Seismic Therapeutic: Maude Tessier, CBO
“Seismic has all the right elements to be a transformative company”
Making novel medicines is not for the faint of heart.
This is especially true for those seeking to design ‘biologics.’ Unlike traditional small molecules, biologics are often large and unwieldy—structurally complex proteins that are daunting to engineer. While a small molecule may have several features that can be reliably altered to improve the drug, biologics lack well-defined “rational” design principles. Modification of a single amino acid residue can lead to dramatic and unpredictable changes in structure, solubility and potency. Yet, biologics have the proven ability to engage intricate signal transduction networks or inhibit so-called “undruggable” pro-inflammatory proteins inaccessible to small molecules.
Given this inherent complexity, how can we leverage the power of biologic therapies to help patients with immune-mediated diseases? Seismic Therapeutic has an answer.
Using the company’s IMPACT platform, Seismic applies cutting-edge machine learning algorithms into the biologics drug creation process, integrating structural biology, protein engineering and translational immunology—enabling efficient evaluation of how multiple amino acid changes of a biologic affect its structure, function and fitness in parallel. Moreover, Seismic is using machine learning to modify its biologics to reduce immunogenicity—a key hurdle to clear for this class of medicines. Seismic hopes its AI-enabled product pipeline will lead to fundamental insights to address adaptive immune system dysregulation in a wide range of diseases.
Seismic was co-founded in 2021 by Alan Crane from Polaris and Dr. Jo Viney, who previously had tremendous success making biologics at Pandion (acquired by Merck), along with academic founders Dr. Tim Springer, Dr. Debbie Mark, Dr. Jeff Ravetch, Dr. Andrew Cruse and Dr. Eric Sundberg. Their team has the scientific expertise, innovative technology, drug development chops and top tier investors to move the needle on some of the most difficult to treat autoimmune diseases: “Seismic has all the right elements to be a really transformative company,” says Dr. Maude Tessier, Chief Business Officer of Seismic (Q #4). Seismic launched with a $101 million Series A in February of 2022. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from lead founding investors Timothy A. Springer and Polaris Partners, along with new investors GV, Boxer Capital, Samsara BioCapital, and management/founders. The coming year will be pivotal for the company to advance its platform and announce lead targets and disease indications: “We’ve made great progress so far. We’re executing on the science—2022 is a real ‘build year’ for us, both on the BD strategy and science side,” says Dr. Tessier.
Maude Tessier (PhD) is the Chief Business Officer (CBO) of Seismic, joining the company in May 2022. After earning her PhD at the University of Toronto, a newly minted Dr. Tessier (resume literally in hand, Q #2) embarked on a now 16+ year career in business development (BD). Specializing in early-stage (discovery to clinical proof of concept) BD, the self-described ‘recovering scientist’ has worked at Xanthus Pharma, Boston Children’s Hospital, Merck and Ikena Oncology prior to her current executive role at Seismic. Passionate about helping the ‘next-gen’ of BD executives, Dr. Tessier provides crucial advice about transitioning from grad school to industry, the importance of ‘soft-skills’ and mentorship in BD and how to land that first gig (Q #8). In addition to discussing her exciting work at Seismic, our interview is a practical field-manual for those looking to pursue a career at the intersection of science, medicine and business.
Below is an interview with Dr. Maude Tessier, CBO of Seismic Therapeutics from August 2022:
1. Tell us a bit about your background. What was your first exposure to science, and what led you to pursue a PhD. What did you work on in grad school?
I grew up in Canada. My mom worked in the imaging department at a local hospital. I remember being a small kid and her coming back home from work and telling me about all the fascinating things that happened during her day. My first exposure to life sciences, medical sciences really came through her. My father was a teacher in high school and he completed a humanities PhD in his early 40s while he was working full time. I hadn’t realized that one could do a PhD until I saw my own father go through that process. And so, it was the combination of both my parents’ experiences that led me down the path of an advanced degree in life sciences.
[On her work as a PhD student at the University of Toronto]
My PhD is from the Department of Medical Biophysics. It’s a multidisciplinary department that is one of the oldest in Canada. Everybody does cancer research, but approaches it from a mix of disciplines and backgrounds. I was in the signal transduction group; I cloned and then characterized a novel serine-threonine protein kinase involved in cancer. We also had a structural biology group in the department, and a bioengineering physics group that was more focused on creating devices to either help diagnose or treat cancer. All of about the 200 graduate students interacted in a number of classes and seminars on a regular basis. I really liked this cross functional approach to cancer research. In addition to having the depth of your own PhD, this education provided me with a broad overview of many different ways that science can hopefully help cancer patients.
