Jay Hartenbach, President & COO, Diakonos Oncology on Reprogramming Cancer Immunity Breakthrough

Hello, and welcome to the BioTech twenty fifty podcast. BioTech twenty fifty is a think tank chronicling the disruptions changing the biotech industry over the next several decades. Check out our website at biotech2050.com. I'm today's host, Alok Tayee. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Vibe Bio. Vibe is an investment platform focused on the biotech industry. This episode is proudly sponsored by our good friends at Quartsey. Quartsey helps life science organizations streamline their operations by combining inventory, procurement, and ordering into one simple platform. Get a special offer from them by visiting quartsey.com/biotech20fifty. That's quartzy, quartzy,.com/biotech20fifty. I'm really excited today to be joined by Jay Hartenbach. He's the president and COO of Diakonos Oncology. Diakonos is developing some really exciting cancer therapies using Dendritic cells, and we're excited to have him on the show to talk through his experience building up the company, running clinical trials, and, of course, raising capital in this interesting market. Jay, thanks so much for joining us today. Hello. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here. Maybe to kick it off, love to learn a little bit about you, your background, and how you got to where you are today. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, at a really high level, I recognized at an early age that I was very interested in both science and potentially medicine, but also the business case for it. And so through my educational career, I had the opportunity to pursue this master's in engineering management where we really could combine some of the things that I had learned in my undergraduate biomedical engineering work with some business principles and really making sure that interesting ideas also had a business case. I had the opportunity to start a company outside of the pharmaceutical business and learned a lot of what to do and certainly what not to do. And through that work, had started doing research with Baylor College of Medicine and got to learn a little bit more about the technology that Dioclonus was developing. That interest quickly expanded into wanting to invest into the company and then also step in and help lead Diocnios where I could be helpful, which was more on the business operation side. So I've been with the company for a little over three years at this point. Really, I think helped commercialize the business. I can be honest. I haven't done much on the science side of it. That's a good thing. But really, I've been focused on building out, I think, a very compelling team and also just ensuring that we have the money to execute and do right by the science. Yeah. That's amazing. Obviously, we need all different sets of expertise to come together for a drug to be successful. And I often joke that drug development is inherently a conspiracy where you need both business and science and regulatory and luck to conspire amongst many other things for a drug to be getting to patients. So …