Advancing Singapore's biotech ecosystem with Albatroz Therapeutics' Dr. Guy Heathers (Part 1)

Episode show notes and transcript

Nucleate Singapore

John Joson Ng

, and

Jessie Wong

Apr 15, 2024

About The Guest

Dr. Guy Heathers is the Chief Business Officer and one of the co-founders of Albatroz Therapeutics, a preclinical stage biotech company focused on developing therapeutic antibodies and antibody drug conjugates for the treatment of solid tumors and arthritis. With over three decades of experience in the biotech industry, Dr. Heathers has played a significant role in the development of Singapore's biotech ecosystem. He has worked in various roles, including business development and IP and licensing strategy, and has been involved in the creation and growth of several successful biotech companies.

📄 Summary

Dr. Guy Heathers is the Chief Business Officer and one of the co-founders of Albatroz Therapeutics. In this episode, Dr. Guy Heathers shares his extensive experience in the biotech industry and discusses the challenges and opportunities in Singapore's biotech ecosystem. He talks about his journey from being a postdoctoral researcher to transitioning into business development, and how he became involved in building the biotech industry in Singapore. Dr. Heathers also reflects on the progress and setbacks in the Singapore biotech scene, highlighting the importance of having a clear business strategy and the need for specialized biotech investors. He emphasizes the global mindset and the potential for biotech companies to make a significant impact on a global scale.

🥡 Key Takeaways

Singapore's biotech ecosystem has evolved significantly over the years, with more success stories and increased investor interest. However, there is still a need for more understanding of business strategy and product development in the biotech industry.
The challenges in the biotech industry include the need for substantial funding to support the development of drugs through clinical trials and the importance of keeping up with the rapidly changing landscape of oncology and other therapeutic areas.
The abrupt closure of Tesla Therapeutics serves as a reminder of the binary nature of biotech investments, where success can lead to significant gains, but failure can result in a complete loss. It also highlights the importance of specialized biotech investors and managing investor expectations.

💬 Quotes

"My job, for the Singapore ecosystem, is to provide it with success stories. If you have the right ingredients, hopefully it will stimulate and inspire other people to also take some shots on goal."
"The complexity of the biotech ecosystem is something that can be underappreciated without the experience that comes with it or without talking to more people who have been in the industry long enough."
"We have a skew to government funding, government development, government push, as opposed to private investment pull to the market. So the balance is different in Singapore compared to many other biotech centers."
"I like to have that big potential that we're going to have a major impact. If this works and no one else is doing this right, we've sort of got a good lead and it gets noticed and we talk to, to pharma companies."

⏱️ Timestamp

01:03 - Introduction
06:28 - Getting invovled with Singapore's nascent biotech ecosystem
10:17 - Early successes
16:16 - Mindset shift
26:37 - Tessa's closure and lessons learned

🎙️ Transcript

Episode Preview

Dr. Guy Heathers: Is there a market for like a homegrown biotech? I'm not sure. I mean, I've worked with a few medtech people. They have a very local business strategy, right? They're going to make six machines, three are going to go to sing health and three are going to go to National Health group and they just make a little profit on their. I guess that's fine, right? That's their business strategy. And I think knowing your business strategy is good.

It’s just, for me it's not my business strategy. It just doesn't make enough value in the local market. Just breaking even on a small cash basis. I like to think I'm going to change the world.

Joson Ng: Hi, thanks for joining us on Nucleate Singapore Pulse, Singapore's premier podcast on the biotech ecosystem. I'm your host, Joson Ng, an MD/PhD candidate at Duke-NUS Medical School. Whether you're a student thinking about creating your own startup or an industry professional looking for diverse perspectives, this is the podcast for you.

The show notes and transcripts for the episode can be found on nucleatesingapore.substack.com.

This is the first of a two-part episode of our interview with Dr. Guy Heathers.

Introduction

Joson Ng: Today, we're very excited to have Dr. Guy Heathers with us. Guy is the Chief Business Officer and one of the co-founders of Albatroz Therapeutics, a preclinical stage biotech company, developing therapeutic antibodies and antibody drug conjugates to treat solid tumors and arthritis. Guy is a veteran in biotech, specifically in business development and IP and licensing strategy.

