Rabia Khan - Serna Bio: Bridging Science & Tech—PhDs, MBAs, & Biotech Innovation (Part 2/4)

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Intro - 00:00:49: 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, Rabia Khan shared stories from her childhood in Pakistan, her early interest in genetics, and what led her to pursue undergrad and grad school in Canada. If you missed it, be sure to go back and check out part one. In part two, Rabia reflects on her PhD experience and the unexpected ways it shaped her thinking, not just as a scientist, but as a future founder. She talks about balancing long hours in the lab with an MBA on the side, how she navigated personal challenges during graduate school, and what ultimately pulled her toward translational science and startup life. She also shares how a cold email led to her first job in tech, and how seeing the healthcare system close up, and what ultimately pulled her towards translational science and startup life. She also shares how a cold email led to her first job in tech, and how seeing the healthcare system up close changed her perspective and her ambitions. 

Rabia - 00:02:14: So I think one of the things that I wish someone had told me when I was starting my PhD, and I feel like everyone starting a PhD should sit down at some point and say, what do I want out of this and write it down? Because unlike the UK where PhDs are three years and time bound, which I wish I had known, in Canada, they are neither time bound nor three years. And so you can meander. And if you don't have an active, I want a nature paper. And so I will only take projects that have a nature paper, or I really want to study this one pathway and I want to really go deep on it. I didn't have any of that. I was driven very much with curiosity and a love for genetics. And so my project was on, there's a mouse strain where if you infect it with Salmonella, they kill over and die. And another mouse strain, if you infect them with Salmonella, it's like water, nothing happens to them. And because mouse are inherently homozygous, you breed them together, you run some crossbreeding. The idea is you can identify the genes that are driving the susceptibility and resistance phenotype. And so conceptually, that's very exciting. But operationally, it's a lot of mouse breeding. It's a lot of salmonella infection. And it's a lot of being alone in mouse facilities, tail vein injection mice, doing ear hole punches, DNA extractions over and over again. And so I think a year and a half in, that side of me that enjoyed economics got really, you know, I need to be doing something else. And so in addition to being very involved in all the extracurriculars, I was always involved in every student society that existed. Starting something in some student society was, you know, an underlying theme. I actually went to McGill and I said, can I do an MBA part-time? And they said, no. And so I said, okay. And I walked further down the street to Concordia and I said, can I do an MBA part time? They looked at me a bit funny and said, yes. And so I said, okay, well, that's what I'm going to do. And having that counterbalance meant that when I was back in the lab, doing things that are emotionally very difficult, working with animals is a very difficult thing. I think we underplay it. For me, it was very difficult working with animals. And so it helped normalize it. It helped keep me grounded and focused during my PhD. But it also gave me that other side of what helps you think about the creativity. Maybe it's case competitions and things like that. So overall, what I got out of the PhD was critical thinking. How do you take a project? How do you break it down? But what I didn't realize is all of those skills matter. And so we're actually designing mouse experiments right now in the company at Serna Bio. And I was talking to our chief scientific and development officer and I was like, this CRO is taking too long. I'm just going to get a mouse facility, do some mouse injections myself, because I've done this for like five years. This is not complicated. And I know how to do tail vein injections. I know how to do cardiac puncture and I know how to collect brains. And I can do this whole experiment in a week. So in addition to teaching you how to do, you know, seven years of a PhD, you do facts, you do a license, you do basically every tool that you need, that it teaches you a bunch of things. It also teaches you how to be systematic, research, all the things that you know. But overall, I think, you know, the question you asked me was, how was it for me personally? I wish that someone had sat me down and said, what do you want out of this? And make sure you drive for that, because I didn't realize that towards the end of the PhD, which is, oh, you want three papers and want to get your thesis out and you want to defend and think about what's next in life. 

