Jason Foster - Part 2: Scaling Cell Therapy Manufacturing to Save Lives

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. In our last episode, we talked with Jason about his early entrepreneurial journey, including his formative years and the pivotal experiences that shaped his approach to leadership and innovation. If you missed it, be sure to go back and listen to part one. In part two, Jason takes us through his journey of launching Ori Biotech in Europe, navigating cultural differences, and overcoming the regulatory complexities of scaling a biotech company globally. We'll dive into his reflections on building a mission-driven culture, fostering strong teams, and creating scalable solutions to make life-saving therapies more accessible. 

Jon - 00:01:08: I can't even imagine, you know, as you're, you know, moving out of Richmond, Virginia and going to London, like that is like almost it's a blank slate. You're going to have to like there's like cultural norms and all of that. And you're like, in addition to all the business kind of like, you know, like, how do we just get this thing set up? So can you talk a little bit about like touching down in London? What were like the early days like as you were just getting situated there? 

Jason - 00:01:33: Yeah, I give my wife tons of credit. Yeah. I moved over like three or four months ahead of the family. She was, as I said, five months pregnant, got the house ready for sale. I was gallivanting around Europe, you know, trying to set up a business. And she was all alone with a two-year-old. So all the credit goes to her. But we ended up landing in London in the summer of 2010. I was, again, the second, third, fourth employee in the London international business at that point. And we were, you know, every week going from Madrid to Munich to Milan, you know, going to try and figure out different countries, figure out the norms there. And, you know, we Americans, we're not known for our subtlety. We sort of stop around with big boots. And I learned to shut my mouth and to listen. You know, my grandmother used to always say, God gave you two ears and one mouth. You know, use them in that ratio. So you learn to listen a lot and try and be observant and to try and, you know, fit into that cultural norm, whatever it is. Which for me at that stage was constantly changing. You know, people in Northern Europe do business very differently than people in Southern Europe. Different pace. You know, first time they cracked open three bottles of red wine at lunch. And I was like, what is going on here? 

Jon - 00:02:49: Yeah, yeah. 

Jason - 00:02:50: I'll be asleep by, you know, it was probably two o'clock. I'll be asleep by three. Yeah. So, you know, just the pace of things, how they make decisions. Again, no matter what culture you're in, it's all about people. But those norms are quite different. And so it was an incredible experience for a kid who really hadn't spent much time internationally. I did that kind of obligatory backpacking trip around Europe for a month and saw, you know, a little bit of a lot of things. But I never traveled much internationally at all. And so, you know, landing in London, I've actually never, I had never been to London when I landed there for the first time. So it was a great eye-opening experience and learning experience. And now we've been in London for 14 years, believe it or not. And that's the longest we've lived anywhere. 

Jon - 00:03:30: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Jason - 00:03:31: Other than my family home growing up. So it's, London's become home for us. And, you know, that experience was fantastic. We built the team from three or four of us to 250 people in Europe and sort of ex-US. So that was a hub in Singapore. And we had business in 37 countries. Listed that company on the LSE in 2014. It's now called Indivior, still a FTSE. 250 company. I'm still serving, you know, many of those 37 countries globally. Over 1,100 people in that business when we listed it. So it went from five of us to 1,100 over 10 years. And it was an incredible journey. And got, you know, two startup experiences, basically the same company on two different continents. 

Jon - 00:04:13: Whoa. Okay. So I kind of want to like, there's so many directions I want to go and I'm just like super fascinated. So I guess first thing you were tasked with just like running Europe. Did you have any like mentors in Europe that could give you any sort of guidance or were you just like feeling around in the dark? 

Jason - 00:04:32: So the guy who hired me into Europe was the head of Europe, and he was a Brit who'd spent a bunch of time in Australia. And the company, we had licensed the product somewhere along the way to Shearing Plow. And Shearing Plow marketed the product in a couple countries, so there's a little bit of infrastructure. For the first generation product. But then Merck launched Shearing Plow, Merck wasn't interested in this franchise at all. So Reckitt decided, actually my boss made the business case to buy the business back from Merck, or Shearing Plow and then Merck. And we took, we inherited teams in many countries, so we had to decide, do we want the team, do we not want the team, do we want the business there, or not want the business, do we close it down? The employment laws in Europe are very complicated. You know, it's very difficult to get rid of people if you want to close down a business. So, I mean, that was an incredible baptism by fire, just really trying to understand not only the cultural norms and business norms, but the rules and the regulations and the status of the business. And so it was an awesome experience. And luckily had Dave as a mentor, the head of Europe, who had spent a little bit of time sniffing around, but as the CEO used to say, we were filling the ship while we were sailing it. So he had to figure out some things along the way. 

Jon - 00:05:47: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one navigating not only just like cultural differences, but just like there's probably like way different tax rules. There's way different like legal like kind of regimes. You're just like and you have to kind of like orchestrate all those things. 

Jason - 00:06:01: My chain, finance, legal, like so much complexity. Yeah, for sure. 

Jon - 00:06:05: So much complexity. It reminds me of your project back in Columbia, honestly. It really does. 

Jason - 00:06:10: It was way more complicated probably. 

Jon - 00:06:11: Yeah, more complicated, way more on the line, but like the seeds of it. Yeah. That's really, really fascinating. And it sounds like you were able to like really kind of accelerate and put gas on this and really ultimately in the culmination of like an IPO. Can you talk about that? Like, you know, that's like the startup dream, right? It's like, go start the company. Whoop, and then just like, let's ring the bell. Like, let's do this. Like, can you talk a little bit of like the run up to that? 

Jason - 00:06:38: I remember sort of ringing the bell at the LSE like it was yesterday. I have a great picture of the management team up there and, you know, one of those kind of bucket list moments. And maybe at some point, I'd love to do it on Nasdaq as well, but we'll see if that dream gets realized. But it was an incredible journey. And it was a traditional startup experience with the exception that we were part of a parent company. And so we didn't have to go out and fundraise. And so those lessons came later in my journey. But, you know, all of that culture building, all of that recruiting talent, you know, those strategic decisions you have to make was all part of that journey. And, you know, training those first couple hundred salespeople. And it was an incredible learning ground and opportunity for me to, you know, just figure out what I was good at, what I liked, what I could do, what I couldn't do. I have some incredible friends from that business who I never met before. You know, some of them are from Germany or from the Nordic countries, you know, some from Italy, some from Spain. You know, we really had nothing in common. Uh, when it started. 

