Radiotherapeutics For CNS Cancers With Plus Therapeutics' Marc Hedrick, M.D.

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 Mark Hedrick, MD, president and CEO at Plus Therapeutics, a company developing novel radiotherapeutics for difficult to treat cancers such as glioblastoma, which has a median survival of just twelve to eighteen months. Mark is a trained general vascular and plastic surgeon who worked in academic medicine at UCLA before transitioning into life sciences as a CEO at STEMsource and Satori Therapeutics. We'll find out what Mark has learned as a biotech leader. We'll discuss Plus's lead candidate, iridium based beta emitting radiotherapy called Rayovik. We'll hear about the company's virtual development model and diagnostic subsidiary called See Inside Diagnostics, and I'll get Mark's thoughts on the current radiotherapeutics landscape and investor sentiment. Thank you so much for being here today, Mark. My pleasure, Ben. Thank you. Let's start out with your background. You were an MD. You trained as a surgeon. What what can you say about your time as a practicing surgeon and maybe the work that you did at UCLA? Yeah. You you know, the the the thing in my career that really, is responsible for making the transition from academia into therapeutic development and business was a, about a three year stint at University of California, San Francisco, where I worked on a team that was developing therapies for babies still in the womb. And so that these were these were largely, pregnant women who had, fetuses that had life threatening conditions, and the survival of the the child was kinda universally poor. However, they were there are group of diseases where if you if one intervenes kind of early in gestation with sort of intervention, then you could actually dramatically increase the odds of survival. So that that started me down a path of, innovating in, in medicine and surgery. We developed a number of procedures and and devices and therapeutic approaches as as part of that. And that really kinda got me excited and, finished my career, went on to be on the faculty at UCLA, but continue that, that interest. And then, we were early in the, the stem cell, could I I would call it sort of the bench to bedside for stem cells in the, in the 2,000 time frame and then just do a series of circumstances ended up, leaving on sabbatical and starting a company. And then, the next thing you know, I'm kinda doing it full time. Well, that with the, the program that you mentioned at UCSF, I imagine there's a diagnostic component to that too given that it's, you know, unborn children. Was that was it something that, you know, with those diseases that you're talking about, was it something that was regularly diagnosed or or was it, you know, like, you had a a genetic likelihood to have it? How how did you know, you know, that, an unborn baby had a …