Jon - 00:06:07: Yeah, and I think with colleagues of mine who kind of had similar experiences, they expressed the same exact feeling. It's kind of like a gas in like a room. It'll just expand. It'll take up the whatever room you give it. It will just expand. It'll take over all of it. And I was actually talking to colleagues who got their PhD in the UK. It's like quite the opposite. They're just like. This room is very small. It's very intense. And we need you out. Instantly, there's, yeah, there is no, there's no other option here. Like we need you out. I'm going over here. It's just like, yeah, whatever. Like, you know, you can do whatever you want really. If you, and I felt the same way about being in lab. It's like, it can be pretty isolating for sure. And I think that's why I always wanted to be in the periphery of labs, but not necessarily being in the driver's seat in the lab. Because for me, it boiled down to a personal thing. Like I am an introvert with extroverted tendencies and I just like kind of need more like human interaction, at least in a more high, a little bit more for high frequency. So ended up just like, okay, like how could we support labs and all the efforts that they're doing? And I was like, okay, I can like vicariously like participate in lab work and not necessarily be doing it myself anymore. So I feel, I feel that. And, you know, again, just like. Kudos to you for, you know, biology, econ, PhD, MBA, kind of like different sides of the brain. You know, it's a lot, but it's like, it sounds like an incredible experience and an enriching one at that. And talk a little bit about the MBA side. How was that experience for you outside of being a different topic than what you were doing in the lab?  

Rabia - 00:07:55: Yeah, I'll tell you a story about SWOT analyses, just maybe for listeners. It's a strengths, weakness, opportunity, threat SWOT. And it's a strategy class. And they're like, you know, you have to do a SWOT analysis. And the way to analyze it is to think about the strengths of something, the opportunities, the weaknesses, and the threat. Sat there and I was like It's just common sense. 

Jon - 00:08:21: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:08:22: Are you just teaching me common sense? This what this is about? And so I've really struggled for a very long time, because I'm like this is not new information. 

Jon - 00:08:35: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:08:35: Why am I not getting new information? Right. So economics was a lot of fun because it was new information. It was new language. It was new words, marginal utility, opportunity, cost. Things that I didn't know I was learning, other than finance, which was completely new and I was not very good at because, I didn't enjoy it. Sorry, accounting. I didn't enjoy it. It didn't feel like it was new information. It all felt like common sense packaged in a different way. Now, to be fair, MBAs are built for people that have worked in the corporate world and are now coming back to school. They are not built for people doing PhDs with zero work experience, doing an MBA part-time, right? So I'm not the target audience for this degree. I just happened to be in the class. And so I was mildly frustrated that I wasn't learning anything new because the other side of me was out being like, oh yes, there's all of these new, you know, RNA-seq was just becoming a thing. I was like, oh my goodness, like we can sequence RNA. It's insane. Because my PhD was SNP chips, right? So we were still in snip chip territory, not whole-genome sequencing. And so it was fascinating to be in a room where we were just talking about things that I felt like was common sense repackaged. Looking back, I now understand why frameworks help, right? And the thing that I got out of the MBA, we did a lot of case studies. You were given a case and then you had to like in three hours come up with a presentation. So it was like, this company is going out of business. These are the P&L statements. Here's the marketing strategy. What would you do, right? And so you had to, as a team, get together and be like, we're going to close 10 sites. We're going to kill these product lines. And we're going to go ahead and try and acquire this other company with the leftover money to compensate for the revenue. When you're forced to do that, you need to rationalize your decision-making. And that rationalization of decision-making with frameworks, SWOT analysis, is a great tool. I think that is something that I learned during the MBA kind of by osmosis. I didn't realize I was learning it, but the love for frameworks comes from there. And the other thing is, unfortunately, PhDs are not a team sport and MBAs are a team sport. And I loved having teams. I love being around people where you're working on the problem together. I made some of my closest friends there. And the memories that I have is there was in the basement of John Molson School of Business, there was a pizza place that had a dollar pizza. And obviously, that's all you can afford, right? You're not affording anything more than $1 Canadian dollar. Oh my God, so many $1 pizzas with your friends, talking about this one problem that doesn't make any sense. Those are experiences I carry with that MBA that I really enjoy. And I think the frameworks that support a decision is something that was very helpful. Because in science, we have experiments that support a decision. But in life, one of the things about life and business is that decisions are not black and white. It's not a Western blot that worked or didn't work. It's normally gray. It's probabilities, it's risks and probabilities. And I think that's where business schools will teach you, here's a framework how to navigate gray, because actually, most of the world is gray. There's very few black and white decisions. 