He has more than three decades of experience in the biotech industry and has played a significant role in the development of Singapore's biotech ecosystem since more than two decades ago. Thank you so much for joining us today, Guy.

Dr. Guy Heathers: Yeah, thank you.

Joson Ng: For a start, do you mind giving our audience a brief introduction of yourself?

Dr. Guy Heathers: Sure, I'll try and make it brief, but, you know, it's quite a few years, as you mentioned in your introduction. So, a long, long time ago, many decades ago, I was actually a PhD biochemist. I did a PhD in heart disease, some cardiac arrhythmias and ischemic heart disease. So I did a PhD in the UK, Bath University, and then I moved over to the US to do postdoctoral studies. That was quite a common path for UK PhDs back in those days, in the 1980s. So I actually went out to St. Louis, Missouri and spent three years at Washington University Medical School doing postdoctoral research, again in heart disease and cardiac arrhythmias. During that, those studies, I actually did a project for someone that was working at Pfizer. So I did sort of an industrial collaboration and I guess I got interested in the more applied side of research actually, doing research to create something useful rather than pure basic research.

So, the person that I was collaborating with, they actually moved to Hoffmann-La Roche in New Jersey. And after my postdoctoral studies, I actually then moved to join him in the cardiovascular department at Roche in New Jersey. So I spent about 3 and a half years doing cardiovascular research, trying to discover and develop drugs for ischemic heart disease and then another 3 and a half years moving around some other departments, other therapeutic areas. So diabetes, inflammation, bronchopulmonary, I moved around a little bit too much to be honest.

After about seven years, I got tired of moving around a bit of a merry go round, and I decided that I wanted to switch gears into the business development side of the pharma industry .

With this in mind, I actually did an MBA part time in the evenings and weekends to gain experience in the business world. And that was at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. That was sponsored by Roche. So luckily I had my education paid for. Towards the end of that, I decided to move back to London and started work in a business development company for Cancer Research UK.

Cancer Research UK is probably the major funder of cancer research in the United Kingdom. It had and still has a separate business development company and I joined that after my stint at Roche in 1995 and started working in protecting and licensing biotech intellectual property. So this was IP that was created by the funding of the cancer research campaign in many universities across the UK. At the time CRUK owned the intellectual property and it was our job to commercialize through licensing, collaborations. And we were one of the first organizations that actually got into doing startup companies from academia in the UK.

Anyway, we also did quite a lot of work in that period for a lot of European cancer institutes, so I travel to European Institute of Oncology, German Cancer Research Center, Danish Cancer Center, who at that time didn't have their own business development operation. So we provided a service which is essentially protecting their IP and then trying to commercialize the IP from those European institutes. I developed the business of business development as you were. We had 1 company actually focused on Cancer Research UK and we basically created a 2nd company focused on all of this IP from all these other European institutes. And we went even further. I remember working for the South African Cancer Research Charity, and we also worked for people in New Zealand and Australia.

Getting invovled with Singapore's nascent biotech ecosystem

Joson Ng: You have a very long history and deep connection with the Singapore biotech ecosystem, going all the way back to 2001 when you were the CEO of Biotech Research Ventures. Could you share how you came about working in Singapore back then?

Dr. Guy Heathers: On one of my trips to Australia, I was asked to stop by Singapore. And I remember my first seminar that I gave at the National Cancer Center in Singapore in the year 2000. And normally, when I give a seminar on intellectual property and licensing, I get about six people and 3 of them fall asleep. In this seminar in Singapore, I had about 250 very enthusiastic, energetic people who stayed awake the whole of the seminar and I had a lot of questions and a lot of input after the seminar. So, I was very impressed with the amount of energy, the enthusiasm of local people, particularly young people. And this was just at the time where Singapore government had announced that biotech was going to be its next big initiative, is going to be the 4th pillar of the Singapore economy.

Within a year, less than a year, I was basically in Singapore, living in Singapore, building up a company called Biotech Research Ventures. And this was a joint venture between Cancer Research UK in London, National Cancer Center in Singapore, funded by Temasek.

So this essentially was a copy of what the business I've been building up in Europe. I was asked to basically build that same business up in Singapore. You know, I think this was between 2000 and 2004. And although there was a lot of enthusiasm and energy. I think the basic understanding of the biotech business model was very much lacking in those days.

