00:00:00:18 - 00:00:12:06
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
It's so lovely to see you. Thanks so much for coming in to see us. I wanted to talk to you about the work that we did with you. Would you mind just kind of like giving us a sense of why was it you were looking for a third party?
00:00:12:19 - 00:00:35:12
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
We are LifeArc and LifeArc started off as a licensing office with a bit of science attached, and it was the old Medical Research Council technology organisation. So LifeArc was destined to undergo a significant transformation. So I decided that a transformation of that size, we needed help.
00:00:35:22 - 00:00:39:11
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
So what was triggering that? What kind of brought you to need a transformation?
00:00:40:02 - 00:01:04:17
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
We were very fortunate in that MRC had humanised an antibody one of many, many years before 2018. But we could see on the horizon that this antibody had now become a significant product. Keytruda, which was marketed by Merck. And with that success came a royalty stream for LifeArc.
00:01:05:06 - 00:01:08:23
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
Can you tell me a little bit more about the transformation? How significant was it?
00:01:09:05 - 00:01:26:02
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
We had to undergo a transformation because we were fortunate enough to receive the Keytruda royalty and in the monetisation we received $1.3 billion. So that was an opportunity to really, really change the organisation.
00:01:26:10 - 00:01:42:15
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
It's a fantastic opportunity and as a charity I think that gives you such an extraordinary legacy potentially as well. So with that in mind, that's a huge responsibility as well. So would you be able to kind of explain what was the work that you wanted us to do with you?
00:01:45:19 - 00:02:12:23
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
When I went in as CEO to undertake the transformation because the royalty stream was obviously the first thing we had to monetise, it was obvious to me that we didn't have the internal skills to really talk about what life could be. In fact, it was even more basic than that. We really needed, first of all, to find out what we had been and what the core skills of the organisation were.
00:02:13:15 - 00:02:39:06
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
And I find that I felt very siloed when I went in. So I actually having a conversation about the, the entity I knew would be assisted greatly if I actually had somebody who used to looking at organisations from the outside. And that's why I came to you, Kate, because I knew you from some time before and I knew you understood the types of organisations that life sciences have within them.
00:02:40:21 - 00:02:55:09
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
And it was a wonderful project to work on. So it would be really interesting for me to understand what was it about Baringa - so what did, what else did we bring? I know we've worked together in the past, but what else did you find? That you really enjoyed working with the team.
00:02:56:02 - 00:03:25:18
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
So LifeArc needed a an external team who really understood life sciences. We needed to understand not just pharmaceuticals as well, but also medtech and the process of moving ideas from academics into potential products that the life sciences industry would be interested in. So LifeArc came to you because you were setting up the Life Sciences practise. And the wonderful thing about the team was that we didn't lose touch with you.
00:03:25:19 - 00:03:42:16
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
We had you leading it, but also we had and you brought with you a very talented group of young people. And each and every one of them contributed their own inputs as well as just delivered the goods for us in terms of the tangible results that we needed at the end of the day.
00:03:44:07 - 00:03:50:14
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
So I know you were working with the other consultancies when you started working with us as well, but what really differentiated us?
00:03:51:05 - 00:04:30:12
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
LifeArc was very small, 230 people and I was rather afraid of having a standardised template imposed on us. I actually wanted an entrepreneurial feel, people who would partner with me. We talked about the CEO office at the time to partner with me and help me deliver something quite unique in terms of LifeArc and what we got with you and your team, Kate, was not just your leadership and companionship with me, but also a young team who were energetic, popular with the LifeArc team.
00:04:30:17 - 00:04:39:06
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
And we actually ended up with tangible deliverables at the end of the day. That helped me communicate with my board of trustees.
00:04:40:17 - 00:04:57:12
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
Now, I know we've been away from you for a while, which is actually a really lovely time to kind of almost take a step back and say, with all the work that we did with you, what's the value that you believe has been left behind? What do you think was the result of the work?
00:04:58:17 - 00:05:33:24
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
Well, so the results of the work with Baringa were that we have a legacy of the journey that we went on to try and understand what LifeArc was. We have lovely slide sets and diagrams that actually help us to explain how the core attributes of LifeArc were suddenly uncovered and unfolded and how we should describe them. You'll remember those very well, the triangle and how we were trying to put all the parts together.
00:05:34:11 - 00:06:09:06
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
Then as we got closer to the strategy that was agreed by the board in July 2021, which was three and a half years of that journey of my being the CEO, we actually ended up with that coalescing around what we should become and what potential was there. And I remember workshops together where individual projects and the response mode behaviour of LifeArc really had to be turned the other way with our core offerings, which we described.
00:06:10:05 - 00:06:40:20
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
And then you can make your own future. So our core offerings were advice, science and the newfound funding. And with those three, we had that conversation about $1.3 billion actually allowing us to turn that all on its head, put patients at the centre, and actually then ask with science advice and funding, what is it you can actually do to deliver for those patients?
00:06:41:22 - 00:06:52:14
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
So we start with patients. Every translational challenge, which we now have and we have three in the bag and two more in the pipeline starts with the central patient problem.
00:06:52:21 - 00:06:55:20
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
And those were the missions that we talked about that, right?
00:06:55:24 - 00:07:33:12
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
Yeah, absolutely. But differentiated from others missions or others challenges because we very specifically focussed on translation. So we go from the academic and the new science and their findings through to tangible assets. And we've got even more enjoyment now because we've articulated impact and our impact areas building on those foundations of knowledge, the ecosystem we can build, the assets we can progress and the economies that we're going to deliver into.
00:07:34:00 - 00:07:44:19
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
And that is how are we going to describe our impact for patients? So we've now got translational challenges founded on those four domains to give us patient impact.
00:07:45:09 - 00:07:58:12
Kate Moss, Partner and expert in Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Baringa
So lovely to hear kind of the impact that we started with you on your journey as the CEO. So thank you so much for your time today. It's been wonderful to hear the journey.