Jon - 00:12:10: Absolutely. And I think too, in just like kind of the lessons that you're, you're mentioning that you kind of got from the MBA is just like. You also just don't have time to experiment on everything. Like, you just don't. Like, again, you just, like, you have to solve for time. You're just, like, sometimes you just have to make the decision when there is no clear answer. And actually, like, indecision is actually probably far worse. It just is only getting worse. Like, it is super costly. But again, just, like, what a, you're on polar opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of your learning. Which is cool. Like, I really like that. Like, I really like when you get exposure to both ends. They're both... Like intellectually very rigorous and valuable and in their own rights. But you almost have like a control group because if you only do one, you don't have anything to compare it to. But now you're like, oh, like you can actually have this frame of reference. Like there is something else on the other side. And yeah, I think too, like you kind of said it like half jokingly with the common sense. And like, sometimes I'm like, that's what people need to learn sometimes because there's a lot of people I encounter who don't have common sense. I'm like, what? Like how? You're so smart. But how did you come to this conclusion that like, I feel like it's a very common sense conclusion. It would have saved you all this heartache. 

Rabia - 00:13:30: I know. But in those moments, I'm one of those people where it's not you, it's me. So if I'm in a meeting and I'm like, that doesn't make any sense, I'm missing something. And so I've always learned like, when it's a clearly something doesn't make sense. The default framework I have is get curious, right? Being like, tell me more about how you made this decision. It's not making sense to me. And normally I'll learn something because I will have like missed something, obviously, or they'll learn something because I'll be like, well, if you look at it in this framework, this should be the obvious outcome. 

Jon - 00:14:05: Totally. And I think I always take those opportunities just to like, it's just like a learning opportunity, frankly. You just like unpack it and just keep going. And sometimes you're like, oh, yeah, my bad. Like, that's just my bad. That's totally cool. But then you just it's all a creative experiences where you're just like it just adds and adds and adds. So now you've wrapped up your graduate school experience. Did you know what was next? 

Rabia - 00:14:28: So, you know, you're doing your MBA and your PhD and the world is all about management consulting. 

Jon - 00:14:35: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:14:35: The dream is McKinsey and case comps. And, you know, like, oh, lonely. 

Jon - 00:14:41: What's the book that they always, Case in Point? Is that the book?

Rabia - 00:14:45: Case in Point. That was the book. 

Jon - 00:14:47: That was the book. 

Rabia - 00:14:49: Oh, I was so bad at it. 

Jon - 00:14:51: Yeah. Everyone's like, you need to like study the hell out of this. I was like, ah. 

Rabia - 00:14:55: You need your math needs to be like on point. You need to be able to do 538.567 times 15.

Jon - 00:15:03: Yeah. On the fly. 

Rabia - 00:15:04: You know, millisecond. And if you can't, you're just a failure in humanity, which in the moment I was. And so I actually am very, very close to my parents, as you can tell from most decisions in my life. At that point, my parents had moved to Toronto and I was in Montreal and they were in Toronto. And my father actually was on a clinical trial. The clinical trial gave him drug-induced liver injury and he went into liver failure. The liver took out the kidney. And so he went into dual organ failure in Toronto. And I still remember I had just finished my MBA. And this was the first time in two and a half or maybe three years, I had my evenings and my weekends back. And I was writing the final year of my PhD. So I was writing my thesis and I was like, oh my God, what I'm going to do with all of this time that I have, because this is going to be great. I'm going to apply for these jobs. I'm going to study Case in Point inside out. I'm going to become excellent at math and I'm going to go work in BCG. Actually, that was my dream. My dream was to go work at BCG. I love their culture. I love the people that I met. And so I ended up actually spending most of my time going back and forth with Toronto because dad was in the hospital. Then moving to Toronto and writing my PhD thesis over an extended period of time rather than in a short period of time while dad was in and out of the hospital. Watching hospital healthcare delivery, first time in my life in the Western world, being in ICUs, understanding what hepatorenal syndrome is, understanding what liver failure looks like, understanding what kidney failure looks like. These are real ugly diseases for which, by the way, zero cures. When you are in kidney failure, your blood is cycled through a huge dialysis machine three times a week and your entire family, their whole life is surrounding that. And that's it. Nothing more happens, right? 

Jon - 00:17:05: By the way, that was the caretaking that I was doing. Yeah, it's rough. It is really, really rough. 