The government put some significant money into three companies at the time, Merlion, ESL International, and S*BIO. And, they actually did very well. But I think one of the lessons back in those days is that biotech is not a straight line industry. You know, development doesn't just go in a straight line.

There are a lot of ups and downs. A lot of failures, and you do need to persevere. You need confidence and conviction that you're on the right path in developing a drug. Not all experiments work. In fact, a lot of them don't work. But If you don't believe in the molecule, no one else will.

And I think there was a bit of a lack of confidence in the government and in those companies, because later on, we do actually know that they produced some good products. One of those products is actually on the market in a different company somewhere else.

But there was nothing wrong with the product. It was really the lack of confidence, I guess, in spending the money and developing it. through into clinical trial. So, I guess, 2004, 2005, I got a bit disillusioned with Singapore. It was very hard work. I was getting half a million I spent at 4 companies. I got small amount of money to start, but that was it.

There wasn't any follow on funding. And there's no exit. You couldn't list anywhere. It's very, very difficult, very early days. And I actually then left Singapore. I went to Australia and spent 7 years, 8 years creating a consortium company, consortium of major research institutes in Australia, CSIRO, Griffith University, Monash University, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Sydney, so there are a whole group of Australian universities and research institutes that came together and we got some government funding, some serious government funding, 100 million Australian dollars, plus about another 30 million from other people, and we created this very large drug discovery company that took novel targets from Australian research institutes, developed proof of concept molecules, and then licensed them out to pharmaceutical companies. And we did 2 very nice, large deals, one with Pfizer .

So seven, eight years into this, of course, people that I know in Singapore were like, ah, well, why didn't you do that in Singapore? I said, well, you know, you didn't give the money, right? You can't do biotech with half a million, right? Doesn't really work that way. You don't really get a long way with a little bit of money you get, you get to step 1, but you need to fund step 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Early successes

Dr. Guy Heathers: But I got asked to come back to Singapore. And so I did, I started working closely with the National Cancer Center and SingHealth, a director of IP. And quickly, we spun out a couple of companies that did get traction. This was 2014, 2015. And these companies got much more than half a million. Tessa Therapeutics raised a hundred and whatever million, maybe close to 200 million, 250 million. Hummingbird raised a lot of money. We spun out Enleofen that obviously was a very successful story. So suddenly 2015 onwards, we had some successful biotech companies, much different than prior to 2005. I think worldwide, there was a renewed interest in biotech, there was a lot of success coming out of Europe and US. I think some people got the great idea that it would be good if Singapore had some success stories. And to have success, you need you need cash, right? You need enough funding to get you to a stage where people will notice. And so, you know, I actually then moved from the academic setting into a number of biotech companies. I worked for Tessa, Hummingbird, and we have more recently Twain Therapeutics and now Albatroz.

So, you know, it's been a progression that's mirrored the ecosystem in Singapore. As it's matured, as more people have come in, as money has come into the sector, you know, the opportunities are there now. Whereas there certainly weren't 20 years ago. And we have, you know, one or two success stories, right?

So, I think that success begets more success, right? I always say my job, I don't work too much with the government, to be honest, or, you know, A*STAR or whatever. My job, in a way, for the Singapore ecosystem is to provide it with success stories if you have the right ingredients.

So I think by having a few goals scored. Hopefully it will stimulate and inspire other people to also take some shots on goal. And obviously with biotech, the more shots on goal, the more, the more goals you score.

We're never going to be a Boston or a San Francisco, or that's a long way off. But I do think we have and can have a lot more success stories on the island. We have some really great science, really great scientists. The research background is very strong. It's just how do we turn that into commercial products, commercial technology that we can partner with the rest of them. And that's sort of my job and other people's job to keep pushing those boundaries.

Joson Ng: That was super insightful. And there was a lot to unpack there, but on a more personal note, we wanted to understand, you had that pivot from your role in more of the science of things as a postdoctoral researcher at first, and then eventually in Roche as a research investigator.

What was a pivot point for you in terms of, why you decided to focus more on business development? Was there anything that attracted you towards the business or translation of things?