Jon - 00:07:35: Yeah. 

Jason - 00:07:36: We built this business together and they're still fantastic friends and great relationships. So, you know, again, coming back to the theme and it's all about the people, we hired great people. They did great work. They were passionate about the impact they could have for patients. And so that drove us. And we had a big patient impact and a good financial impact for our investors. Ultimately, we grew so big within Reckitt. So Reckitt's a giant company. It's like 30,000 employees. It's, you know, FTSE. It's a massive company. And because they basically sell household goods, which are generally low margin, we were 10% of sales or 4% of sales, but 25% operating profit. Like, you know, it was a, they had to have started breaking us out separately because they're like, what is this weird business over here? This shit looks nothing like the business. And it's like, what's happening over there? Yeah. And so they faced the strategic decision to either sell the business or spend it out. And we sort of did a quasi, a spin out, kind of quasi MBO to try and get the business out from under this, you know, fast moving consumer good parent into a specialty pharma company. And that was successful, listed on the LLC. I think they're trying to do a list or have already done on Nasdaq. And again, still a going concern today and one of the leaders in addiction medicine still. And that's, you know, very gratifying. We built something that's long lasting and helped millions of patients at this point. And, you know, got to see that process happen from the inside, the IPO process, the IPO roadshow, you know, the castle intrigue going on behind the scenes and the management team and all those things. So, yeah, it was great, I think, preparation for what came next. But also, I think for me, I learned about myself that I was much happier at the earlier building phase than not kind of trying to manage a large, publicly traded company. It's just it's a totally different beast. You know? Going from five to 400, going from three to 250, you know, inside the same company was much more my speed. And then you get to a company where you're public and there's a thousand people and it just didn't it didn't feel the same. It just wasn't it wasn't for me any longer. And, you know, after after the IPO, about a year and a half, I left. After 10 and a half years. 

Jon - 00:09:48: What an experience. I guess, you know, being stuck in the Bay Area since forever. 

Jason - 00:09:55: Stuck in a seven mile prairie like on the TV show. 

Jon - 00:09:58: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, a lot of the kind of startup entrepreneurial kind of like zeitgeist out here, at least, it's like there's a lot of first time founder energy, like screw big companies. But everything I'm hearing sounds like a kind of a master class of entrepreneurship within a large organization. And like, you know, I'm jealous. That sounds incredible. Like, you know, we're not a we're not a 250 person company, but like being able to do that. And I think I guess for any for any listener out there, it seems like. You don't have to be the Mark Zuckerberg of kind of, that archetype is not the only way. 

Jason - 00:10:37: The Bill Gateses, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Elon Musks, the guys that are zero to one guys. But also 1 to 5,000 or 1 to 10,000 employee guys are incredibly rare. They're like more rare than unicorns or gals. You know, it's just like, it just doesn't happen. Like, you know, what I learned as part of that experience is I'm not a zero to one guy. Like the guy who founded Ori, I always joke, he's like, you know, Doc Brown, he fell off the toilet and hit his head and invented the flux capacitor. He's like one of those people that has these ideas. He's incredibly creative, sees angles that people don't see. That's not me. I'm just not that guy. But I can help you if you have that great idea. I can help you turn it into something, turn it into a business, commercialize it, build a company around it, raise money, operationalize, you know, that stuff I'm good at. And then at some point, you know, I probably, again, if I'm successful, put myself out of a job. I'm probably the one to 500. I'm not 500 to 5,000. That guy or gal is going to be really good at process and really good at building big organizations and big structures. And that drives me crazy. So know yourself, you know, it's like, like, figure out what you're good at, where you can add value and try and focus there, you know, and don't try and be Mark Zuckerberg because he's a, he's a unicorn, like somebody that can build that kind of enterprise from, from zero. It's very unusual. And one of the lessons I learned at Indivior, just to kind of share with your listeners, which I think is incredibly, incredibly important, is the power of culture. You know, the kind of snide, you know, witticism is culture eats strategy for breakfast or whatever the kind of phrase is. But people that genuinely care, about the mission of the company. Will do incredible things. And, you know, they will do incredible things. Against the largest odds. And, you know, really building a culture, it's easy in healthcare, it's easy for us because, you know, we're trying to bring cures for cancer to everyone in the world. I mean, this is something that is easy to get out of bed for. But that culture that you build inside the organization is the most important thing about your company. It is the most important thing that will drive success. It is the most important thing that differentiates you from your competitors. It isn't ours is better than theirs. Ours does this and theirs doesn't. And I think that is such an important lesson. I learned it at Indivior. We have a very unique culture in that business. And you see, culture is a living animal. It's a living organism. And it, you know, it absorbs new people and it shapes the culture and it moves in various directions. But you have to be very intentional about how you shape a culture at different stages of the company, what kind of people you bring in at different stages that will shape the culture for you. One of the great books, business books that I've read that I really take is very telling on this topic is No Rules Rules by Reid Hastings. So Netflix is well known to have a very unique culture, one of kind of radical transparency and, you know, one where they strive to have very, very high levels of talent density. And that means, you know, a lot of different things. But that's the one business book that I read cover to cover and then flipped it over and started reading again from the beginning because I thought it was that interesting and that sort of insightful. And I modeled some things, not all things, but some things in the culture at Ori around certainly the lessons I learned at Indivior, but also, you know, some of these pieces of the puzzle, you know, that book from Reid. I think Dan Pink's work is super interesting on what motivates people. And the power of incentives, you know, everyone has worked for a company that has KPI driven bonus schemes, right? So you do these three things and you get another 10% or 15% or 20% of your base salary. And he's basically proven through a tremendous amount of research that carrot and stick incentives like that cause worse performance, not better, which is a totally counterintuitive finding. And something that I believe to be true, but not many people that I know do. Almost every company that I've ever worked for and that I know anything about remains having those kinds of carrot and stick incentive programs as KPI programs. So it's a super issue. He wrote a book called Drive all about this. It's a really interesting book. So, you know, you take these things along the way, these experiences, and you sort of put them together. Hopefully in a way that makes sense to you and helps shape whatever that next, you know, lily pad is that you're going to hop to. 

