Mar 29 2020 51 mins
Rob Chess is a successful and esteemed serial biotech entrepreneur and executive. His resume is incredibly long and impressive. He is the Chairman of Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ: NKTR), a multi-billion dollar market cap company, where he was previously President and CEO. He is co-founder and Board member (until very recently the Chairman) of Biota Technologies, which uses DNA sequencing to optimize oil and gas production. He is a Lead Director at Twist Biosciences (NASDAQ: TWST), a public company that produces synthetic genes using an innovative high-throughput silicon-based manufacturing process. He was previously Chairman and CEO of OPX Biotechnologies, a renewable chemicals company that was sold to Cargill, and co-founder and President of Penederm, a dermatology company that went public and was acquired by Mylan Laboratories. He served in the White House in the first Bush administration, teaches at the Stanford business school, and is on the board of trustees at CalTech, and sits on the board of various other companies and organizations, among many other accomplishments.
The biopharma industry is undergoing immense change as there are exciting advancements in technology and life sciences, amidst a constantly changing structural environment. Rob Chess discusses keys for success for founders and executives and explores some key trends involving scale, platforms, financing, discovery, and payment reform within biopharma.
Topics:
Keys to success as a founder or executive in biotech
The cyclical nature of platforms, products, and financing in biotech as an industry
Scale in biopharma
The impact of tech-enabled services on biopharma
Direct-to-consumer biopharma
Eroom’s Law and drug discovery
Academia vs industry for life sciences innovation
Business model problems that belie the lack of successes in diagnostics
Incentive structures in healthcare and how to align them
Business school and management in healthcare and biopharma
Payment reform for specialty pharmaceuticals
Why go into healthcare?
Thank you for listening!
BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.