Dr. Guy Heathers: Yeah, two things. One is I was getting annoyed with feeling that I'm becoming useless on the bench in the science teams.

Now, the reason was when I came into Roche, I was an expert in cardiovascular biochemistry and I started projects where I knew what I was doing because I actually brought the project in with me. There was a major restructuring decision in Roche, you know, pharma restructures every few years and decided the cardiovascular was going to be moved to Basel in Switzerland. So people that are left in cardiovascular had to retool into other disease areas and I quickly realized that that's not an easy process that you don't become an expert in diabetes overnight. So, I think you start to realize that in the early research side in the pharma world, it's very tough because you're constantly moving projects. And you're not an expert in many of these projects, right? You actually need to go out and talk to experts in academia who have been working for 10 years in whatever field. And so, I realized that actually, a lot of the really cool, innovative stuff is not done in the pharma world. I just kept playing catch up with people in the academic world. So I realized that this wasn't for me, I couldn't keep up with the field this way. And so then it was like well what else do I do, and a couple of my colleagues have moved into business development. And so I thought, okay, maybe I'll see what that's about. And I remember talking to Roche, you know, can I get a job in licensing, and they said, yeah, but you've got no experience. Why would we hire you?

I literally took a couple of steps back. I was on a pretty senior salary at Roche and going nowhere, but a good salary. I basically joined an academic tech transfer company in Cancer Research UK. I took a big pay cut, I mean, half, more than half, and I needed to make that sideways step or even downward step to be able to progress up.

And that's where I went into business development, and I started to work with some of the earliest patent agents in Europe. I actually worked with the guy that wrote the first biotech patent in Europe. This was Genentech's patent that they filed in the U. S. And I learned about IP, I learned about protecting research from good people. I worked with some very good lawyers in the City of London, who had done licensing deals at biotech.

I was very, very fortunate in those 6 years at Cancer Research UK to work with some very good people, work on some very good projects. I said, I'm involved in some great startup companies, one, which was successfully bought by AstraZeneca. I got involved in filing a patent around the BRCA2 gene which was on the news. And it was a big thing back in the 90s. Genetic patenting of genes was a real ethical minefield. So we had some really very interesting meetings.

So, you know, you're often told if you want to learn something, you know, hitch your wagon to a star, right? Work with really good people that know what they're doing, that got experience and you gain from their experience. I had a fantastic boss, Sue Foden. She was brilliant at negotiating deals. She was pretty tough. But she's very smart and I learned how to negotiate deals. That's something you don't learn in an MBA class.

Mindset shift

Joson Ng: Yeah, I absolutely can see how that career switch came about and the fact that you thrived in a completely different environment after having that small dip, I feel is really inspiring. But I also wanted to highlight the part where you mentioned about teaching a seminar in Singapore. Everyone taking that one hour, few hours (of learning) and just trying to replicate that trying to see if that will work out (in practice). Was that in general the mindset back then in 2005?

Dr. Guy Heathers: I got lots of questions about what, why do I need to work with you, Guy? Why can't I just do it myself, right? I had people at SingHealth, National Cancer Center and others just sort of saying, well, you're just a middleman.

There was a culture. It's not here now, but there was a culture where doctors seriously thought that they were gonna develop a drug and give it to their patients. They don't need to work through middlemen. “You're just gonna take a cut of the financial gain. Better, I learn how to do it myself. And then I can get, 100%”, you know, if only it was that easy, you know.

I mean, we know right biotech is a terribly, terribly complicated industry, it involves thousands and thousands of people to go from an idea in an academic lab to a drug on the market, right? Fifteen years, more than a billion, two billion bucks. So it's a very, very complicated process. But unfortunately, the mindset back in those days was straightforward. We just make some chemicals, we test it. And if it works, then I'm going to give it to my cancer patient that walks through the door. And I don't need middlemen to tell me what to do.

So, that's why after 4 years of this, I'm like, I can't, you know, so I left, I had a break and then when I came back, I think that's when I think people have tried, failed and other people were coming in. Obviously, many people were were coming in with experience abroad. And there was a much more realistic environment from 2014, 15 onwards about the complexities and the challenges of creating a biotech company, let alone a whole biotech industry. And so I think we're a lot more realistic.