Jon - 00:14:55: Absolutely. And I wasn't just like fist pumping in my head when I was hearing that, because like, I think the cultural element is so important because like, I always think about starting a business and running a business is a very long, there's a long time horizon. And inevitably there's going to be bumps in the road, probably some really big bumps. And if you are purely motivated by coin, usually you're, you might jump ship the second that it gets really tough. And perhaps the coin opportunity has been jeopardized. I'll kind of like caveat what I'm saying here too, is that there are large organizations that are purely coin operated that are also functioning at a, at a high level. But that's for me, I think not something where I would thrive in, but I think it's something too, is that you talked about like intentional design of culture is knowing exactly that, like, do we want to set up the coin operated kind of culture or do we want it to be kind of more like a mission driven, and I'm, these are like these dichotomies. I'm just trying to illustrate the polar ends of the spectrum, but it's kind of knowing, knowing that and designing it with intent, exactly what you said. That's critical. 

Jason - 00:16:03: Absolutely. I mean, you know, Dan talks about autonomy, mastery, and purpose, what actually motivates people. You know, when you take money off the table and people feel, because people want to be treated fairly, right? If I'm worried about where my next meal is coming from or if I can pay my rent. I'm going to be focused on that, you know, the base layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But once you get beyond that, people want to be treated fairly. Am I getting fairly valued for the contribution I'm making? And the answer to that question is yes. Then it's other things that are going to motivate me. I don't think I'm going to hire someone at Ori. If I pay them 10 or 15% more, they're going to do that much better job. They're going to do the best job they can because that's the people I hire. They're going to bust their ass to get the job done and go, well, above and beyond. So it's that kind of thinking, you know, what they really want is autonomy. Am I self-directed? You know, can I drive my own future, my own, you know, achieve my own goals? I don't want anybody micromanaging me if I'm a top performer. Mastery, am I learning? Am I, you know, around peers who are teaching me, coaching me? Am I able to teach and coach as well? And purpose is what I'm doing have meaning. You know, I remember a software engineer that I interviewed not that long ago said to me, I don't want them to write on my tombstone that I caused teenagers to spend 14 more minutes on TikTok. Like literally that's my job is to tweak the algorithm to get people another, you know, two minutes, another one minute, another three minutes. And like, you know, it's completely demotivating. That has no purpose in my life. And so, you know, realizing what makes people tick, these things are human things that we have to get. You know, no one can deny that, let's say Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid, you know, I think about, you know. You know, financial incentives out the wazoo, they're tremendously a successful organization. Is there a lot of loyalty there? Do people love working for Goldman Sachs? So would they, you know, would they sort of jump in front of a bus for Goldman Sachs? I'm not sure they would. But, you know, you can't deny it's a successful organization. So there are different ways to build companies. But, you know, one of my board members is a great lady who was a CEO in her own right and head of research for MSD. And she advises the FDA. She's a badass. Basically is what I would call her. But she's like, yeah, the best thing about starting your own business is you get to design the business that you always want to work for. And, you know, that taking all those lessons along the way, the importance of culture, alignment of incentives, some of these things, and putting them into one business so far has worked very well for us. But as we said, culture is an evolving and ever-changing animal. So it has to evolve with the business and with the circumstances of the business. So it's exciting, forward-looking opportunity for us. 

Jon - 00:18:38: Absolutely. It's interesting what your board member said, too, because like that element of design of culture was like a massive like driving force or like something that gets me fired up about Excedr and starting Excedr. And this is back in 2011. But like I did a stint in like consulting and a law firm. I basically had a. Crap. I was like, oh, this is crap culture. This is awful. I'll give you an example. We were terrified of the CEO whenever he would be in the office. And so we had ties in the little drawer. Anytime he's like, oh, he's in, everyone just like, just like getting ready because like that's. Because that's what matters, right? Like, that's what matters. So when thinking about designing Exceders, exactly. We at least knew what we didn't want it to be like.

Jason - 00:19:28: Equally important. Yeah. Even if you don't know what you want it to be, as long as you know what you don't want it to be, you can sort of work it out as you go. 

Jon - 00:19:34: Yeah, exactly. So now you've said, okay, I want to get back to the earlier stages of company building. I'm not so interested in getting this thing to 5,000. What was up next for you after that experience? 

Jason - 00:19:46: So I left Indivior after 10 and a half years and kind of a year and a half after the IPO. You know, we made a lot of money for Reckitt and for their investors, which is a good thing. Made a little bit of money for the management team as well. I was in a position where I didn't have to rush into funding the next job, but it wasn't, you know, I can go to the beach and drink, you know, martinis or pina coladas or whatever you drink. So I started really just getting involved in the venture ecosystem in London. You know, at this point I was in London. And my wife and I said, OK, we'll give ourselves a year. And if we can find something that, you know, puts food on the table and keeps us happy in London, we'll stay here. And if not, we'll probably move back to Virginia and find a job, find a real job, quote unquote. But I'd spent, you know, at that point, six and a half years in London. And a lot of our network was here. But I'd been head down, you know, building this business and traveling all the time. And so I really had to kind of restart, you know, restart the network and really just get involved. So I didn't know anyone really in London. It's certainly not an adventure ecosystem. So I started, you know, going out and meeting people and having a coffee, even though I don't drink coffee, having a coffee and saying, you know, who should I meet? Who's the next two people I should go see? And they'd make an introduction and I'd go see those people and two more people. And that turned into Forde. It was turned into 16, which turned into, you know. And just built a network that way. I was lucky to get a kind of temporary consulting gig with KKR working on a business that they had bought, which was in the healthcare space. You know, got to know some investors in the space, started investing also as an angel, which helped give me sort of, you know, some credit, street credit in the venture ecosystem, putting some skin in the game. And this is late 16, you know, through 17. Started investing full time with a family office, which was interesting. But all the while just trying to, you know, basically looking for interesting businesses and smart people that I could help solve big problems. And sometimes that was as an investor, sometimes as an advisor. I sat on a couple of boards. I still do. I sit on the board of four companies that I've invested in that are portfolio companies and just trying to add value. I mean, I think at the end of the day, I didn't ask for anything back. I just said, you know, if I can help, let me know. And I'm happy to connect you to anyone that I know or to give you some free advice or we can do a whiteboarding session on your commercial strategy. The few things that I knew that were applicable to a startup. But, you know, I think in the particularly in health care, and this might be true and broadly in tech. You get a lot of technologists. Or clinicians, or scientists that start businesses in this area. And they're very, very good at their domain of expertise. So they're often bringing a perspective on the problem. They've identified a problem and they have a domain expertise that they think can either solve the problem or can develop a technology. And then they go and try and find a problem to solve with that technology. That's the most kind of common phenotype that I see of health tech, at least startups. What they don't have usually is operational experience, commercial experience, fundraising experience. Those are things that they lack. And oftentimes some of that EQ we talked about earlier, they also lack. 

