Spirovant Sciences is a biotechnology company focused on the development of treatments and cures for inherited respiratory diseases. The company has developed several innovations with viral vectors that have the potential to overcome previous challenges of the clinical viability of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis. Pulse writer Alex Yoo spoke with CEO Joan Lau to learn more about her experiences with and motivations for leading companies in the biotech industry.

Joan Lau, CEO of Spirovant Sciences

The Pulse: Could you share an overview of your career path and the decisions or events that led you to become the CEO of Spirovant?

Joan Lau: I started my career at Zimmer after receiving a bioengineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania. I caught the bug of wanting to develop products for patients. The people I was most impressed with – people who asked the most relevant questions or made the most compelling arguments – had graduate training in science: MDs and PhDs. So I went to graduate school. I received several offers after finishing my PhD. Though my desire was to accept the role at a small newly public biotech, others advocated Merck: “go there and learn how drug development is done well.” The Merck job was what I call, now jokingly, a 10-year training program. I became adept at drug development, advancing drug candidates from the lab bench through early clinical proof of concept studies. I was fortunate that Merck agreed to sponsor my MBA; I worked at Merck full time while attending the Wharton MBA for Executives program.

After a number of years, I followed a colleague and joined Locus Pharmaceuticals, a venture backed computational chemistry discovery company, as the Chief Operating Officer. A story for another time – unexpectedly became the president, then CEO a few weeks later. Running a company has its challenges, especially one that had been around for a while and lived out many versions of itself. We got a little bit of investment and did some internal discovery and development, and then looked for partnerships that made sense for our stage, where we could put the assets in better hands.  We decided that the most prudent decision was to partner or sell all our assets then close operations. It actually worked out nicely for investors – those drug candidates became drugs and our shareholders benefited significantly. Some of those investors liked how Locus worked out so I was asked to run another legacy company; this one ended up with safety findings in the clinical study so we ended it without a good exit.

The Pulse: At this point in your career story, you led and exited two early-stage biotech companies. What did you learn and enjoy about managing these two companies, and how did you determine your next step?

JL:  I learned that it’s all about the team. Merck had very capable, experienced leaders who made tough drug development decisions and tradeoffs, and I wanted to surround myself with that caliber of decision-making. A few serendipitous conversations with investors and peers resulted in co-founding Militia Hill Ventures which would build life sciences companies from scratch with the right management team and the right assets. We invested ourselves and operated an ongoing company, Immunome, shepherding it through its seed and Series A rounds. We then helped form Tmunity Therapeutics with technology out of Penn. The third was Talee Bio which we formed in 2016 rubbing two nickels together. Talee was sold – twice! – in 2019 and continues today as Spirovant. I took on the role of CEO for Spirovant, and I stay connected to Militia Hill.

The Pulse: Outside of your work in the biotech industry, are you involved in any other organizations?

JL: I started by giving money to the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBT advocacy organization, and eventually ended up serving on the board and “retiring” as board chair.  I’m now on the Board of Advisors for the School of Social Policy and Practice and on the board for the Philadelphia Orchestra. One of my favorite things to do outside of work is to co-direct the capstone class for seniors in the Vagelos Life Sciences and Management Program and watch students develop their own learnings.

The Pulse: Can you delve deeper into how you made the decision to form a company around gene therapy for cystic fibrosis?

JL: Emily Kramer-Golinkoff, a Penn ’07 grad and founder of Emily’s Entourage, has two alleles with the same nonsense mutation of CFTR on both genes. At this point she is 37 years old and has advanced stage cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a progressive, monogenic lung disease and it’s fatal. There are companies who have products that can upregulate or modulate the function of the CFTR gene or its associated ion channel proteins. However, for those people like Emily who don’t have the CFTR gene present due to nonsense mutations in the gene itself, and therefore produce no proteins, no small molecule can upregulate a gene that doesn’t exist. And for those people, some sort of gene addition is required to help them. 