We have a lot more people, a lot more investors. It's a much more richer ecosystem than a few years ago, fortunately, otherwise I'd be retired again, right? And probably off somewhere else.

Joson Ng: Absolutely. I think the complexity of the biotech ecosystem is something that can be underappreciated without the experience that comes with it or without talking to more people who have been in the industry long enough. We also talked about your previous work with government agencies. Albatroz is a spinoff from A*STAR and you also mentioned that you've worked with Enleofen from Duke-NUS as well as with the Singhealth IP office with medical schools and hospitals in general. And of course, you've worked with Tessa, Hummingbird and these private companies. Are there any differences in the culture inside these organizations and about what kind of research is being done and how easily the output is actually commercialized?

Dr. Guy Heathers: If we talk about government organizations, I think there are similarities and differences.

Similarities is generally, you know, Singapore has a way of governing that's pretty top down, right? It's a very paternalistic system. Government knows best, right? The minister knows best. Biotech, of course, isn't like that at all. You know, innovation tends to happen by individual scientists at the lab. You can't direct someone to be innovative, right? You've got to let them be innovative. So that's always, I think, a challenge in Singapore is that, it's an industry that thrives on innovative individuals. Not as much by government direction.

And I think there's a tension there quite often, right? There's a bit of a tension between what people are told to do and what they really want to do.

As to differences between say A*STAR, Duke-NUS, NCC. Not so much. You know, A*STAR is more focused in commercial endeavors, right? Creating commercial economic outputs, you know, sits under the Ministry of Trade and Industry, right? They have an objective that's not purely academic research. You know, NUS, yes, Ministry of Education. So A*STAR has pressure to deliver economic outputs.

And I think, sometimes it's very difficult to direct that. As I said earlier, it's not an easy government-directed activity, to make innovation happen and to commercially develop that stuff. So it's, it's difficult. It's difficult. You know, obviously working in America, UK, different systems, Australia, different systems, more hands off. Plenty of grants in Australia, plenty of grants in the UK, a lot of grants in in America, they tend to be a lot more hands off. They tend to be, we're funding the research. It's up to the private sector to pick up the research and develop it. So they tend to be a little more hands off, a little less stringent, less strings around the grants and things like that.

But they have much better developed private industry, right? Private investment in those countries is a lot more developed than it is in Singapore. So we have a skew to government funding, government development, government push, as opposed to private investment pull to the market. So, you know, the balance is different in Singapore compared to many other biotech centers.

Joson Ng: You've covered this quite comprehensively in the very beginning, but I wanted to go back and tease apart some of the small details. And you mentioned that you went to Australia for a while and then came back after seven to eight years. It was about 2014 that you came back to Singapore and then you've since stayed on in Singapore.

What made you decide to stay, after you came back in 2014?

Dr. Guy Heathers: Yeah, good question. I could have happily lived in Australia, right? It's a nice country. It's pretty warm. Obviously, England is a little cold, so, you know, weather matters, right? Temperature. Truth be told, I actually live in Phuket, Thailand.

I have a very nice house set up and a wonderful family and, and I'm very happy there. Although it's getting busy now. A lot of people are coming in. And I guess it was, you know, honestly, it was actually a bit of a long commute to go from Phuket to Melbourne one week every month for 8 years.

I was getting tired. I did my own contribution to, you know, the global warming, put my hand up for that one. But, I guess it was the ability to work on interesting parts at companies, interesting projects, great people, much closer to my home, which was in Phuket. So that, that sort of attracted me. I never actually moved to Australia and lived there. I was quite happily in my family, quite happily in Phuket and so Singapore was closer.

And as I said, a lot of the fun I have in this industry is working with really smart people and trying to make a difference. And I felt I could make a difference in Singapore.

It was sort of on the upturn, right? You know, Tessa was doing well, Enleofen had been spun out, Hummingbird, MiRXES you know, we're in a good spot at the moment. We're sort of moving forward. You sense there's successful companies around and other ones still to be still to emerge.

So I think there's a lot that I and many other people can contribute on the island.

Joson Ng: The logical follow up question to that would be how different then are the challenges that Singapore is facing now compared to how it was back then?

