Spotlight on Business Development: What It Is, and Why It Matters for Variant Bio
I joined Variant Bio as Chief Business Officer in June of this year, so I’m very much a new member of the team. Prior to pursuing a career in commercial biotechnology, I was a cancer genetics researcher with training in computer science and bioinformatics (see this press release with more information about my background). As a significant part of my role at Variant Bio, I have particular responsibility for what is termed Business Development. I like to think about this as figuring out how — and by this I mean with who, when, and in what way — we should work when we team up with other companies to fulfill our mission and achieve our goals of developing life-saving therapies. And when this is all figured out, along comes the challenge of making it happen –- ensuring other parts of the company get involved and do all the work necessary to put a productive partnership in place and make it run effectively.
Today, I’m especially focused on the early, trust-building phase of this process as we identify companies with whom we really would like to work. For example, in January I will be meeting with industry stakeholders at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. It makes a difference to meet people in person at conferences such as these and start to get to know how they approach identifying partnering opportunities and their own deal-making style. At some point, we may be sitting around a table negotiating and personal relationships and trust count for a lot.
Forming these alliances with others is such an important activity for a growing company like Variant Bio with big ambitions to make an impact on global health. The entire life science industry is an intricate, complex web that works together to create, develop, and make available new treatments that serve to improve health and, as far as possible, save lives. All companies, large and small, recognize that they cannot make much of a difference alone. And this need to partner is where the function of Business Development takes center stage, as the primary source of what those of us in this space affectionately call “the deal.” So you might say I’m responsible for the thinking, that is the strategy, as well as the execution, or the tactics, that will end up as Variant Bio’s slate of active, productive industry collaborations.
Of course we have to recognize that this is a team effort. All the strategic thinking and planning is aligned with leadership and, as a member of the executive team, I need to ensure that we are all pointing in the same direction when it comes to taking action in this area.
Because it is not possible to address all the opportunities in front of us at one time, we also have to set priorities, for example, when it comes to capabilities. Variant Bio is still a relatively small company and we leverage the skills of multiple companies in the space that offer contract research services. Sometimes the relationships are quite straightforward and don’t fall under the umbrella of Business Development, but sometimes they are more “strategic” and a little more complex, and that’s where we come in. For example, a company with a unique technology that could enable us to accelerate any aspect of our business could make an excellent long-term partner. Or, a company that has an asset which has exhausted all avenues of development but where we have proprietary genetics-based know-how that gives us confidence to develop it in a totally new way. And of course, the larger pharmaceutical companies with substantial financial and therapeutic development muscle could enable us to do so much more in transforming the diverse genetic partnerships we form into actionable insights that could eventually become life-saving medicines.
In sum, my team and I are focused on the goals of designing and executing well-crafted partnerships, accessing complementary expertises and technologies, assets, and strategic investments, and ultimately development and commercial strength. Together, these strategic alliances will ensure that Variant Bio fulfills its mission and delivers on its promise to improve the lives of patients around the world.
When you think hard about such partnerships between companies and what they might yield, what is striking is that the only limit is our imagination. In putting people together with a shared future in mind, we are creating something that does not already exist. And in relatively short order, we could have a large inter-company team fully engaged in translating this imaginary idea into real, tangible activity. And that is exciting.