Rabia - 00:17:11: And to watch someone's entire blood come in and out and realize that there's nothing you can do. And if the dialysis messes up a little bit, the person is not okay. And your whole schedule is around dialysis. So when you combine that with liver failure, you actually have something where the toxicity to the brain can get so high that the person can't make decisions anymore. And so you have to call 911 and they have to take you to the hospital because now this person is basically out of whack. Like dad would forget who he was and you couldn't convince him to go to the hospital. So you had to call 911 and they come and they give you a sedative and they carry you away. And so this was the last two years of my PhD in and out. Finished my MBA. I was doing this. Really excited about going to BCG, right? And applied to McKinsey. Didn't even make it past the written test. Didn't make it past the written test of BCG. Got rejected at Deloitte. Past the third interview. Just one after another. Like they were just not interested in having me. Confident I was going to be jobless forever. Very, very worried. Writing my thesis. Because at McGill, you can write your thesis but start applying for jobs, right? You don't need to finish. And then there was a company called ScienceScape at the time that had built a knowledge graph on the biomedical literature. And I was preparing for my defense. And I was worried I was going to be asked a question on Salmonella that I did not know the answer for. And I would fail. This was a real worry. And they had a tool which said stay on top of the academic research. The natural language processing algorithms basically read PubMed, tagged the papers. And as a result of that, you would have a Twitter-like feed for scientific papers for the people that you cared about and the topics you cared about. I was like, I need this. I need to not miss the one paper, right? And so I emailed them and I said, can I please get access to this tool? Because if you want access, email us. And so I emailed them and they were based in Toronto. And so... All back being like hey do you want to come talk to us, and I was like, sure. And so I go in and Sam Molyneux and Amy Molyneux were the founders. The company became Meta eventually. And they offered me a job. And the job was because I had a PhD and an MBA, they had this beautiful tool and they needed someone to figure out with a science degree how we're going to sell it. And I joined. I will never be grateful enough to Sam and Amy for giving me that opportunity because that first job gives you so much confidence in life. And so I started there. It was maybe a 15-person company in Toronto. And I was doing anything that anyone would give me. I was helping Sam with whatever he needed. But basically thinking about if you have a knowledge graph on the biomedical literature and you can read the world's scientific domain, how do you make money from that? And so examples are you could sell this information to Thermo Fisher. For example, when Thermo Fisher sells to UCSF, they don't actually know which. Lab is buying what? Because they're going to a central procurement tool, right? And so we went to Thermo and we said, hey, what if we could tell you that this lab is just flipped from using your master mix to another ones, right? How do we help the sales reps get a better handle on what tools this lab is buying? Like, did you know they've been buying the other master mix for three years? Why don't you try and flip them? So we tried to sell that by putting a BI tool on top of the knowledge graph, did a deal with IARPA on knowledge predictions. And that company, Sam had a vision to change the name of the company to Meta. And he went and got the domain Meta.com. And he changed the name to Meta. So it became Meta. That company subsequently got acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. And that's where the name Meadow comes from. It comes from a tiny little company in Toronto.  

Jon - 00:21:26: That's so crazy. I love how it was like, I'm never going to be employed ever. I have this defense that I think I'm going to fail. And then let me just look at like what I can do to not fail. Hey, I would love this tool. And then they're like, hey, you want a job? It's kind of like. And I think, you know, that's something like this on that point is that for anyone listening, I feel like if there's a product that you can get, like you yourself would want to use and you're into a good product, you'd be surprised. You're like, hey, I'm like, actually, I'm a one, I'm like a customer of this thing. But I would also love to be able to like contribute to this thing too. Like if you're a passionate customer, they're like, well, why not? Like you seem to really care about this thing. And you know exactly what the use case here because you're a customer. You'd be surprised. Like I feel like you could turn that into job opportunities. Like I'm not saying it's like a guaranteed job opportunity, but it makes sense. There's alignment there. 

Rabia - 00:22:25: Well, there's passion, I think. And, you know, when I interview people, if I can see passion, that trumps so much other things. And so if someone's emailing you and being like, I really want to use your tool, I'm so worried about my defense. They must have seen the like, she thinks that this tool is the best thing since sliced bread. 

Jon - 00:22:43: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:22:43: let's talk. Let's talk to who she is. 

Jon - 00:22:45: Yeah, exactly.  

Rabia - 00:22:47: And the MBA helped. I mean, it helped think about business in a different way. That's how I ended up in that role. And I was actually talking to a girl today who reached out to me about mentorship and things like that. I think serendipity and following your heart is undervalued. 