Jon - 00:22:58: They don't even want to do it.

Jason - 00:22:59: They either know they don't have it and don't want to do it or don't know they don't have it and that they need it. But either way, they need it. And so someone's got to do it. So, you know, trying to add value where I could. And a lot of it was pro bono, you know, keeping some food on the table through various consulting gigs and whatever. And met the team at Ori as a potential investor, actually, through an investor friend of mine. I made a pretty good inroads into the investor networks in London, Cambridge, Oxford, the kind of golden triangle, they call it. And from mid-2016 to late 2018, when I met Ori, whatever that is, is that two and a half years or so, I saw something like 5,000 health tech businesses, health tech investment opportunities. It was a very large number. 

Jon - 00:23:43: Yeah. 

Jason - 00:23:44: And I invested in a handful, you know, let's call it maybe 10. And not one. Did I pledge my full human capital to? That wasn't the goal. You know, the goal was to build kind of a portfolio career and see if I could help businesses and help, you know, get startups off the ground. But I met Ori and I was just blown away by the incredible potential of personalized living medicine. So we can actually turn human immune cells into cures for cancer. Isn't that incredible to say that we can actually do that? And it's great for humanity. And I was blown away. I mean, this is, you know, new science. I've been working in pharmaceuticals since 2006 in healthcare since 2003. Never heard of cell therapy before, you know, 2018. But it had been, you know, obviously one of those overnight successes that had taken 30 years. I was blown away by the potential. First application was in cancer. We were seeing results in blood cancer, like leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma. That were unprecedented, literally curing late-stage patients that had weeks to live. They'd failed everything. They'd failed chemotherapy multiple rounds. They'd failed a bone marrow or transplant of some kind. They were on their last upshake, and these cell therapies were curing them at very, very high rates, some in the 90%. So you think the very sickest people, they're literally weeks or maybe months away from death, are getting cured of cancer. And I'm like, this is incredible. Why doesn't everyone know about this? How is this the first time that I'm hearing about this? This actually exists. You know, the first products were approved in 2017. So, you know, this time it's like 2018, 2019. I hadn't heard about it. You know, even now I run into many, many people who, you know, if you walk down the street, they're like, have you ever heard of CAR-T therapy? People are like, what? You know, so, you know, this idea that, wow, we can actually cure cancer. And I'm like, well, this has to happen. Like, I have to get involved somehow. I have to help. So I offered to invest and took the management team as it was currently constituted out to help, you know, fundraise and introduce them to some of my friends in London. And we managed to put together a seed round for them. It was a $10 million seed round, which closed in 2019. And as part of that, I lost my mind and pledged not only my financial capital, my human capital as well to the business. And here I am five years later. I feel like five minutes, five years later, still in the business. So yeah, that's how I got kind of, from the end of the Indivio experience to the beginning of the Ori Biotech experience. 

Jon - 00:26:12: Very cool. And I guess, you know, first question I have is like, you mentioned that like you had the startup experience, but that was kind of within or under the wing of a larger org. But now There's no larger org. Can you talk about those early days? Like where it's like you are truly like building, building the plane as you're trying to like fly it. 

Jason - 00:26:33: Yeah, I was the third or fourth employee in this business, joining the founding team, basically. You know, very, very deep domain expertise on the founding team. Again, some of those elements that I had done in the past, the marketing, the commercialization, the branding, the sales, the fundraising was a new experience for me. But I have been on the other side as an investor, which makes that jump easier. So, you know, I think I thought I could add value in various ways. And, you know, we started with culture. We started with brand. And, you know, what do we want this company to be? And building what Ori Biotech meant. So our tagline, which you may be able to see under the logo there, but it's on my jacket as well, it says, Manufacturing Brighter Futures. You know, we're a manufacturing technology company. We could have said engineering great machines, you know, engineering great cell therapies. But ultimately what we're doing is, or we're all trying to do, and our therapeutics developer partners as well, is trying to impact patients. So it's, you know, how do we think about our role in the world? What does Ori want to be when it grows up? What is our, you know, what is our passion? What is our big purpose? And we started there and really trying to develop that and think about that. And that translated into some VC funding, which translated into, you know, an engineering program and our own team. And we're now 83 people and have just launched our first product this year, which is going to hopefully be used in the first clinical trials in 2025. And treat the very first patients with the next generation of cell therapies, which will be an incredibly happy moment for me when we get there. That we sought out to do, you know, five and a half years ago. 

Jon - 00:28:09: Very cool. And congratulations on the product launch. And as you were kind of like, I'm sure you're like scoping out the market, seeing what the status quo and kind of your guys' competitive edge and differentiation is. Can you talk a little bit about, like, I guess, what is the status quo and what is it for those out there? Like, what is the state of the market and how is Ori approaching it differently? 

