Cartography: Kevin Parker, CEO
“I would love to see more grad students or post-docs go from academia into starting a company.”
Finding the right target on a tumor cell is the Holy Grail of cancer immunotherapy. Cartography Biosciences is creating the map to get there.
Born from work done in the Howard Chang and Ansu Satpathy labs at Stanford, Cartography uses cutting-edge multi-omics profiling to construct a comprehensive tumor antigen atlas. By profiling millions of cells, across thousands of samples, from both cancerous and healthy tissue, Cartography searches for antigens that are selective for tumors. They use this knowledge to create precise immunotherapies – CAR-T, bispecific antibodies, or antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), for example – that exploit these targets. By building immunotherapies from precise targets, Cartography will create a pipeline of drugs with enhanced anti-cancer efficacy and reduced off-target side-effects.
In discussing his motivation to cofound and lead Cartography, CEO Kevin Parker describes his frustration with the current state of immunotherapy: “People keep trying to hammer at the same biology without making progress. As a result, you get off-target toxicity. What sticks with me is a trial using an ADC against a splice variant of CD44—one of the patients developed a fatal skin toxicity.” It is in these types of patients, that Cartography seeks to make an immediate impact.
Founded in 2020, Cartography raised a seed round led by a16z and Wing VC. Recently, the company announced a $51M series A financing led by 8VC with participation from seed investors, Catalio Capital Management, ARTIS Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, AME Cloud Ventures, the Cancer Research Institute, and Gaingels.
Kevin Parker, PhD (CEO/Co-Founder) graduated from Harvard College in 2016, where he was advised by Kevin Eggan. During his extremely productive PhD at Stanford (’20), he was co-mentored by Howard Chang and Ansu Satpathy. There he gained the expertise in single-cell and functional genomics that contributed to the founding of Cartography. Part of a growing cadre of biotech founders & CEOs straight out of training, Kevin understands Cartography’s science on a granular level—he can leverage this technical know-how to effectively fundraise, problem solve, hire and support a growing team of over 30 employees. In our interview, Kevin describes how he has benefitted from a network of founder-led biotech CEOs and CSOs. He is determined to give back and help trainees considering making a similar transition: “I would love to see more grad students or post-docs go from academia into starting a company. As more people do it there will be more people to share knowledge, which will help make it easier for future academics to start companies.”
Below is an interview with Kevin Parker, Co-Founder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences, July 2022:
1. Briefly describe your background, and the moment you decided to jump from academia into entrepreneurship? What different paths did you consider, and what was the deciding factor to make the transition?
I did undergrad at Harvard in stem cell biology and worked in Kevin Eggan’s lab. I got really interested in how cells make decisions: how do you go from a stem cell to a neuron? How does the genome reorganize itself? I wanted to go to grad school to understand gene regulation and this process of cellular decision making. I joined Howard Chang’s lab at Stanford, who does a lot of cool work building tools to understand how the genome works and apply those tools to biological questions. I initially worked on single-cell ATAC-sequencing, and then had some collaborations in the immunotherapy space, as well as a project looking at CD19 CAR-T therapy.
As part of this work, I realized that the fields of immunology, antibody discovery and cell therapy were not taking advantage of the new work in genomics and computational biology. As we talked to more people in the cell and immunotherapy space, we found that there was a lack of good targets—we have a handful of B-cell targets, like CD19, CD22, CD20, and BCMA, and everyone goes after them. We haven’t built the tools to find new antigens, and people keep trying to hammer at the same biology without making much progress. As a result, in many other cases when drugs against new targets are tested in humans, there is unanticipated off-tumor, on-target toxicity. What sticks with me is a trial using an ADC against a splice variant of CD44 —one of the ten patients developed a fatal skin toxicity. People didn’t realize it [CD44 splice variant] was expressed in the skin. I found this very frustrating to hear, because we [founding team] could have done something about this. We felt like there was a need and that we knew how to translate genomic insights towards patients. These types of ideas were the foundation for starting Cartography in 2020.
[On considering different career paths at the end of grad school]
I was personally considering a few different paths, such as the traditional academic route. For me, I realized that the paper publishing aspect of academia is not what motivates me. So, I felt I may not like the academic route. I then looked at scientist roles in biotech companies, and also thought it could be interesting to work at places like TRV [Third Rock Ventures] or Flagship and explore venture creation opportunities. In the background, though, we were also starting to build the ideas and plan for Cartography, and it really seemed like there was something there. We hadn’t yet gotten the company off the ground, but even so it felt like there was a lot of important work to be done. I felt like I could see a path for the coming years, and just thought: ‘well someone has to do it – and we’re probably the right people to do it.’
2. What is one book that has influenced the way you think, which you would recommend to fellow scientists or entrepreneurs?
One book I think is really helpful is Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor. It does a great job of laying out the structural components of how venture works and why VCs make decisions. It is a good primer for people who are looking to understand how the ecosystem works.
3. What is the elevator pitch for Cartography Biosciences? What is the company’s overarching vision?
The goal of Cartography is to understand how to make precise therapies. We have a lot of drugs that hit the tumor but also hit healthy tissues – the skin, liver, gut and blood, for example. You are throwing a dart at a dartboard and half the time you miss the tumor, which causes toxicity in patients and reduces your ability to actually treat that tumor. What you ideally want is a therapy that doesn’t miss, and hits the tumor every single time. Cartography’s focus is building up exquisitely precise therapies—and we’ve built out a platform to find precise antigens that can be used the basis for downstream development of immunotherapies.
The vision of the company evolved from our earlier academic work, which was initially focused more on understanding toxicity of existing therapies, whereas Cartography is built around shifting the pipeline of cancer drugs to develop novel immunotherapies and expand access to more patients.
