less of a formal reporting structure. The way I saw it, is more, hey, we're all working together. Yeah. So I didn't really see it as a sort of hub and spoke boss and team. It was more okay, right? This is new ground. You're trying to figure out how to do this. Well, nobody knows what we're doing here because we are doing it for the first time. We have so much market share we can grab. We can't really go wrong. And our existence depends upon us doing it right. Because this team was an experiment. And so we're all motivated to just go out there and do it. And when things are going well, it's easy to stay motivated.

Jon - 00:27:15: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The morale is definitely high, but it sounds like a proper startup experience and honestly quite cool to kind of hear how that unfolds. And so as you're wrapping up your time at DuPont Merck, when did you know it was time to move on to your next role?

Doug - 00:27:33: Oh, I got recruited to a company called Elan. And the opportunity was moving from this sort of commercial marketing role, a product manager role to a proper marketing. So supporting prescription brands and then marketing to physicians and hospitals. And that was kind of missing from my resume. And Elan at the time was really fast growing too. I think when I joined, there were 45 people. We got up to about 4,500 in the time that I was there. And so again, great to be a part of something that's really small and growing. And I knew I didn't want to be in marketing sales forever. I was much more interested in, at that time, R&D licensing and partnering deals and co-promotions and all that stuff. And so that was one of the opportunities that was very clear at Elan, because they were growing fast and multinationally. So it was great to kind of take the science. And take the sales and marketing experience and put them together. And then they started letting me assess business development opportunities. So looking at R&D licensing deals, I could assess, you know, is this developable? You know, is it marketable? Does it differentiate it? And so I started out just doing lots of analysis, you know, spreadsheets and all that grunt work. And then gradually got to sit at the table. I knew then that that was exactly what I wanted to do. And from there, I've had many roles where it's always about cutting deals of some shape or other. And they gradually got bigger and bigger and bigger through the career. So honestly, I think we're all in that mode in biotech and pharma. It's always about continuing to cut deals to move the pipeline along in some way or other.

Jon - 00:29:29: Absolutely. And wow, I love that, too, that you're marrying your your varied interests and it finally coalesced into something that you're like, this is it. Like, this is it.

Outro - 00:29:41: That's all for this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our discussion with Doug Drysdale. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening. And we look forward to having you join us again for part two of our conversation with Doug. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.