Jason - 00:28:30: Yeah, and it's really the kind of the tale of two halves. I mean, I think when I joined the company and met them in 2018, joined full-time in 2019. We didn't know it. We were on the cusp of an explosion in this area. So 1920, 21, something like, I don't know, I'll get the number wrong, but it was like $50 billion was invested in cell therapy alone in like two years. I mean, it was just an incredible culmination of the scientific proof of concept happening, enough of this new science coming to the fore. It was an incredible focus in advanced therapies in this area. And what we knew at that point, and still is true today, is that these products were being developed on first-generation lab-scale technologies. They're using bags. They're using tea flasks. They're using technology that was developed for transplant medicine, you know, RegenMed. None of these tools are fit for purpose to get this industry where it needs to go in the next 10 years. So it was very clear that the innovation was lacking in this industry to support this kind of growth opportunity in personalized, you know, living medicines. And it was fundamentally different from where biopharma had been for the last 30 years. So we make lots of tablets in one place. We stamp them out of chemicals. They go into bottles. They go into pallets. They go to pharmacies. They go to distribution centers. They go to pharmacies. That was the supply chain. Then we did biologics and we have, you know, it took us 20 years to get, to these giant tanks of biologic, biological medicines that turn into biologics. But at that point we're making small g, generic medicines, right? So any one of those tablets and any one of those doses of a biologic can go to you, it can go to me, it can go to anyone else, it goes out through the supply chain. It is generic to any patient. It is not at all specific to that particular patient. So what we do here is we take your immune cells, we take them from you at the hospital, we send them through a manufacturing process and a supply chain, and they return that singular dose, those exact cells that have been genetically modified and usually grown up into large numbers, back to you. And it only works for you. It wouldn't work for me or for anyone else. So this idea that we have now a living medicine, because we have to keep the cells alive through that process, and it's also personalized just to you with a circular supply chain, starts with you and ends with you, is a totally new paradigm for the industry. We've never had to do anything like this before. And so we've been figuring it out, trying to apply the lessons from biologics, learning the painful way that it doesn't work anywhere near the same way. And then we can't apply the same rules to it. And now we've reached a point where seven to eight years post the first approval of a cell therapy, there's now eight, I believe, approved cell therapies. And just this year, for the very first time, we'll treat 10,000 patients in one year. We've treated over 35,000 patients in total. In the last seven years across now eight different indications. So the incredible, the kind of inflection point for me in the journey with Ori was I learned that there were cures for cancer. And then I learned that basically patients couldn't get access to them because they were too expensive and too hard to make. And I just said, well, that's just an untenable outcome, which just can't happen. And so, you know, kind of threw my hat in the rain and said, well, let's go, let's see if we can, we can help fix this. And I think this incredible modality has a huge and exciting future to cure not only all different types of cancer in which is being studied, both liquid and solid tumors, you know, things very, the hardest to reach diseases like ovarian cancer, prostate, pancreatic, lung, you know, there's really kind of deadly diseases which don't have great, you know, brain, glioblastoma, like all these. Disease, 10 million people a year are diagnosed with cancer globally. Another 10 million people a year die of cancer every year. There's a huge potential impact that we can have if we can get these cures into the clinic and get it to patients at scale at an affordable price that could be accessed not only in the Western world. But everywhere in the world. And that's where his mission is, a company which is, as I said, easy to get out of bed for in the morning and feel like you're doing something important. 

Jon - 00:32:46: Hearing that I like i'm thinking about you seeing like your DC experience seeing how the sausage is made and then having kind of like the the Medco experience kind of seeing like i said I'm pre clinical guy but you saw everything like with the supply chain everything what everything you described like you know pressing the pill like putting in the bottles I want to imagine that kind of was like something you're like this needs to get better if we're gonna actually have and do it in the lab like me I'm like I don't know i'm just working on the tech. 

Jason - 00:33:16: I'm just micropipetting. 

Jon - 00:33:17: Yeah I'm just gonna keep pipetting but there's a kind of this downstream kind of exposure that you had which I'm because like definitely I'm gonna imagine informs a lot of this and your willingness to get in the arena and do the thing 

Jason - 00:33:30: Yeah, I mean, I think the, and we still suffer from that today. Like, you know, process development scientists, research scientists, people doing translation. In academic research and or in pharmaceutical companies, are not thinking about the end game. They are not thinking about what's the cost of this product going to be and how do I get it to patients? Because it's not their job. Their job is to say, does this work? Is there a safety signal in here somewhere? Is this an efficacious medicine? But ultimately, the hard lesson we've learned with cell therapy is that you can have great science and highly, highly clinically effective medicine that still can't reach patients because we didn't think about those things early enough. And we try and scale up a lab scale process using old tools, it doesn't work, no matter how many billions we spend on it. And so I've been talking a lot in the last kind of year, 18 months, about elevating commercial viability up alongside safety and efficacy. We've always been focused on safety and efficacy pre-clinically, that's the core, you know, North Stars for us as an industry. But for cell therapy in particular, we can no longer assume that if it works, it'll get covered and we can make it and we can treat enough patients with it because those things have proven not to be the case. So we have to be thinking about this other element, this commercial viability piece. Early and getting scientists and process developers to care about that stuff is hard. So, you know, if you're a researcher and you want to spin out a company, you want to get VC funding, you want to partner an asset. These are questions that you need the answer to. You cannot say that will be Pfizer's problem, that will be, you know, J&J's problem, that will be Novartis' problem, because they've already inherited those products and have failed with them, and they're not accepting that problem anymore. So, you know, what we've tried to build at Ori is a platform that's flexible enough to be used in the scientific, you know, research lab at the very early phases. But if it happens to hit, and you get those safety and efficacy tick marks or, you know, check marks done, you know you've also got commercial viability because the platform will skip with you. So you no longer have to worry about that. If you use this, then you sort of tick that box already. But if you're continuing development of flask or a bag or whatever you're doing today, you're almost doomed to failure no matter what you do, no matter how clinically effective your product is, which is terrible for patients. It's terrible for drug developers, terrible for investors. You know, it's everybody loses. And that's it. 

Jon - 00:35:52: Absolutely. And I think about that kind of dichotomy where it's like the downstream kind of like viability is kind of like an afterthought. I'm like, why is this an afterthought? There's only so much money that can be spent. And if this is so untenable that no one can afford it, all of this was moot. 

Jason - 00:36:12: All that stuff. And the funny thing that I often reflect on is I've never talked to a single... PI or an investigator or someone leading a clinical trial says, you know, I don't really care if this product makes it to patients. Every single person is there for that reason. 

Jon - 00:36:28: Yeah. 

Jason - 00:36:29: The fact that the decisions that we make early, which seem benign in the early phase, like, okay, we don't have to worry about cost of goods right now. We're just going to kind of, you know, that's someone else's problem later, actually could be the differentiator of what actually allows the product to reach patients and get market access and do what you want it to do or not. It's not necessarily whether it has 97% efficacy versus 93% efficacy or whatever, which is what we've been thinking about, you know, for the last couple of decades. So it is, I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, we all want the same thing. Human beings respond to incentives. We have to create the right incentive structures for people to realize that this is something they have to care about, you know, and all that work. I think part of it also is that drug discovery is such a Hail Mary anyway. You know, I've got a 7% chance of the product that I'm developing ever making it to market anyway. So I've got so many things to worry about. The other 93% of the outcome, that this is just one more thing, but it's an important thing that people need to really focus on. 

