A Royalty Model For Value Creation With Zymeworks' Kenneth Galbraith

Welcome back to the business of biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, chief editor at Life Science Leader. And today, I'm speaking with Kenneth Galbraith, president, CEO, and board chair at Zymeworks, a company managing a portfolio of licensed drug candidates and developing an internal pipeline of multispecific antibody therapeutics and ADCs. Ken is an experienced biotech leader and life sciences investor who has worked at more than 20 biotech and investment organizations. I got a little stressed out myself, just looking through his CV, but that's one of the reasons I'm excited to speak with Ken today. We'll talk about some of his past experiences in biotech and investing and get his take on where the industry is headed. We'll learn about the corporate director role, a position that Ken has held at more than a dozen biotech and pharma companies, and we'll talk about Zymeworks, how the company attracts and manages multiple partnerships, why it shifted to a royalty model last November, and what it means for ZymeWork's pipeline and development programs. Thank you so much for being here, Ken. Oh, thanks very much. Appreciate the invitation. Well, I'm, I'm happy to have you on the show. I wanted to start out with your background experience. You're a biotech company leader many times over, and an investor with deep experience. I I think you've led your own fund. In addition to currently leading Zymeworks, you're also a part time chair at Senkona. What are a few of your favorite professional experiences? I guess, thinking back through your work across a bunch of life sciences companies and several investment groups? Yeah. Absolutely. You know, probably it probably not unlike other people. The first thing I did in the sector was probably the most interesting because it was so novel for myself. So I I got involved in biotech back in 1987, which doesn't seem possible because that's thirty eight years ago and makes me really old. But I I was just a new business school graduate looking for something to dig into. And and then through serendipity, I met four somewhat mad professors from the local university here in Vancouver who wanted to start Canada's first biotechnology company. And they said they wanted to be Genentech of the North. And my first question was, who was Genentech? This is No idea about the sector at all. And from the very beginning, they they were amazing scientists who had these ideas to create novel novel biologics and novel structures, from emerging science. They just said they didn't know anything about business. So, they wanted me to join them and handle the business of biotech. And so that's what I did. So I joined them. It probably wasn't a great career decision at the time because we didn't have any money, and it was such a new industry. And but from my standpoint, it was so early on, there weren't experts in the field. We didn't have experience. There weren't paths …