John Lepore, CEO & President - ProFound Therapeutics, on Proteome, AI, & Bold First-in-Class Drugs

Hello, and welcome to the BioTech 2,050 podcast. BioTech 2,050 is a think tank chronicling the disruptions changing the biotech industry over the next several decades. You can check out our website at biotech2050.com or on your favorite podcast listening platform. I'm Rahul Chaturvedi, cofounder of this podcast and today's host. I'm also the founder and CEO of Chlora. Chlora is a platform that enables biotechs to build a fractional workforce. You can check us out at chloro.com. This episode is proudly sponsored by our 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 at quartsey.com/biotech20fifty. Again, that's quartzy.com/biotech20fifty. I'm excited to welcome John Lepore, CEO of Profound Therapeutics and CEO partner at Flagship Pioneering. Great to have you on today, John. Thanks for joining us. Yeah. Super. Thanks for having me, Rahul. Really looking forward to it. Great. So, John, to kick us off, I'd love if you could talk to us about how you initially got interested in biotech, the arc of your career from then on out, and then we can stop with where you are today, and we'll go deeper from there. Yeah. Sure thing. So I'm initially by training a physician scientist. I'm here in Boston. I had the good fortune of going to Harvard Medical School, met my wife there, and I really learned about science as a foundation for medicine. And throughout all my training, I've just been very attracted to how do we understand the causal basis of disease and what do we need to do to intervene? So I've done a lot of clinical work and thoroughly enjoyed that. But for me, it was always much more about the science behind the medicine. And I worked in various ways in and around that theme. It was initially in academia. I trained here in Boston, as I mentioned, in cardiology and internal medicine. I was on faculty at Penn for a number of years. I had a basic science laboratory there focusing on molecular mechanisms regulating cardiac development. But that got to me to be a little bit too far from patients. And I was really interested in how does that translate into potential medicines. And someone really gave me insight to how I can do that better within a pharmaceutical company. At that time, it's almost twenty years ago now, I took a leap and went to work at GSK, where I stayed for almost seventeen years. And I originally worked in cardiovascular drug discovery and development. You know, over the years had lots of opportunity, was really blessed to be involved in both discovery and development and business development. And then for the last several years had been running the whole research organization, the research discovery platforms and early clinical translation, and really got the front row seat to how to bring a medicine all the way through to patients. I had …