Jon - 00:37:31: Absolutely. And I think to get back to your, what you mentioned about like the healthcare pharma kind of therapeutic industry, not doing a great job of like doing PR is that element that you're describing of like this minuscule chance of getting this drug approved and also being commercially viable are truly miracles. How are we up there with tobacco? How are we compared to tobacco? Like how, like, this is like all of this. And I think about it and it's like similar to like material science too, where you're like, it looks great in like pilot scale. And then once you start getting into like commercial scale, everything just starts like the wheels fall off. And you're like, holy crap. 

Jason - 00:38:17: Yeah, we have the tools to get the biology out for 10 patients. Like, we can do it as close as possible. We just can't do it for 10,000. And that ultimately is where success lies, is the bridge between 10 and 10,000. 

Jon - 00:38:27: Yeah, absolutely. 

Jason - 00:38:28: Hopefully we can act as part of the solution to that bigger problem. 

Jon - 00:38:32: And so with your product launch, this seems to be a pretty big paradigm shift for the space. You're now introducing what was like in bags, no longer in bags. Here's a tool that's more scalable than this. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to the go-to-market for your product? I'm going to imagine there's a lot of education, too, that you have to do with the folks who are like, I've never seen this before, ever. How do you cross that chasm? 

Jason - 00:39:02: Yeah, I mean, that's another two-hour podcast we could probably do on this one topic. I think, you know, we've worked very hard from 2018-19 when I joined the business, establishing Ori as a credible source, a partner to the industry. You know, the players who are in the industry today with the first-generation technologies. The nomenclature tells the story. They're vendors. You know, the therapy developers think of them as vendors. And that's the bottom of the relationship pyramid is just someone I go to to buy stuff. They have no value beyond selling me stuff. And so we have worked very hard to move our way up the relationship pyramid providing value beyond products because we haven't had any products. So we've had to figure out a way to be relevant without products for several years while we were developing it. And so a lot of that has to do with our approach, our brand, our purpose, our mission, you know, the things that we stand for, the things we believe in, you know, the data we put out there in the world to get credibility. And we spent a lot of time and a lot of effort getting credibility for three or four years before we ever launched our first product. And I think that was an investment that was well worth making because we enter the market now with our first product in a differentiated place from where most of the industry has been at that kind of vendor level. And this goes back to not only products, you know, the products that we've developed, the Iro platform is best in class. It delivers best in class results. It looks great. It looks like it was developed by Apple. Yeah. Pleasing to the eye. It does what it says it's going to do. All those things are true. But it goes far beyond the products. It actually goes very, very deeply back into culture is what do we believe our role in this is? We are enabling our partners to gain widespread patient access for their life-saving therapies. That is our mission as a company. We are supporting the industry. And our goal is to support them and enable them to do these great, incredible things and cure these intractable diseases. And if we think about that kind of servant leadership mentality of we are here to serve the industry, we are here to partner, to do, help them get to the big goal that we all want to achieve, you behave differently. You behave differently in the way you interact. You turn up to meetings differently. We hear feedback. The Ori team turns up prepared. They turned up ready to add value. They add value in ways that others don't. This is like music to my ears. I love this stuff. This is the way we position ourselves because that's our job. Our job is to support you, the pioneers, the heroes of cell therapy that are developing these products and to help you get for the end game. And if we sort of take that position to market in everything we do, not just the way our product looks, the way it operates, its usability, but how we answer the phone, how we handle customer complaints, how our sales team behaves, you know, all of these things, our marketing messaging. Are we promoting ourselves or are we promoting the field and the ability to impact patients' lives? And so everything that we do has that cultural element embedded in it. And that will pay dividends. I firmly believe it. It's a little bit, I think, touchy feeling for several members of my board and probably others who, you know, maybe haven't seen what I've seen. But I strongly believe that, you know, that ethos within the company is that we're here for the patients. You know, every company that works in healthcare says, we put patients first. And for most companies, it's just simply not true. I've always said to our team, like, our culture, I will never put our guiding principles or our values up on the wall. Because then they become a showpiece. They don't actually get lived. They're just there. They're there for show. Culture is what happens in the water cooler. It's what happens in the hallways. It's what happens in those hard meetings. That's culture. And those things are the things that we want to make sure that we're doing, you know, with every interaction, with every opportunity to demonstrate that we are a credible partner and someone that can help solve the biggest problems for the industry and for our therapy developers out there who are developing these cures. And that's what Rory's all about. I'm super proud of what we built. I'm incredibly proud of the team and the challenges that we've overcome and the potential for us to have a massive impact on patient access for cell therapies over the next couple of decades. 

Jon - 00:43:22: That's super awesome. And like, again, just like another fist bump moment, because that's I feel the exact same way. Like Excedr is a leasing company. Leasing as a business model is a tale as old as time. You know, they're like people have been leasing things, but we're super weird in that we only serve laboratories in the life sciences. Like oftentimes people are like, do you guys do yellow iron construction? No. You guys do aviation? No. You guys can do a fleet of cars? No, we don't. And we take great pride in it. Right, because and and. We just do this. Like, this is all we do is lab equipment. And but it comes back to like, we're here to serve the scientific community, to accelerate the path and pace in which we can get these miracles across the line. And for us, we realize that's like, you know, that's perhaps not what Wall Street wants to hear. They're like, what about the TAM? Like the TAM could be so much bigger. But for us, we were making a conscious decision to take a smaller TAM, but a TAM we really care about and go in deep. And I think exactly what you said is like when you keep that at the forefront. Like that is true, like, I don't think that's fluff, honestly. I think that's for real. Because at the end of the day, we were talking about the very, very beginning. It's like people buy from people and people partner with people. And do you want to just be that vendor where there's like, this is the bill that I need to pay? Or is this someone that you can rely on and know that your values are aligned? Because like when things like with every partnership, things also get tough too. Like, are you going to do the right thing? It's kind of that thing where you like, you would hope that whoever you partner with will do the right thing. But if you don't establish those like ground rules, your partners might not know. And they just treat you like any other vendor. So I truly believe what you're building is critically important to that. And I'm going to imagine. Definitely facilitates more. Productive, engaged conversation with these partners that you're striving to partner with. 

