Would you be able to walk us through your career path up till now? What were some of the key experiences that led you to co-found Inhibrx?
My background is a little different from some of my peers. Out of school, I started on the executive search-side, and so I worked with a number of biotech, medical device, and life science tool companies. When I was doing that, I put together the senior teams for over 40 companies. That was earlier in my career.
I went from there to the investment side, and, for eight years, I ran a biotech investment fund that was strategically focused, but in public entities, primarily. We initiated that after the dot.com crash, starting in around ’02, or ’03. That experience led me to believe there was a better way to execute drug discovery, drug development, and run a biotech company, because I just didn’t like some of the things I saw.
That’s what led to starting Inhibrx in 2010. I wanted to create an environment where teams would be better incentivized, which would in turn allow them to remain focused and increase efficiency. And that’s been my last 15 years – building Inhibrx.
The field of engineered antibodies is relatively crowded. What do you see as Inhibrx’s approach, and what sets it apart from competitors?
From the very beginning, with my two co-founders on the scientific side, Quin Devereux and Brendan Eckelman, we took an approach where we looked at it from a target biology point-of-view. Our belief was that the best targets are known, but how to drug it properly wasn’t quite so clear.