As a team at Militia Hill Ventures, we thought there was an opportunity. In gene therapy, Spark Therapeutics had progressed along but not received approval at that point. The understanding of gene therapy in the FDA regulatory environment suggested that gene therapies were mature enough to invest in. We embarked on a one-and-a-half-year exploratory exercise with Emily’s Entourage, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and a few investors to identify approaches to affect gene addition of CFTR. We traversed academic, government, and industry research and held symposia to find a program that had the most potential. When we identified a family of technologies that had the most promise, we engaged in conversations with those academic investigators and their home institution and found that we had some shared interests and skillsets. Talee Bio was founded on that basis. 

The Pulse: You’ve been both an operator and an investor in the pharma / biotech industry. What do you look for in a company when you decide to invest in or join it?

JL: I look at the team and I look at the goals of the company. What is their strategic intent? Do they have individuals who have had success with that strategic intent, and collectively does the group shepherding the company have a shared but diverse understanding of that strategic intent and how to approach the problem? I look at everything through the lens of an operator. I am much less an investor. I don’t think about the ideal. The ideal is always to be more efficient, to get more approvals, to have the studies achieve statistical significance. But what does an organization do when it doesn’t achieve FDA approval or achieve statistical significance in its studies? How does the management team think through the risks and the ways to continue to prosecute the program without being able to go linearly? Organizations that think through these are those that I enjoy joining as either a board member or as part of the operating team. Those are the types of companies that we think about when we invest.

The Pulse: You spent 10 years working at Merck before moving into smaller biotech companies. What were some learnings you took from your time at Merck that you apply to Spirovant today?

JL: Drug development is a discipline. It requires incredible intellect, experience, and difficult tradeoffs. Individuals who make those decisions or lead groups who generate information for those decisions have a level of patience, wisdom, experience, and judiciousness both in leadership and in making decisions. These qualities are not easy to see on a resume. Those skills and talents can only be observed working in drug development together. Bringing together people who have an insatiable curiosity for new learnings and new ways of thinking is often a harbinger of future success – I thrive off that.

The Pulse: This year’s Wharton Health Care Business Conference theme is “A Fair Shot at Health.” How important is providing equitable access to life saving therapies and what steps should the pharma / biotech industry take to address the access issue?

JL: By the very nature of saying we need to “address the access issue” says that systemically there have been biases. There’s been biases towards race, towards gender, towards background, and I’m thrilled that the conference and the organizers are thinking about it. The trick is to find a way to listen and be willing to be uncomfortable.

If you want fairer clinical trials, one needs to have more diversity of the individuals recruiting for clinical trials. That means you need to have more diversity at the employee level. If you want that, you need to have more diversity at the leadership level, individuals who are making the decisions. You need more diversity at the investor level who accept and understand the need for diversity. These things are hard because the moment you or I think about who would be a good person to fill a role, our network by its very nature is biased. We all need to learn to be comfortable with people who are different than oneself, by their thinking, their background, their experiences, and putting the time to build relationships. Put in the time to be uncomfortable. I can’t guarantee you will get to a fair trial doing all these things, but at least you’ve got a better chance at it.

Innovation and access are aligned because if we don’t innovate, we’re going to make the same kind of drugs for the same kind of people that we did in the last decade and that is not innovation. Innovation is new patients, new diseases, new modalities, new technologies, and new ways to help patients. That’s innovation. And each of these parameters pose problems but we want to tackle each one to get some movement on all fronts. It’s like social justice. I did social justice for decades and we need a lot of people pushing together and things will slowly move and gain momentum as others join.

The Pulse: Do you have any advice to Wharton MBA students who want to pursue a career in pharma / biotech?

JL: I don’t have any specific advice other than to learn. Learn from everyone. Learn from those in leadership roles. Learn from the people who report to you. Learn from your peers and colleagues. Learn from people who don’t have much of a voice because that’s when the “aha” moments come. That’s when the innovation comes because they’re not stuck in the traditional ways of thinking.

Interviewed by Alex Yoo, January 2022.

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On Feb 10-11, 2022, Wharton is excited to feature more expert perspectives at our annual Wharton Health Care Business Conference. This year’s conference is virtual and themed ‘A Fair Shot at Health’. Tickets available here