Jason - 00:45:20: Absolutely. This is a deeper, deeper level of engagement. And the very top of the relationship period is a trusted advisor. And people will say, oh, we're trusted advisors to our clients. The definition of trust advisor is your customer or your client doesn't do anything in your domain of expertise without consulting you first. How many of your relationships can you say that is true for? I'm guessing very, very few because it is incredibly difficult to build that level of trust to where you get to that status. No, so we have to earn that. By showing up every day in a differentiated fashion, by bringing value, by being responsive, by being customer obsessed. These are the things we think about. And we will get there. We will earn the right to be a trusted advisor to our customers and our partners in the bigger journey. But it's a journey for sure. It's not a- 

Jon - 00:46:08: Yeah, it's not built overnight. 

Jason - 00:46:10: And you're right. Maximizing short-term revenues and profits is often in direct conflict to that. A great example from the COVID era is just-in-time supply chains, right? Great for working capital. You know, we carry 30 days of inventory on the books and it arrives from whatever we need, arrives from China whenever we need it. It's all working great. This is-our CFO loves it. As soon as that supply chain gets disrupted, you've got rubber gloves and pipette tips and gas removal bags that are a core part of the bio-processing for supply chain that are no longer around. People had to stop clinical trials because they couldn't get a carbon removal. People died because we couldn't continue those medical trials. I refuse to make that trade-off. I refuse to, and I might get fired over it one day, who knows, but I refuse to make that trade-off. We're going to carry enough inventory to make sure that we can have a business continuity plan that allows for us to supply our partners that we're committed to supplying and to partnering with. And that is not going to be a very popular decision with my future CFO or whoever whose job it is to manage the numbers. But it's like some of these things, you have to stand for something. Your business has to believe in something. If it's just a black box that prints money, there's a lot of black boxes that print money. What does it stand for? 

Jon - 00:47:36: Absolutely. And I always think about it as like, if you have a long time horizon, this all makes sense. It all makes sense. Because like, if you're building for resilience, and like, I always think about vendor relations, I've been squeezed as a vendor before. And I was like, never will I do that to my vendors. Like, yeah, when someone tried to bully me to like, you're going to take this net 180. I'm like, what? 

Jason - 00:47:58: You've worked at big pharma, have you? 

Jon - 00:47:59: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I know. But it's like, you can imagine you can live in a world where everyone wants to partner with you, because you're not trying to eke out a minor working capital gain, right? Like, it would mean the world to every smaller company. If you paid net 30. I'm using working capital as an example, right? No, I know. It's like, can you just pay it net 30? And then that way I can reinvest in my business to help you? 

Jason - 00:48:23: It's a mindset, right? I mean, one of the businesses I used to work for essentially ran a negative working capital margin. Their receivables were on 30 days and their payables were on 120 days. So they ran a negative capital margin. Yeah, fantastic for business, for the leverage of the business. You know who hated working with them? Every single one of their vendors hated working with them. And so, you know, at the end of the day, what is good for your business is having vendors that are financially viable, that live up to their word, that like working with you, that deliver on their commitments, that view you as a partner. Those are important things. And an extra 30 days or 60 days on their working capital margin. Again, to use that example, what you want is healthy suppliers and partners and vendors downstream in your supply chain that help you do your business. And so, putting terms to them that work for their business makes sense. It's good business. But unfortunately, sometimes we forget these things. 

Jon - 00:49:17: Yeah. And I think it's just for anyone that's listening out there, just like, I encourage you to think about it from this angle. Like in a textbook, it's like, yeah, we want this negative cash conversion cycle. That's the best. But I encourage you to think about it from the other perspective of how can we make it sustainable and resilient for everyone, all the stakeholders. And it doesn't have to be zero sum win loss type situation. And exactly what you said about culture being something that you got to show up every day. This is an element of culture. That's culture. And we're not writing on the walls, we give customers net 30. That's not it. You're just doing it. You're just like, I support those who are on this journey with us. 

Jason - 00:50:00: Our team. 

Jon - 00:50:01: Our team. It's internal, external, and it's like every day showing up and living it. And it's like, people can experience that. And it's infectious. And if you, like you said, I don't agree with throwing up the values. It's like on your wall and just calling it a day because that's like, that's not it. That's just like, it's like buff. 

Jason - 00:50:21: I mean, you think your employees don't see if you're screwing your vendors and you get a chance to screw your team out of a few extra bucks to pad the bottom line, you're not going to do it. Yeah, of course you are. So, you know, it's either real, it's not real. I interview every person that gets hired at Ori. I'm the last interview. And I only interview for cultural fit. I can't be judged whether they're going to be a great scientist in the lab. I'm just not qualified. But I can tell them about what the organization that we're trying to build and what we believe in. And, you know, I use this example. I say a lot of companies say they're a family. And you and I both know that they're not a family. You know, you don't go cutting in the bottom 20% of your family when you miss your earnings. Like, you know, these are businesses. And it's just disingenuous to say that we're a family because we all know it's not true. The way I view is we're a professional sports team. I'm the manager, and I want the best player at every position. And so the sum of the parts, the team is stronger than the individuals that make up the team. At some point, if I'm not the right manager to get the most out of this team, I'll be replaced. You know, this is a fact of life. And this is, this came from No Rules Rules is the ideas that Reid Hastings has taught me through his writing. But being very upfront about that, like we have a big purpose. We share that purpose. We trust each other. We built, you know, we coach. We, you know, we're a team and we're going to look out for each other. But at the end of the day, you have to know this is a business. This is a business that we want high talent density. We want performance out of. We drive for performance. And that's what's expected. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that this is a family and you can just coast and not add any value because it's not the case. But having that upfront and that conversation is part of the culture, you know, being open and being transparent. So hopefully that's useful for someone out there who's listening. 

Jon - 00:52:06: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there are tons of folks out there who are kind of like making these pivotal hiring decisions early. And like you, I also am doing the culture check on interviews. People are surprised when I do the screeners. People are like, who am I talking to? Oh, you're talking to the CEO founder. And they're like, oh, but I'm like, don't worry. I was like, this is normal for us. But I think too, like something about the aspect of culture, like permeating, it's like those early hires to like, if you get the culture right, it's kind of like an exponential function, where like, you're more likely to get better cultural fits. But if you slack off on it, and you let someone that's like, perhaps not a fit for the culture, it also goes the other direction where that starts to go viral, and your culture starts to get diluted. So like for anyone out there who's like, I guess, I don't know if there's a better way to say it, but just like, if you're not taking this kind of culture check and screening early, seriously, I encourage you to do it. Because there are times when, especially when you're growing fast, where if you let it kind of ease up on it, you kind of let the filter get a little bit just like, there's no more filter. You're not going to recognize the culture or the company, you know, when you scale from like 10 to like 50. 

