Founders Readers - Ep 44 - Dr Jack Hoppin and Dr John Babich with Ratio Therapeutics
The Founders Keepers podcast, podded
The Founders Readers podnotes are not a transcript, but accompany the weekly podcast detailing key insights from that exact conversation
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This week, we’re speaking with Dr Jack Hoppin and Dr John Babich and their company, Ratio Therapeutics…
💬 Quote from the pod:
“Once you leave your safe spot, it's not as daunting the next time and the next time, right? So you kind of be you, you're kind of a little bit freer in your ability to see that you can navigate the world… you can leave where you were and and make another go of it. ”
🔑 Key insights from the episode:
John and Jack on their routes to entrepreneurship: John comes from a pharmacy background and went on to specialise in nuclear medicine, completing a research program at Brookhaven National Labs and on to NASA’s medical branch investigating the effects of weightlessness on physiology. He went on to complete a PhD at the UK’s Institute of Cancer Research, followed by a post at Mass General Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School for eight years looking at small molecules for a variety of clinical applications including infection and cancer. Jack meanwhile is a mathematician by training who completed his PhD at the University of Arizona and postdoc in Germany after which he “took a right hand turn into industry, and moved to Budapest” working on the the pharmacokinetics of radiolabeled drugs. He moved back to the US in 2008 and established Inviro - a company dealing in image data processing in drug discovery and development, many of whom now work at Ratio after the company was sold in 2017 to Continental Precision Medicine. Jack cites: “That's a big part of entrepreneurship… teammates and team over time.”
On pivoting between academia and business: John “got the itch for doing something different” after almost a decade in academia, and set up a company called Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working “in this space of nuclear medicine and, and molecular imaging and therapeutics…very much limited to orphan indications”, and was later sold in 2013. John then returned to academia where he found that the work he had been doing in radiopharmaceuticals “was now being really embraced by the the greater medical oncology community… And we came up with some very interesting technology where we could manipulate pharmacokinetics of a construct.” This led to John building his second company, Noia Therapeutics, with Jack on board: “I called Jack, I said, Jack, I think we have a kind of interesting math problem, right? Take, can you take a look at it? And then we started to, to work together on that project more.”
The “jump” moment: John cites that a call from Bayer Pharmaceuticals “at the 11th hour” persuaded him to make the jump back into business full-time again, though he remembers “…when I left that first academic post, a lot of people thought I was crazy”. Jack’s work in business to date had already provided “a commercial experience in diagnostics and translational research… So right away we had radio labeled and studied hundreds of drugs… And when John brought me the trillion, when he showed up with the trillion platform, I[thought] this is the right idea… we both stopped everything we were doing.”
On doing the work and enjoying it: Jack alludes to having experienced failure and overcome it, having “an alternative strategy and you can tune something, that's the excitement and that's what kicked us off.” John meanwhile revels in “the joy of bringing a drug to market. And I've had the incredible, humbling experience of actually meeting a lot of the patients that we treated in some of our trials and what it means to actually, you know, put your science kind of where your mouth is.”
On the “team sport” of what they do: Jack alludes to the strength of being in a position to improve patient outcomes in cancer, and how “you need lots of people, lots of brains, lots of hands, lots of sweat and lots of passion to make these things happen when they do”. John agrees, citing that Ratio’s team is made up of people that “we've known in our past that we've been really successful in getting things done with, who are very excited about the same things we're excited about”.
On what they’re focusing on next: Both state that they have multiple ongoing programs in the clinic, including preclinical work, a project in immune-cell carcinoma, prostate cancer, and a collaboration with another radiopharmaceutical-focused company also based in Massachusetts interrogating stromal targets. Jack elaborates: “The early stages though are somewhat similar. We're always gonna start by imaging our drug.”