Jon - 00:23:07: I agree. Like, I truly agree. And I think I also was like considering like, I was like consulting, I could be a lawyer. There's like these, like, these kind of tracks that are kind of like well formed. It's almost like a well formed track. But I think I encourage anyone to exactly what you've said, kind of like follow these passions and interests. But the key is that you have to be like, it's a proactive thing. These things don't just like, happen to you. I mean, sometimes it does. Like sometimes it does. Sometimes like, you get struck by lightning. Sometimes that happens. But I feel like it's almost like manufacturing, like serendipity and luck. It's like, you got to be proactive about this. Like, it's not just like sitting, like, got to go out there, reach out, whatever it may be, show up. And that's when you start seeing this happen. And then where serendipity is less to happen, I think is that if you're only on the track. Because it's a very controlled environment. They're not on a randomness on a track. And serendipity kind of needs randomness. 

Rabia - 00:24:09: It's not for everyone, right? I think that's the other thing is I was talking to lawyers today, trying to look at a contract and they're like, you know, we should talk about your risk tolerance as a CEO. And I was like, I'm a solo founder. I imagine you can see that I have high risk tolerance. 

Jon - 00:24:25: Yeah, yeah. 

Rabia - 00:24:26: I think it's all relative. And I was looking for security. I was looking for a job. I was looking for a career progression. But Deloitte was the one I made it furthest along. And I think what they saw in me was someone who wouldn't fit a good box. I think they probably saw someone who would challenge their box and cause problems in their little box. And so it was the right decision to not hire me. I probably would have not been very good at any of those jobs, frankly. 

Jon - 00:24:57: Yeah, and that's an interesting experience because I was pretty far down the line to be at this law firm slash consulting firm. But I think they also saw something that they're like, he doesn't really fit that mold. Like he would be a problematic person. I'm not saying I'm like breaking rules or laws or anything. It's more of just like... It seems like he wants to do his own thing, like it's kind of the energy. 

Rabia - 00:25:26: But I think people see that, right? And I always say founders sometimes can make terrible employees. 

Jon - 00:25:33: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:25:33: If you've been a founder and you're like, oh man, this was really hard. I want to go work for someone. That's a different stage in life. But if you are inherently an entrepreneur, you haven't figured that out about yourself yet. People will see that in you, I think, especially experienced people. And we'll say this will be a difficult person to manage. And in larger organizations, I think you kind of don't want a weird problem hire. Because that's a difficult place to be. So I absolutely would have loved to work at BCG or Deloitte or any of them. Got rejected across the board. But I was so lucky. Because whenever I say I worked at Meta, people think Facebook. I'm like, did you know Facebook's name for Meta comes from Toronto? 

Jon - 00:26:16: Yeah, yeah. No, no. Different things. Like, they were different. It was not always Meta. It was not always Meta. And rejection still sucks, right? Like, the not getting into Deloitte or BCG, that stuff still sucks. Like, just like, you know, for me, I got like, I felt like, oh, man, I'm not cut out to be at this firm. But like, in retrospect, I was like, oh, they did me a solid. 

Rabia - 00:26:37: That's right. But you don't know that then. 

Jon - 00:26:40: I did not know that. I was like talking to my girlfriend, now wife. I was like. What the hell, I was like, I was like, just like complaining or like, are you hitting me? Like, are you at, but now like, you know, fast forward, it was like a long time. I'm like, God, this journey would have been so different and probably a less fun one for me and for them. If I was there. 

Rabia - 00:27:03: Yeah. And I think back and I'm like, whenever something feels like it's pushing water uphill, it's probably a bad idea. This is my life takeaway because, I inherently can't do math at the speed of life. 

Jon - 00:27:16: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:27:16: I was not going to pass that McKinsey, you know, how many balls fit in an airplane. 

Jon - 00:27:22: Yeah. 

Rabia - 00:27:24: How you think about this? 

Jon - 00:27:26: Yeah, like, how are you going to move this mountain and you have like a truck? You're like, what? I remember like studying those. I'm just like trying to like grind them out. And I'm like, this doesn't feel natural to me. 

Rabia - 00:27:38: And there were people who were very good at it, and they've gone on to work at these firms, gone on to be very good at it. I tried. I got all the degrees. The degree set was there. The aptitude was somewhere else. 