Dr. Guy Heathers: So I think the challenges, you know, are more fun, right? As I've mentioned the challenges are being successful.

The challenges are how do you take an excellent research discovery finding and develop it and integrate it into the worldwide industry, biotech industry, and, you know, business strategies. I think that's the bit that I talk to people a lot about these days. It's really trying to figure out what your business strategy is.

People understand product development. There's still a need for more understanding of product development, but people get an understanding of product development. But business development, business development is about developing the business. So you've got to understand what your business is.

So what is your business? It's not product development, right? If you're doing a product development, a product development is just how you move an idea through preclinical development, clinical development.

The business strategy is how you protect the idea, how you market it to investors, how you create an exit strategy that your investors will buy into. How do you to deliver on that exit strategy. What is your exit strategy? Is it a listing? Is it a trade sale? You know, what is it that you want to do with, with this company that parallels the product development strategy? You know, product development, business development are parallel strategies. And a lot of the other bits are following, you know, IP protection is a following strategy.

It follows your business strategy. Marketing is following. Marketing follows your business strategy, right? So, You've got to understand, have a clear line of sight, what your product development strategies and what your business development strategies, and then, you know, try to execute on those.

So that's where I think the conversation now is much more advanced than 20 years ago, where people just didn't know what I was talking about. They knew what a patent was, right? A patent is something you file a priority, you file a PCT, you go through national phase, a few countries, you try and get it granted, right? That's a patent prosecution strategy.

Everybody knew that. But how you use that to create, to capture the value in a biotech, and then how that's used by a buyer, you do a trade sale. The buyer has to look at the IP portfolio, it has to be pretty good because that's, that's what they're buying. And so how do you actually merge IP strategy with business strategy with product strategy?

All of that stuff is at a much higher understanding now than 20 years ago. And I think that's the development, that's really excellent. Still, I think we need more people to understand those elements and really get their head around business strategy or all of that.

So I think it's a work in progress, but much better now than it was, say 20 years ago, when literally there was no understanding of what business strategy is, you know, I got people, investors asking me, you know, in three years, what is the market for your cancer drug? I said three years is we're not even in the clinic in three years, right? If you think we're going to get revenues in three years, you don't invest in biotech, right? It's not happening.

So those conversations were a mile away from where we are today, right? Thank goodness. So, so that's where, you know, we've really come leaps and bounds over those 20 years as a much more intellectual nuanced discussion about business strategy and things.

Tessa’s closure and lessons learned

Joson Ng: When we talk about progress, we can't ignore talk about setbacks and there have been several setbacks. One of which that really shocked the industry is Tessa Therapeutics, which had a candidate in phase three, but it shut down very abruptly. What are the kind of lessons that we can glean from this?

Dr. Guy Heathers: Well, I mean, as you know, I worked for Tessa for a few years. I left a few years ago to actually join Hummingbird. So first of all, I do believe that the technology in Tessa was fine. I don't think there was challenges or difficulties with the CD30 targeted candidate being in development.

The thing that often happens in biotech, if you don't keep a very close eye on competition, is quite often if you don't move fast enough, the world will overtake you. And I think when we started Tessa, I remember doing, one of our first trials was a phase three for nasopharyngeal cancer. It was a T-cell therapy. And when we started it, there were no PD-1 inhibitors on the market. Immunotherapy was just something that academics did. Unfortunately, we took about seven years to do the phase three. It took a long time and the world changes in oncology in seven years. So some of the PD-1 inhibitors were found to be very good in nasopharyngeal cancer, actually better than what we were targeting. So our treatment, although it worked, it didn't work as well as the new treatments that were coming through. So, lesson to learn biotech,you've got to move fast. Otherwise, other people will develop past you. And I think that's a lesson for Tessa.

Also, doing a phase three was a very, very tough thing for a biotech to do in Singapore. Most biotechs will do a phase one, phase two, and then they'll try and sell it to a pharma, right? Phase three is a very, very challenging, very big, expensive clinical trial to do.

As I mentioned, the CD30, I think that was a great technology. Again, I think what happened is investor appetite for cell therapy waned a lot in the years since Tessa started its program. So whereas we got a lot of interest in the early days, a lot of investors were coming in. In the latter days, that wasn't the case.