On working with investors: Jack alludes to the competitive market Ratio has found itself in, but also the pitfalls that they have so far managed to avoid and based on their prior experiences in business: “It's amazing how many companies we meet and see who have a great idea or potentially exciting technology, but ultimately, if someone, whether it's a partner or an investor, or ultimately a customer is not interested in buying, I would recommend again, restarting the business… in our case, we have done a hybrid of taking on equity investors as well as strategic partners.” In this way, Ratio has been able to sign multiple strategic partnerships, including with big hitters such as Merck.
On their platform’s fundamental science: Ratio’s platform technology has been designed to support the design and development of drug molecules for the delivery of radiotherapeutics: “the ability to enable a therapy is really to make sure that you have enough activity localized in the tumor, and that there is a big enough gap between that and the rest of the normal tissues in order to create a therapeutic index… We can actually see the therapeutic index in many ways when we image our drugs before we go into the therapy side of it [and] we can actually see which molecules are giving us the best therapeutic index and which also are residing in the tumor long enough in order to affect an impact on the cancer.”
On how they view their competition: Both support the notion that “When we think about competition, it’s a good thing… It's certainly a good thing in our space because we're seeing a lot of capital move into this space. And when you're making a new market, it's great that others are trying to do it.” Jack in particular claims to have been so competitive in his previous endeavours that he viewed any competition as “a visceral reaction”, but now sees this as “opportunistic... you need to be looking at what’s the potential collaboration here?” which specifically in the life sciences is “your competitor one day is your co partner; the next competitor one day is your investor.”
On raising capital in a tough market: John and Jack agree that 2022 was “not an incredibly great year” for pre-revenue organizations worldwide, and specifically on the heels of “what was an influx of a big push in a lot of people getting large scale series A at very high valuations.” Jack states that there is always an “economic challenge” for pre-revenue businesses, but that Ratio they feel is well positioned through their remote working team and high adaptability; their unique platform; and their rapid data-generating capabilities despite these challenges: “And the last 18 months have been harder than most periods, so… so far so good.”
On integrity and flexibility: John speaks to the need for versatility in business and in building platforms such as theirs at Ratio, where “flexibility and intellectual honesty as to what you’re really looking at”, with the need to “stay as lean [as possible] and be as transparent about what the odds are on that.” Likewise, citing that the highest value to recognise “real value” in a company such as theirs playing in the healthcare space is “when you start to have clinical data. And I think this is where you come out… A lot of people cure mice along the way and we've cured mice along the way, but nobody's really interested in mice, right? And so when we can make those transitions to the clinic and we can show, you know, that everything we see in our preclinical models are true.”
On working together: John claims that the image of he and Jack, as friends, working together is one of “we kind of walk through the doorway at the same time, like one of those cartoons, right? So we just have to give each other space, but I couldn't ask for a better partner.” Jack builds on this, stipulating that their success is down to having “similar experiences, similar outlooks, and that's the best and worst, right? …the wanting to do things, the anxieties that come with having a startup and… balancing our own conversations around innovation.”
📖 Background:
Founded: 2021
Location: Boston, MA
IPO status: Private
Industry: Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
Market size: USD $5.32 billion (Radiopharmaceuticals)
Employees: 11-50 employees
Funding stage: Series A
🔍 What:
A pharmaceutical company focused on discovery through early clinical phase research.
Ratio Therapeutics employs a suite of innovative technologies to develop best-in-class targeted radiotherapeutics for the treatment of cancer.
🔧 How:
Ratio Therapeutics’ Trillium™ targeting scaffold combines pharmacokinetic modulation with best-in-class chelation technology to create proprietary small molecule targeting agents to attack a broad array of cancer targets.
Their compounds accommodate imaging and therapeutic radioisotopes (ie "theranostics") and the “tunable” nature of their platform combined with small-scale imaging trials in patients results in accelerated, de-risked compound selection.
🏙 Company tagline:
“Developing best-in-class radiopharmaceuticals for cancer patients”
👉 Find out more about Ratio:
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