Jon - 00:27:53: And I think whenever I think about hiring, it is like trying to spot those fits, those specific fits. It's like, what are these like, are you like passionate? Are you hungry? And is this going to mesh well with the kind of culture that we have here? If you have a founder kind of like type energy and you're not looking for founder type energy, those are just like two things that are going to collide and cause friction. And not to say anything, there's like, they're just different modes of working. Like there are plenty of super smart, great people who are not founders and they crush. It's just a different mode of working. And just knowing exactly where you fall on that spectrum, like are you all the way founder mode or are you like more in like, I'm more in this kind of like more regimented kind of schema. Just knowing that is I think the biggest part and what your culture is. 

Rabia - 00:28:48: Where in your life's journey are you, right? I think some people can be founder mode at some point in their life, and maybe they want a break, and then maybe they want to go back. I always say like one of the most amazing things was at Sensyne where I built a mini company inside a company, right? So if you are in a point in your life where you are risk averse, but you're inherently a builder, there are ways to do that, right? You don't always have to start from scratch and you don't always have to do your own thing. You can still build and you can build for someone else with comfort and a salary and healthcare and all of the above, right?  

Jon - 00:29:28:  What do they call us? Entrepreneurship.  

Rabia - 00:29:29: Yes, that's a great word. 

Jon - 00:29:31: Yeah, intrapreneurship. It's possible. It's like absolutely possible. It's like, no, I think about it. I was like, damn, it would have been nice to have like at least like it's kind of, yeah, where they're just like, yeah, there's like we got tons of like resources and cash back here for whatever entrepreneurial thing that you're doing in here. Just like let us know. Like that would have been great. I guess like question about your experience, like, you know, fresh out of your MBA, you're basically at a startup. Was that like when you got the startup bug? 

Rabia - 00:30:00: You know, I don't know the answer to that question because that's the job I got. And so did I then say, oh, my God, I must really work at a startup? Absolutely not. Right. I was there. So I decided that I was going to be not a scientist, right? Because the mouse experiments and all of that, and that had enough. And I wanted to do management consulting or business development. And then I was doing business development. And I realized, oh my God, I really miss the science. And so at this point, miraculously, my father had gotten a dual organ transplant and had moved back to Lahore and restarted his entrepreneurial. Endeavors. And I was in Toronto and having spent at this point, it must have been three years in and out of ICUs and hospitals. And, you know, it really takes a toll on you. I think people underestimate the emotional difficulty of being in hospitals all day and caring for someone. And so that was going on. I was working. I had finished my defense. I wanted a change. I didn't want to be doing BD anymore. I wanted to be near the science, but it didn't, it was not going to be mice. It was going to be iPSCs. I was going to do dishes. And so I'm like, I'm going to go, I'm going to do a postdoc.  

Jon - 00:31:18: Team In Vitro. 

Rabia - 00:31:20: Yeah. Team In Vitro. Like, no more mass work. 

Jon - 00:31:23: Yeah, yeah. 

Rabia - 00:31:24: And so I applied for postdocs, and I wanted a bigger city. So I said the Francis Crick Institute. And everyone was like, no one's going to let you do a postdoc. You've been off doing, like, BD for machine learning companies. But Eva actually decided that that was okay. And so I got a postdoc at the Francis Crick Institute. And so I moved back to the bench working on building Salmonella, so typhoid infection models and iPS-derived macrophages and trying to understand if iPS-derived macrophages are similar to human macrophages. And my vision was, I'm going to go work at GSK. I'm going to go be a scientist at GSK. At the bench, I was going to work on CRISPR and iPSCs. I went on a CRISPR course. I was going to do organoids. And I was going to do CRISPR screens. And I was so excited about working at this big company. So did I get the startup bug? Absolutely not. I was still in this like, the startup thing is cool, but I don't even know what it is. And I had watched Verily. I was in love with Verily. I thought it was the coolest company ever. I thought 23andMe was incredible. But I didn't understand that you could start a company. I didn't understand any of this. And I went to do a postdoc and I walked over to a networking event, as you do, because I never do just one thing. And so I was in London being like, what else can I do? I went to this networking event and I met someone called Jackie Hunter, who was the CEO at BenevolentAI at the time. And BenevolentAI has a knowledge graph on the biomedical literature. We're talking about like eight, nine years ago now. And at the time, there were three companies in the world that had knowledge graphs on the biomedical literature. I had worked on one of them. BenevolentAI was the second one. And so I met Jackie and I was like, this is really cool. I worked at, I know Sam. I worked at Meta. And she said, interesting. Come see me. And I gave her my card and I went to see her. This was like a year and a half into my postdoc. I went to see her. I talked to their head of HR and I don't know why I was talking to their head of HR. And then I walked into her, she was the CEO at the time, into her office. And she said, how much do you make? And I told her, which is a postdoc salary. And I think she doubled it in her head and said, okay, when can you start? And I was like, what? And it made complete sense because they needed someone that understood science and understood knowledge graph. And there was very few people at the time that understood the backend architecture of mapping ontological frameworks into backend knowledge graph, understood the technical possibilities, understood all of the ontologies. And I had done all of that work because when I was building a tool to sell to Thermo Fisher, I needed to understand the backend knowledge graph to understand the BI tool that I put on top of it. I also had a degree in genetics and I understood how biology worked. And so what Jackie must have seen as someone that understands technology and biology and can sit at the intersection of this nascent company, BenevolentAI was 50 people. They had a bunch of ex-Pfizer people and a bunch of machine learning people, but no one in the middle. And so I joined Benevolent. And even then I did not have the startup bug. I was just like. This seems like a great idea when Jackie Hunter gives you a job. You take the job, actually. I called my mom. I'm like, she's this amazing woman. You know, she's offered me a job, but I'd have to leave my postdoc. And I just, I'm learning CRISPR. And I don't know how to do this. And so mom was like, you know, you can't say no to someone like Jackie. And so I didn't. 