2. What led you to transition to industry (from grad school), and what appeals to you most about business development?
I was still really interested and curious about life sciences and cancer research, but I didn’t see myself being in a lab full time going forward. Luckily, my PhD supervisor was very supportive about not doing a postdoc.
I decided to spend six months or so, while writing up my PhD, exploring different career paths. I did a number of informational interviews, read some books, did an internship of the tech transfer office, and took a few MBA classes at the Rothman School of Management. I did different things to figure out: okay, if I have a PhD, and I don’t want to be in the lab, what will the rest of my career look like?
I ended up narrowing into the business development [BD] and licensing field as a really interesting career path. I was drawn to the multidisciplinary nature of the work: You have to understand the science, especially if you’re in an early-stage BD role, and you have to understand the business. So being at the intersection of science and business I thought was really cool. And then you get to learn about and apply core principles of law and IP, negotiations, messaging, branding and marketing, in addition to the science. Business development is also a much more outward facing role than working in the lab. You tend to interact with a lot of people. And it’s important to be able to translate the key messages from the lab and the clinic to different audiences. All of these facets were really interesting to me.
When I moved to Boston in 2006, I made my transition to BD. But of course, I had no BD work experience to speak of and finding an entry level role was hard. So, I ended up walking around Cambridge with my resume in hand and knocking on doors. My strategy was to say: ‘Hey, I’m trained as a scientist, I’m happy to work on the bench, but I would love to do BD projects on the side.’ I did that for a couple of days and waited. I was fortunate that I ended up working at Xanthus Pharmaceuticals. They were a really small biotech company in Kendall Square, and were looking for a junior BD person to be the right hand of their CBO. They were looking for somebody who had a PhD, whom he could mentor and train. That was my first BD job.
I think this speaks to a couple of lessons. The first one is that you have to create opportunities for yourself. I think if I hadn’t gone out and put myself out there to find my first job, I don’t know where I would be. I do think it’s partly serendipity—I showed up at the right place at the right time. But showing up is definitely the first step. And then the second lesson is about the importance of mentors. I was lucky early on that I found Mike Boss at Xanthus who saw my potential and who was willing to train me from the ground up. I think mentorship is important whether you’re just starting out, or whether you are continuing to grow in your career.
3. What exactly is BD? How did you view BD when you first entered the field, and how has that definition changed?
People get into BD in so many different ways because it is such a multi-disciplinary field. I know some BD executives who have very long, illustrious R&D careers, and then they decide to come to BD later in their career. I’ve done the opposite, but I still fit into the ‘recovering scientists’ profile of executives. Then there’s the ‘MBA phenotype,’ with or without a scientific degree, that has business/finance as the primary value proposition of their profile. And then there’s another cohort, which bring legal and IP expertise through JD degrees. And there’s some executives who have combinations of these credentials.
When I started my BD career, I had a very narrow view of what BD was. I don’t think I realized the full breadth of BD profiles out there and how one can do business development in several different settings. I’ve been in very small companies, I’ve been in academia at Boston Children’s Hospital, and I’ve also been in big pharma when I spent four years at Merck. Whether you’re working in an early-stage or a late-stage company (for example, one that is in late stage clinical development or even commercial stage), or working on the pharma or biotech side of the industry, your role as a BD executive can be very different in spite of the core skill sets of the job being similar. Given my background, as we talked about, my sweet spot has become an early-stage BD exec who is at this intersection of science and business. My passion is helping innovative scientific companies go from really early and bring them to a certain stage of maturity.
[On defining BD and the general types of activities]
In its simplest form, BD in early stage biotech means cultivating, negotiating and managing partnerships and collaborations in order to bring in non-dilutive capital, and/or to access capabilities and resources, and to create value for shareholders and patients. BD in an early-stage company can be tasked with supplementing the platform with technologies from the outside, or helping to craft relationships with academic labs or consortiums—anything that would support the preclinical, translational or clinical development of the product pipeline. And then a big part of business development in a small biotech, is establishing partnerships, usually with big pharma, on projects of common interests where we can do things better or faster than if we were doing them by ourselves. My definition of a great partnership is one that brings non-dilutive of capital into the company and that brings capabilities, expertise, and real synergy that hopefully gets the project to the next level and gets promising drugs to patients faster.