4. What excites you most about working at Cartography? Briefly, what is the secret sauce or competitive advantage?
The team is a huge component. We have an amazing team of 30, and everyone is exceptional—some of the best scientists I have been able to work with. The long term vision that excites me is shifting how we think about classifying cancers. Originally this was done based on histology and then shifted to genetics and mutations. But now, in the field of immunotherapy we really should be thinking about antigens. If you have a CD19 positive patient you should be profiling cancers based on CD19 expression and then developing therapies against that [target]. This is not something that the field has done—classifying cancers based on antigen expression. There are so many unknowns in what antigens cells express—we know there are millions of possibilities, but we usually only measure this on the scale of a few thousand. For me it is exciting to consider how we take all the work that has been done in developing the chassis of immunotherapy and let them reach their full potential for an expanded number of patients by building from precise antigen targets.
5. What are you currently working hardest on at Cartography? What are the upcoming milestones you are using to keep the team motivated?
At a high level, one of the aspects of my job is bridging internal and external stakeholders, and getting people to keep the company moving smoothly in the right direction. One aspect of that at the moment is helping to hire and build out teams we are growing at Cartography. Another piece that has come up following the launch announcement is that there has been a lot inbound interest from different companies wanting to talk, partner or collaborate. So right now, I’m spending time talking to these companies and exploring how we can work together. One other more mundane thing is finding lab space—which is a constant pain for everyone. There is not enough of it and it is very expensive–and Cartography is growing.
In terms of milestones, we are focused on building out our pipeline. We have a lot of ongoing discovery work, in addition to already having several targets of interest. We’re focused on advancing these programs to the point of having lead targets and molecules that we’ll continue to push toward clinic.
6. What has the transition been like from grad student to CEO? What have the challenges been making this leap—do you think removing some of these would facilitate more founder-led biotechs?
There is an initial trivial barrier of ‘how do you literally start a company?’: incorporate it, hire people, get payroll, get health insurance, etc. These initial pieces of starting a company aren’t that hard, it just sounded very different to me than what I did as a grad student. Having this practical knowledge is a barrier to people; it sounds harder than it is but is one of the questions I get asked most frequently by others looking to start companies.
As more grad students or postdocs go into founder/CEO or founder/CSO roles, there will be more people who have knowledge that you can talk to. I benefitted a lot from talking to other people who had made that transition and learned a lot from them. I want to do anything I can to help other people who are earlier [in the process] understand how this process [of starting a company] works. I would love to see more grad students or post-docs go from academia into starting a company.
Learning to manage a team is something that I, and everybody, continues to work on. You can always be a better manager—and it’s something that I prioritize, because it’s important to me that we as a company work effectively together. In terms of being a CEO, I see my job as having a vision, fundraising, and hiring but then it really becomes about supporting everybody else. Finding other people who can do their job better than I ever could, getting them up and running, and enabling them to do their work. I know some things but not others and that is fine. It is better for the company if we bring on experts to lead different functions. This is very appealing to me—it is my job to keep steering us in the right direction, and do whatever needs to get done so that everyone else can do their work. I find that supporting everyone is a really satisfying and exciting role.
7. What is another biotech (public or private) that you think serves as a paragon of an impactful company? What are the key learnings from this case study?
I’d call out a set of companies – Mammoth Biosciences, Genesis Therapeutics, BigHat Biosciences, Dyno Therapeutics, Scribe Therapeutics – and many others where founding teams that are exceptional scientists have translated this into amazing biotech companies with transformative potential. I find these very inspiring and a good set of proof points of how successful founder-led biotechs can be. I expect there to be many more of these in the coming years, and glad to have Cartography as part of this group. I’m excited to see the many more to come!
8. In today’s climate what is one short piece of advice you would give to prospective biotech entrepreneurs?
The biggest piece is around the team. The strength of the early team matters so much. You want to find people who can be hands on to help build the company, but then also scale to be leaders of groups—this is a win for them, it’s a win for me and it’s a win for the company. Growing and scaling a company really depends on having amazing people there at the beginning. Be intentional about the people you bring on—make sure they actually want to be at an early-stage company, and know what that entails. During hiring conversations, I share with people the amazing vision and potential Cartography has – but I usually don’t give a super hard sell to convince them to do one thing or another. I am just honest about the incredible opportunity and also challenges of working at a small biotech, and make sure that they want to build the company, have the technical expertise to do it, and also the right mindset to grow and scale. It’s important to me that they are aligned in wanting to roll up their sleeves and build a transformative company at Cartography. The amazing technical expertise and cultural alignment we have as a team has enabled us to work quickly and effectively as a company, and how you build the team is one of the most important things to focus on if you’re starting a company.
9. What has most impressed you about any experienced or thoughtful investors with whom you have interacted? What is one piece of advice you would give to new biotech investors?
Good investors get the science, and the business. In talking to talented investors, I have been impressed when they are able they are to go into the weeds of the science—in the same way a scientist could—but also zoom out and connect the science to what the business is building. This ability to understand what science moves the needle, what doesn’t, and what needs to be prioritized really differentiates great investors.
11. Any recent announcements (hires, abstracts/publications, awards, job openings) or key milestones regarding Cartography that you want the public to be aware of?
Well – the major news recently that we’re excited to share is the launch announcement of the company with $57M in financing and an amazing group of investors, advisors, and Cartographers. It’s been great to see the coverage and interest, and we’re excited to share the progress already and progress to come.
As part of that – we are hiring! One area we are focused on is immunologists, CAR-T scientists, and antibody engineers—but also we are always looking for scientists with genomics expertise and computational biologists as well. Please reach out if you’re interested to talk!
