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<p>In just five years, biotech startup <a target="_blank" href="/portfolio/ventus-therapeutics">Ventus Therapeutics</a> has built a technology platform called ReSOLVE that is breathing new life into a critical area of drug discovery — and has already yielded three clinical-stage therapies. ReSOLVE allows scientists to visualize proteins in motion, giving researchers a quick way to use water as a blueprint for how small molecules could be developed against a disease target. It is renewing interest in small molecules, which have given us the majority of our most common and safest medicines, including antibiotics, analgesics, statins, and steroids. </p><p>“There was a sense that the great disease targets for small molecules were over,” says president and CEO Marcelo Bigal. “We’ve shown through advances in structural biology, molecular modeling, and computational chemistry that we can find new ways to pursue small molecule drug discovery against targets that have proven elusive. Our platform makes the process very efficient.” Three programs for therapies tackling diseases including Parkinson’s, refractory epilepsy, and systemic lupus are at the trial stage, and around 10 more are under assessment. </p><p>In addition to its R&amp;D breakthroughs, Ventus’ remarkable success has been built on a management philosophy and an approach to drug discovery that is unabashedly people-centered. In a broad-ranging conversation, Bigal talks about putting patients first, competing with larger, better-resourced companies, and why having a shared sense of mission is critical to success.</p>

<h2><strong>Compared to Big Pharma, you are David to their Goliath. How are you able to compete?</strong></h2><p>I come from that world, so I have a pretty good view on this. How did David win the battle? By being quick, by being fast, and by acting first. Basically that&#039;s it. Big Pharma has technologies, platforms, money, and critical mass. But they are slow. We have a platform that&#039;s quite unique. We can decide quickly: what we do, how we fund it, what we advance, what we don&#039;t advance, what we partner on. And we know exactly who we serve. We don&#039;t serve the target, we don&#039;t serve the protein, we don&#039;t serve the platform. We serve the patients who are struggling with a disease. This gives us a North Star that helps us to be very fast and intentional, as David was.</p>

<h2><strong>You have said that one of the most important things for a company and for you as a CEO is to do the basic stuff really well. What does it mean and why is this so critical?</strong></h2><p>What defines a company is not brilliance. It’s method. For example, if we decide that we are going to do a study on Parkinson&#039;s disease, we need to understand everything about the science and we need to understand everything about the patient. We should do an advisory board with doctors, but we also should do an advisory board with patients, because a fundamental question is what matters to them. If you ask a doctor what&#039;s important for patients with Parkinson&#039;s, they may say shake less, or walk more, or have fewer off moments. That&#039;s what doctors think that patients want. When I was in medical practice, I once asked a patient with Parkinson&#039;s to define what success would look like for him. He said being able to go to the bathroom without help. He could tolerate the shaking, but not the humiliation of having to ask his daughter for help when he had to go to the bathroom. And that difference is important.  </p><p>Doing the basic stuff very well also extends to everyone being a master of their craft, and we hire with an eye for that: if you&#039;re a biologist going after a protein, know more than any other biologist; if you&#039;re talking about patients, work to understand their needs better than anyone else; if you’re focused on competition, understand it better. And when we do all that, we’re going to do better than everybody else. If we keep getting these basics right, then we position ourselves for moments of brilliance. </p>

<h2><strong>So how do you instill this mentality as a leader?</strong></h2><p>I don&#039;t tolerate sloppiness. Everybody that joins the company, from the intern to the CSO, will have a one-on-one with me in the first two weeks. It’s an hour long. I basically go over the do&#039;s and don&#039;ts. We don&#039;t bully. We don&#039;t harass. We start on time, and we come prepared. If there’s a meeting, we send the agenda a day before and we read everything that’s relevant before we start. I don’t hire you because you know everything. Not knowing something is absolutely acceptable. We’ll hire a consultant or give you a coach or find someone at the company to help you. But coming unprepared or being sloppy is absolutely not acceptable. When everyone does the basics of their job well, it becomes part of the culture. And those that don&#039;t belong, they leave.</p>

<h2><strong>What are some examples of doing the basics well in regards to patients and the challenges they face?</strong></h2><p>To me, developing a medicine only matters if we&#039;re really solving a problem for the patient. That’s why we bring the patient to the discussion. The patient shouldn&#039;t be the recipient of what we do. The patient should be the co-developer. You can’t design a trial that requires so much from patients that they won’t participate. You have to ask questions such as, what’s better: a medication that improves by 50% all the patients with a disease, or one that improves by 100% only half of patients with a disease. It depends, but only patients can answer that. </p><p>We did something very cool around Parkinson’s. Once we developed a molecule that was ready to advance to the clinic, we had a movie session where we showed <em>Still</em>, a documentary about Michael J. Fox. People cried. People asked a lot of questions. The next day, we had a doctor come and speak to everyone. And on the third day of this sprint, we had a patient with a severe form of Parkinson&#039;s come talk about his life, his experience. All three events were mandatory for everyone at the company, whether they were an accountant or a chemist. </p><p>What was the impact? Try telling someone at the company today that we’re giving up on Parkinson’s. They’re going to fight for it. The accountant is going to find money for Parkinson’s. This is our disease. Those events touched everyone at the company. They changed us.</p>

<h2><strong>Does that translate into creating a happy work environment?</strong></h2><p>I&#039;m very passionate about what we do. I think there are very, very few professions that allow someone to come to work every day and work with highly qualified people who are driving science forward. If we do our job well, somebody will benefit. </p><p>We are rigorous. But as long as we follow some basic rules, and are very prepared, we are very relaxed in how we interact. We have internal clubs, we play songs together, we have leisure activities. The fundamental thing is that I want Ventus to be a company that, when you come home to your spouse or roommate and they ask, “How was your day?” you say, “It was awesome.” Everyone in biotech is smart. That’s not what defines us. What defines us is that we love what we do, we do our work with pleasure and a sense of pride, and we work as a team. That, I think, is how you disrupt an industry, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. It’s through the human connection.</p>

<h2><strong>Your approach seems to be working. Does this explain your 3% attrition rate?</strong></h2><p>Yes. We are in a very competitive environment, but so far this year, not a single person has left. Last year, I think one person left. I can name everyone who has left in five years, because there are so few. If you bring fulfillment to people’s work and compensate them well, why would they leave?</p>

<h2><strong>When you&#039;re building a biotech company, you need a broad mix of very specialized talents. How do you assemble such a team and make sure the disparate specialists all follow that North Star?</strong></h2><p>We have computational chemists, biologists, physicians, and epidemiologists. They each know a lot about their vertical. But as a team, we are not interested in a Nobel Prize nor in developing the best assay or the best animal model that exists. We’re interested in bringing a medicine to somebody. So the main difficulty sometimes when you’re selecting talent is to make sure not that they understand the other disciplines at the company, but how their work is contributing to how we advance medicines. They must have the ability to understand tradeoffs, because we don’t have infinite resources. At some point, they may have to decide between getting more computing resources or hiring another 30 chemists to advance something. You need to have the very people affected by these decisions helping you make them in a way that advances our cause, whether it is the computer scientist telling me we should hire the chemists, or the chemists telling me if we get the computing resources now, we’ll be able to do chemistry more efficiently. </p><p>That can happen only when everyone at the company understands the mission. When you ask somebody at the company what they do, I don’t want them to say, “I&#039;m a chemist, I am in communications, I’m a janitor, I’m an accountant.” I want them to say, “I&#039;m a drug developer.” That&#039;s the spirit. That’s what it takes to form a successful biotech company. And it&#039;s not easy. </p>

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