4. What is one book that has influenced the way you think, which you would recommend to fellow scientists or entrepreneurs?
I’ve got a couple of them. On the science side, The Emperor of All Maladies [Siddhartha Mukherjee] is one that I think is famous by now in terms of going over the history of cancer research. It’s a wonderful overview of all the various facets in which the field has evolved, whether it was through academic research, progress made by industry or change resulting from public health initiatives. I think it shows how far we’ve come in the field of cancer research, but also how much there is still to do.
And the other one on the management side is: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. It’s become a classic management book published about 15 years ago. It was particularly helpful for me when I was transitioning from an individual contributor in BD to be a C-level executive. Eventually when you grow in your career, there’s a major shift that needs to happen in your thinking. Yes, you’re dependent on your own domain expertise, but the job is much more about enterprise leadership, and being able to apply leadership across the company. The book goes through a number of habits that maybe got you to where you are today and made you a successful individual contributor, but shows you how to let go of some of them in order to become a more effective enterprise leader.
5. What excites you most about working at Seismic? Briefly, what is the magic sauce or competitive advantage? How do you leverage this secret sauce in BD?
I was really excited about the opportunity to join Seismic in early May of this year [2022]. We just raised our Series A and announced it in February of this year.
At Seismic, we are an immunology biotech that discovers and develops novel biologics enabled by machine learning. I was really excited about coming to a company that integrates machine learning into the drug discovery process for biologics, and that has an experienced team with a strong track record of drug creation. And that’s a new combination. The AI drug discovery and drug development, space has exploded in the last few years, but others have been less focused on this integration of AI into the process for biologics discovery.
Seismic’s unique drug development approach is combining machine learning with structural biology and translational immunology. And that guides us in several ways. One is that using machine learning models, we can make multiple, parallel changes to a particular protein to alter how the protein essentially behaves, both in terms of its fitness and biology. So that allows us to get to, what we hope, are going to be novel and better biologics more quickly, because we’re streamlining a lot of this conditional iterative process.
And the other way that we’re applying machine learning in protein engineering is around ‘invisibilization,’ as we’re calling it. This is a way to modify the sequence of a protein to make it less immunogenic – in essence, it is ‘invisible’ to the overall immune system and doesn’t provoke any undesirable response – which has been a real issue with both antibodies and enzyme therapeutics in the past. Machine learning really allows you to do this in a better way, because one can understand the higher order relationships between different amino acid changes that you make, rather than serially making one change at a time. So, this work could be a real leap forward in terms of how protein therapeutic design is done. At Seismic, we’re focused on applying our platform of biologics to autoimmune disease to start. We’ve made great progress so far. We’re executing on the science; 2022 is a real ‘build year’ for us both on the BD strategy and science side. Next year, we’ll be disclosing more about our specific programs and pipeline.
Our philosophy at Seismic is that you still need the human element to make it successful. Core members of our drug discovery team were together at Pandion Therapeutics, which was acquired a few years ago by Merck [R&D was led by Seismic CEO Dr. Jo Viney]. And so, they have a track record of making meaningful medicines that have gone into the clinic, in addition to having a successful exit with acquisition by a major pharma company. And we have great investors: Polaris, Lightspeed, GV, Boxer, Samsara and Tim Springer. So, we are well funded with long term committed investors, and great academic founders as well. Seismic has all the right elements to be a transformative company.
6. What are you currently working hardest on at Seismic as CBO? What are the upcoming milestones you are using to keep your team motivated?
We’re still a young company. And so right now, I am a team of one. That’s typical of a start up environment, where under the CBO there are a number of business functions that “incubate” eventually becoming full time positions or entire new groups as the company matures. And this is also what happened in my prior role at Ikena Oncology—when I joined in 2018, we were 12 people. The CEO and I were really the only non-R&D people, although both of us were scientists by training. [At a small company] you end up doing whatever is needed to be done that is not R&D. So, because of that, there is no typical day. I would say this can be both a pro and a con. If you’re a very curious person, you like doing many different things, and you like knowing different fields and understanding how all these pieces fall together, this is a really great career.