Investors were very shy, very cautious. You know, as we said before, waiting for someone else to solve the problems of manufacturing and development. So I think the investment community cooled a lot to cell therapy and my understanding again, I was an outsider at the time. I wasn't inside the company. My understanding was that it was just challenges. Getting additional funding into the company to take the clinical trial candidate all the way to regulatory approval. I think that they were aiming to get to pivotal trials to regulatory approval. That does require a lot of cash, and I guess they weren't able to raise that cash.

Having said that, I will certainly admit I was as surprised as everyone when I suddenly heard on a Monday that Tessa were going to close on the Friday, one can certainly question the abruptness. And yes, the impact that that abrupt announcement had on the ecosystem in Singapore, it wasn't good.

And one could certainly perhaps have managed it quite a bit better and maybe over a period of time. But all I know about to be honest and, you know, fortunately, it's starting to be in the rear view mirror right it's one of those things that people are slowly forgetting about.

It is a salient reminder right that biotech is, it's a bit of a binomial success. You either win and you can win big or you can lose and you lose big. It's either way up there, or if it's liquidated, it's probably close to zero.

And there's not many investments in Singapore where you can lose everything. Normally you have tangible assets or something that's still left. So biotech can be quite an abrupt come down from a very success story early in Tessa's existence. It certainly came down very quickly.

Joson Ng: Do you think that has kind of tempered investor expectations in the sense that people now have a more realistic idea of the likelihood of success of biotech companies?

Dr. Guy Heathers: Yeah, I think so. Now, most investors in Europe, US are specialist investors, right? I mean, they have a lot of experience in biotech. They know what they're looking for and what they're not looking for, whereas obviously in Asia and Singapore, there's a lot of family run firms, family money, right? And they tend to be more general investors. Very difficult to be a specialist biotech investor from a general family fund, right?

The expertise isn't there. And I think that could be a lesson that Tessa teaches us is that it's probably better to go with specialist biotech investors and let them manage your money. So if you're interested in biotech, maybe work with specialists to make more educated investments, more nuanced investments.

And maybe that could be the lesson of Tessa perhaps is that those investors should have board seats and take a bit of interest in the company. And I think I should be careful what I say, but I think a lot of the early investors in Tessa perhaps were not biotech specialists and perhaps didn't understand the risks that were clearly evident in all biotech companies.

Joson Ng: We also talked about how local companies have inherently that struggle in the sense that they usually develop with the idea of serving the local market, but also the idea is that they should grow to a big enough extent that they can go global. And for some biotech companies instead, they choose to have a global mindset from the get go and therefore develop their business model as such.

How would you tease apart this apparent dichotomy?

Dr. Guy Heathers: Yeah. So, I mean, again, personal preference, I like the global viewpoint, first-in-class cancer treatments or first-in-class fibrosis treatments is what I'm personally interested in.

Is there a market for like a homegrown biotech? I'm not sure. I mean, I've worked with a few MedTech people, and they have a very local business strategy, right? They're going to make six machines. Three are going to go to SingHealth and three are going to go to National Health Group. And they just make a little profit and they're happy.

I guess that's fine, right? That's their business strategy. And I think, knowing your business strategy is good. It's just for me, it's not my business strategy. It just doesn't make enough value in the local market, you know, just breaking even on a small cash basis. I like to think I'm going to change the world.

If this works, this will work big, right? This will have a major impact on cancer treatment. If I can persuade people. And, and, you know, if we, if we, if we get some really good data and it looks really promising, but if we, if we really sort of show that this has a lot of potential as a cancer drug in Albatroz.

You know, I'm sure we get interest. We get interest already, but they always say, well, you need a bit more translational data and stuff. You get the potential that this can have a really big impact on how you treat solid tumors. Obviously, the risk is big. I mean that goes, you know, other side of the same coin.

But I just like to have that big potential that we're going to have a major impact if this works and no one else is doing this right. We're sort of got a good lead and it gets noticed when we talk to the pharma companies. That's just what I, what I prefer. Not that excited about local mindsets, local business strategies myself anyway.

Joson Ng: Stay tuned for monthly podcasts with key stakeholders of the biotech ecosystem, including founders, investors, and policy makers.

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