Jon - 00:35:10: That's freaking rad. And I guess before jumping into the BenevolentAI experience. What was moving to the UK like for you?  

Rabia - 00:35:19: Yeah, I didn't really make much of it. I think I'd gone Lahore, Montreal, Montreal, Toronto, and then Toronto, London. I loved public transit. You know, the fact that you don't have to drive. That was very exciting. 

Jon - 00:35:35: It's not the life I live or know, but I appreciate it. 

Rabia - 00:35:40: Transformational. So I'm currently in the process of wanting to move to San Francisco. And someone's like, San Francisco is a walkable city. You can take the train. And I'm like, I don't think you guys understand what it means to take the train. You have to plan to take the train. You show up and you're like, the train is at 145. We don't plan to take the train. We show up. There's a train every minute. 

Jon - 00:36:00: That is, yeah, not the same.  

Rabia - 00:36:04: Not the same. I loved it. I loved the cultural diversity. It was the first time in my life I was in a city where no one else is from that city either. And I apologize for all of the people that are actually from London, but they know this, you know, when you walk around London, you meet someone who's from London, they're unique. You're like, oh, really? What's that like? Because everyone else is from somewhere else. I love that. I fit in. And there's something for everyone. It's probably like New York. I've never lived in New York. And that to me was the drive, right? Diversity, a place of immigrants, a place where there is just so many different opinions, so many different languages, and they all come together.  

Jon - 00:36:43: That is the vibe I get. It's like San Francisco, not so much, a little bit more similar to New York. I would say San Francisco is walkable if hills don't annoy you. Like if you're okay doing hill walks, then you're good. Like, yeah, you'll just get very strong calves if you do choose to walk. But love it here. You let me know when you're in San Francisco. I'll show you around. There will be no public transportation, though. We will do long walks. 

Rabia - 00:37:11: It's not a public transportation city. This is what someone was like, you can take the BART. And I was like, yeah, it's a lot of planning that BART. 

Jon - 00:37:18: Where I live, it's like 30 minutes to BART. I'm like, it's barely public transportation. It is a subway, but you have to commute to the subway is kind of what you have to do.  

Rabia - 00:37:31: Europe and the UK, they've been built around this culture, right? And North America has not. 

Jon - 00:37:37: I wish it was, though. I wish it was like we had it out here.

 Rabia - 00:37:41: I do, too. Yeah. But I just, I don't think it's ever going to happen. And so you got to love places for what they've got. And, you know, not try and make London San Francisco, because San Francisco has got so many other things that London doesn't. 

Jon - 00:37:55: Exactly. Exactly. I think I've just come to terms with it and it's okay. And that's the thing. It is okay. So you're now at BenevolentAI. Talk a little bit about what was it like working there? What was the culture like? What were the early days like? 