In the early days, it’s about being as versatile of a business executive as you can. And so my role is actually much broader than just BD at the moment. At Seismic, we’re currently about 35 people. And the vast majority are in the research and development team. Currently, I am responsible for, in addition to business development, financing – which involves capitalizing the company through equity and being the point of contact for investors and bankers – and corporate strategy of the company. The other area I’m responsible for is corporate communications. I work with an outside PR firm on our website, social media and press releases. You have to put yourself out there as a company to attract partners, investors, but also talent—recruiting key people is very important to a small company. We want to make sure that we have outward facing platforms online and on social media that tell a compelling story about who we are, what we do, and how we do science and work with one another. Seismic has a very unique culture in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. We’re really focused on making sure that we have a diverse workforce here at Seismic, where everybody feels like they can be themselves at work and that they belong, and that we volunteer in our community and give back.
We’re also doing a lot of work on the patent side. We’re a young company, so we are driven by our science and making sure we have a robust patent portfolio is a key area of focus. And so that’s what I mean by it’s a ‘build year.’ Right now, I have a very broad set of responsibilities because of the stage of the company, and where we are.
7. What does a day in the life of a CBO look like?
Depending on the day, you can be focused on one of the [above] aspects, or multiple of them in a 24-hour period. They all require very different skill sets, and mindsets sometimes. If you want to talk to, let’s say, a banker, it’s very different than, working on a patent application with one of our R&D team members. So sometimes it takes a lot of mental gymnastics in a single day to be able to move on from one task to another. But that’s what I find interesting and exciting. It has certainly been a very fulfilling career path.
8. What is another biotech (public or private) that you think serves as a paragon of a great company from a BD lens? What are the key learnings from this case study?
The one that comes to mind is Moderna. I was at Boston Children’s Hospital when Moderna got started—there’s some foundational IP that came from Boston Children’s. So, it’s been really interesting for me, in particular, to see how far Moderna has come in the 10 plus years that they’ve been around. And I think it’s one of those success stories where some of the IP came from academia, it was successfully taken in by a group of investors and early executives that were able to steer the company forward through many ups and downs.
The global pandemic gave them an opportunity to show the power of their platform, and they were able to live up to that potential. I think it took a while for them to be able to find the best application of their platform and really show their value proposition. This was sort of the turning point that that they needed.
I think the other impressive piece for me is also how quickly they’ve been able to become a commercial enterprise. Some companies take years to scale to become a commercial entity, and be able to produce and distribute millions of doses. And Moderna has managed to do this in the context of a global pandemic.
9. In today’s climate what is some advice you would give to students interested in going into industry and potentially business development? What key skills do you need, what is a good place to start?
Thinking from an early-stage company BD executive point of view, there’s quite a few transferable skills for somebody who has done a PhD, an MD or both.
I think knowledge of science for a BD executive in the life sciences industry is paramount. You don’t need to understand it to the level of your R&D colleagues, but it is an integral part of being able to articulate what the company is doing and being able to understand the potential value of certain programs. The question is, can you show a potential employer for your first BD role that you have softer skills, which can make you a good BD executive. Whether you go into BD or whether you go into any other disciplines, having a network is very important. It’s never too early to start building one and get a mentor or mentoring board.
Mentors are not necessarily people you work with, or your managers or supervisors. They can be anyone that you look up to in the industry. People love talking about what they do, and I want to give back in the way that others helped me figure out my career path many years ago. I have found that most people that you reach out to “cold” are really happy to spend a little bit of time and get to know you and share some advice. Another piece of advice is showing general interest and knowledge in the biotech industry. You can get involved as a volunteer in one of many biopharma non-profit organizations in the Boston-Cambridge area. Showing that you have some extracurricular interests, which are biotech related, is a good place to start.
These are the things I look for when I have an entry-level BD role open: a strong scientific background, good analytical skills, some general knowledge and interest in biotech, maybe some side gig that demonstrates this interest, and someone who is comfortable in an outward facing role.
10. Any recent announcements (hires, abstracts/publications, funding, awards, job openings) or key milestones regarding Seismic that you want the public to be aware of?
We’re continuing to scale the company this year and we will disclose more next year around our approach and pipeline. In the meantime, we have a few open positions in R&D, finance and in BD. The best way of keeping up with Seismic is to check out the job openings on our website and follow us on LinkedIn and on Twitter.