Jason - 00:53:24: And it'll ruin the company. I mean, I think ultimately the culture, the alignment is the most important thing. It's why the team does what they do. It's why they work so hard. It's why they care about what they do. And it permeates everything, permeates every interaction. It permeates the quality of the output. And yeah, an emphasis on culture is absolutely critical in my view. 

Jon - 00:53:46: Well, Jason, I'm so pumped up for Ori. Like this is freaking awesome. And I'm like, again, I was like living my little preclinical bubble, but like learning about the intricacies of like, okay, what does that actually mean on the other side was incredibly insightful. And I love your perspective on culture, because I think sometimes people can just say, oh, that's fluff. But we're like, I love that we're just like, no, not fluff. Very, very real. And, you know, I can't wait for your product launch and getting that thing into the clinic and, you know, just being on the sidelines, like rooting for you guys and watching you guys journey. Jason, you've been so generous with your time. And before we get to our traditional closing questions, what's in store for you and Ori in the next one to two years? 

Jason - 00:54:28: I mean, I probably end up saying this every year, but when you're in an exciting startup scale, like 2025 is really going to be the most exciting year for Ori yet. I mean, we're going to be working with somewhere between 10 and 15 therapy developers in 2025, both with their CDMO partners and also with the developers themselves and their own teams and their labs. And we should treat, fingers crossed, treat our first patient in a clinical trial in the second half of 2025, which is why we've been working so hard for the last six years. You know, so I've got a bottle of champagne that's been waiting for five years in the fridge for that first patient that gets treated with a therapy that's been manufactured on an aero system. So that's the super exciting element for us. And, you know, I think the industry really needs a next generation infrastructure provider. You know, someone that's going to really build out the infrastructure necessary for this next generation of medicines. And Ori wants to be that, you know, we're starting with the IRO® platform as our first product, but we have partnerships upstream and downstream with organizations on the physical infrastructure side, like a germ‐free and a G-CON. We've got partners like a bench sling or a track cell on the software side. L7, we're building out these relationships with, you know, research centers like MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic. You know, we will build out an ecosystem that can support this next generation of therapy development of clinical trials and ultimately of commercialization and much, much lower cost at much, much higher throughput availability. And that is the big vision for us. That's, you know, in two years we'll be a totally different company. Really helping to provide a more comprehensive solution to industry and into our next wave of R&D and innovation, which is a super exciting thing to think about. 

Jon - 00:56:16: I'm stoked for you guys. And I mean, it's amazing to think about just like seeing the culmination of work come to a head and, and, you know, you're talking about just like the early days about just having to establish kind of, we were differentiated even pre-products, like we are differentiated, we're different. And now you're actually seeing the product launch and actually having it starting to impact patients. So that's amazing to hear. Um, and likewise, my team usually is just like, Jon, you say this every year, the next year is going to be amazing. 

Jason - 00:56:46: Best year ever. 

Jon - 00:56:47: Yeah. It's going to be the best year. It's like, what else? I'm not going to say like, this is going to be the worst year. 

Jason - 00:56:52: Yeah. 2023 was way better. 

Jon - 00:56:54: Yeah, exactly. The best is behind us, everybody. The best is behind us now. We just call it. 

Jason - 00:57:00: Not quite as motivating. 

Jon - 00:57:00: Yeah, exactly. And then in the two traditional closing questions, first is, would you like to give any shout outs to anyone who supported you along the way? 

Jason - 00:57:10: Wow, so many folks. I mentioned him earlier. I think one of my mentors, I didn't call him out by name, but Adrian has been a fantastic mentor for me, teaching about life and business and rapport building and sales skills and all those things we talked about and being your authentic self at work. And he's been a fantastic support and the fantastic team at Ori, Farland, Gris, who invited me on this journey with them. They took a big risk on me. I'd never done this before. I mean, you've never really done this thing before. I'd have done some things before, but we've really thrown our hats in the ring together as partners and built this thing from the ground up, which has been awesome. And their trust means the world to me. And I couldn't have done any of it without my wife in particular, who I think I mentioned. I left her abandoned in the US with a two-year-old and a five-month pregnancy to let me go to Europe and start a new role that led to our life here. So there's just so many people that impact your journey and your trajectory, both professionally and personally. And I've been very, very fortunate. I'm one of those people that have few friends, but very deep friendships. And as, I don't know about you, but as only children, often those friends, you get those kind of deep bonds that you might have with a sibling. A brother or sister and those friends have been decades old. And so I think they've all had a small hand in shaping the outcome of me sitting here today. 

Jon - 00:58:40: Absolutely. I feel the exact same way too. That's how I feel about my close friends. It's like they feel like siblings, honestly. You mentioned how about bring your authentic self to be at work. This is on a lighter note. We're late to the game, but we just, my wife and I just finished Severance, which is about the mind splitting of things like work and personal life. It's like, this looks nightmarish. Like this is, this sounds awful. And I was like, oh, is this like an allegory for like? Not actually being able to do that and bring your authentic self, but incredibly important. And then the last question is, if you can give any advice to your 21-year-old self, what would it be? 

Jason - 00:59:16: Don't worry so much about the future. I think, you know, as high performers in life and people that want to do, you know, great things, you get very stressed out about, you know, how do I get to the outcome? It's all about the outcome. And you forget to enjoy the process and the journey. And it took me too long. Like most people don't believe me when I say this, but I'm actually an introvert. And so, you know, something means, as you know, it's like, where do you get your energy from interacting with people or being by yourself? I get my energy from being by myself. I can flex to an extrovert, which you've seen me do for the last two hours. But I think the introvert in me undervalued the importance of human relationships. 

Outro - 00:54:10: Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Jason Foster. Be sure to tune in for part two, where Jason reflects on his transition to the healthcare sector, his insights into scaling startups, and the pivotal moments that shaped Ori Biotech's mission. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your friends. See you next time. 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, https://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.