Rabia - 00:38:10: I think that was the first time that, you know, you're working somewhere and you realize drug discovery, the industry and what it's about. And I still remember they had this beautiful platform. I'm sure they still have it. And you type in a disease and it gives you a ranked set of targets. Basically, they have a knowledge graph and it produces or it produced at the time based on inference across multiple papers, how a target could be linked to a disease based on the back end infrastructure. And so you can then filter that and start thinking about novel targets. Part of that was thinking about how do you prioritize targets for a disease to then set up screening. The second part of that, how do you do feedback on the platform and help improve the platform? So much of what I learned at that organization I have applied in terms of culture into Serna Bio today. But the one thing that I learned, I still remember, I was like, these are the targets. I'm very excited. Like, we're going to drug these targets. This is what I want to go after for glioblastoma. Walked over to the chemist. I said, Matt. And he said, I'm druggable. 

Jon - 00:39:24: Yeah. It's a no-go. 

Rabia - 00:39:26: And you sit there for a moment and you're like, this industry, you know, and like, I've just dealt with dad being sick. I've done a PhD, folks in my, what does the word undruggable really mean? He's like, we cannot target this. And so I was like, okay, fine. And so then I said, well, how many are drugable? And he's like 4,000. 

Jon - 00:39:47: Your world went from like... Just like immediately just like shrunk down. Oh my God. 

Rabia - 00:39:55: And so I'm like, so 4,000 of the 20,000 proteins. Drug upon. None of the dark genome have we even addressed at this point. MicroRNA, link RNA, like 98% of the human genome we're not even thinking about. And yet... You're ranking in your front end all 20,000. They said, why? Just rank the four. In fact, forget ranking the four. Let's just run a CRISPR screen on some brain organoids and be done with it. I always say that I am very lucky that I was never indoctrinated in a large organization, whether it's McKinsey, whether it's GSK or something else, because I would show up and then say, that's ridiculous. Don't agree that 4,000 are druggable. I don't agree that we should not find ways to target the rest of the human genome, whether that's the transcriptome or the proteome. And rather than accept the 4,000, I would rather find ways to solve for the remaining part of human biology. Because as a geneticist, what you know is that the majority of GWAS hits are not protein coding. And they're definitely not within all of them, the 4,000 that exist. And so if we take a really first principles approach, which is human genetics is the underlying cause for disease, right? So you begin to read the human genome, you find out where the variation is. The majority of that variation is sitting outside the protein-coding regions and untouchable with protein-targeting drugs. And then even the ones that are sitting in the proteome, we can't drug with this undruggable problem. That tells me you need to change the word undruggable, not I need to shift my biology to suit your undruggable characterization. Like we have it wrong. And so that was the first time that I started thinking about that something is wrong here. This doesn't make sense. This doesn't make common sense, right? And I learned a ton about building teams at the intersection of machine learning and biology. And we had the most interesting experience. There was someone called Patey, and he's really great, gone on to do great things. And he was talking to me, he's an NLP engineer, and he was talking to me about this Ensembl of models they had in their natural language processing things, and he kept saying Ensembl, and he kept saying Ensembl. And the sentence structure didn't make sense to me. And so I pulled up Ensembl, the website that we use for genomic alignment, and I said, this is Ensembl to me. What is Ensembl to you? And he said, oh, an Ensembl of models, like six different machine learning models in one. And I was like, oh, we're having two completely different conversations. 

Jon - 00:42:39: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Rabia - 00:42:41: And it's so true, right? So when you say vector to me, I think vector in synthetic biology. When you say vector to machine learning person, they think vector in machine learning, right? Arrows. Arrows. Yeah. There's this belief and understanding that you should be able to model all of human biology, whereas any biologist will tell you, well, we don't understand biology. How are you going to model it? And there was a disconnect. And so I learned that you need to build a new language so the teams can talk to each other. And only then can you actually begin to collectively solve the problem. And then you learn all kinds of things. It doesn't matter what disease you put into a system built on public data, P53 is going to come out at the top because P53 and BRCA1 and BRCA2 are the most published on, right? And so how you think about ontological frameworks and so Benevolent taught me a ton. But more than anything, I learned that I don't like the system and I want to change the system. 

Rabia - 00:43:41: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast with Rabia Khan. Join us for part three as Rabia dives into her time at BenevolentAI and Sensyne Health, where she worked at the intersection of biology, machine learning and clinical data, and began to see just how limited drug discovery could be when we only target what's considered druggable. She shares what it was like building cross-functional teams, translating between biologists and ML engineers, and why those challenges became the inspiration behind her next move. 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, 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.