Speaker 1: Welcome to Made by Women, a new podcast by the
Speaker 1: Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio. At a
Speaker 1: moment when businesses face some of the biggest challenges in
Speaker 1: recent history, we bring you inspiring stories, practical insights, and
Speaker 1: shared learnings to help you successfully navigate in today's environment.
Speaker 1: Every Thursday, Made by Women will showcase the experiences of
Speaker 1: legendary women, entrepreneurs, fierce up and comers, and everyday women
Speaker 1: who found success their own way. Consider this your real
Speaker 1: world NBA designed for the New Now. I'm Kim Azzarelli
Speaker 1: and thanks so much for joining us today. This past
Speaker 1: year of the pandemic has brought incredible advancements in science
Speaker 1: and medicine. We've seen the creation and approval of vaccines
Speaker 1: for the coronavirus quicker than we ever thought possible. Today,
Speaker 1: we'll be talking to a CEO and founder who's been
Speaker 1: working since two thousand and fifteen to make sure that
Speaker 1: clinical trials for a wide range of medical conditions are
Speaker 1: done faster and at lower cost. That means that effective
Speaker 1: treatments for patients can also happen faster. Dr Michelle Longmire
Speaker 1: and her company Medabal have developed technology which allows clinical
Speaker 1: trials to be handled remotely and more efficiently, which is
Speaker 1: a game changer in the fight against disease. I met
Speaker 1: Michelle through Springboard Enterprises, an organization that for twenty years
Speaker 1: has worked to accelerate the growth of women led companies
Speaker 1: through access to essential resources and experts. I spoke with
Speaker 1: Michelle about how medical is shaking up the way we
Speaker 1: develop new medicines and treatments. Please enjoy our conversation. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for joining us today. Thank you, Cham it's
Speaker 1: awesome to be here. Well, we are so excited about
Speaker 1: your company, especially given what we're all going through right
Speaker 1: now in terms of the medical environment. So let's get
Speaker 1: started with learning a little bit about metabal. What is
Speaker 1: it and why did you start it? So medical provides
Speaker 1: a solution and too very challenging problems in the development
Speaker 1: of new medicines. And when you look at how medicines
Speaker 1: are developed, it's essentially a clinical trial process where people
Speaker 1: all over the world are recruited and participate in clinical trials.
Speaker 1: And traditionally this happens through you know, visits to a
Speaker 1: doctor's office and therefore the participation is very much limited
Speaker 1: to the immediate geographic area. As a result, this kind
Speaker 1: of laborious and barely limited in terms of access process
Speaker 1: leads to extremely long timelines. On average, it takes US
Speaker 1: twelve years to develop a new medicine once you begin
Speaker 1: the human based research. It also costs US two point
Speaker 1: six billion dollars. So Medical is bringing a completely new
Speaker 1: approach and solution one where we are making research ubiquitous
Speaker 1: through a universal access through our platform. This really enables
Speaker 1: anyone in the world to participate in iCal research and
Speaker 1: brings the clinical research into that person's own life in
Speaker 1: a way that removes so many of the barriers to
Speaker 1: the traditional process. And I think you know why this
Speaker 1: really matters is it not only shortens the timelines and
Speaker 1: decreases the cost, but it also improves the science itself.
Speaker 1: Research is limited in scope of participation and the traditional approach,
Speaker 1: and by making research ubiquitous, we can get far greater
Speaker 1: data and much broader understanding of the safety and efficacy
Speaker 1: of medications in the global population. So it's an exciting
Speaker 1: problem to solve. And yeah, that's what Medical does. Well,
Speaker 1: that's incredible and and obviously it's pretty game changing in
Speaker 1: terms of accelerating that. So before I take you too
Speaker 1: far down the path, of metabal. I want to take
Speaker 1: you back to your own story the early days. Did
Speaker 1: you know you always wanted to be a scientist? When
Speaker 1: did you realize that you were a scientist? So? I
Speaker 1: grew up in a small town most most New Mexico,
Speaker 1: where pretty much everybody as a scientist. So, um, you know,
Speaker 1: I never I always, I guess saw myself as an
Speaker 1: inventor um And even when I was young. You know,
Speaker 1: both of my parents are scientists. My grandfather was a
Speaker 1: famous physicist who um was you know, one of the
Speaker 1: kind of part of some of the collaborative research in
Speaker 1: the early days of Los Alamos. So I always was
Speaker 1: encouraged and I guess really inspired by how discovery could
Speaker 1: transform the world. And you know, some of my earliest
Speaker 1: memories are doing science fair experiments with my dad, and
Speaker 1: you know, everything was always about deductive reasoning and science
Speaker 1: and that was, um just the way that I saw
Speaker 1: the world. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I was kind of board and
Speaker 1: raised a scientist. Well that's pretty unique. How did you
Speaker 1: end up then transitioning to becoming a CEO. Well, it
Speaker 1: was a pretty long path. You know, I really was
Speaker 1: always somebody who wanted to do research. I saw that
Speaker 1: discovery and science was a way to make a meaning
Speaker 1: not only a meaningful contribution, but I think something that's
Speaker 1: important to me, which is, you know, a contribution that
Speaker 1: is a culmination of your unique talents and capabilities. And
Speaker 1: so when I was looking at, you know, after undergraduate,
Speaker 1: what did I want to do? My parents, you know,
Speaker 1: we're really encouraging to pursue a career in medicine. Honestly,
Speaker 1: it wasn't something I had been really considering. I always
Speaker 1: saw myself just you know, pursuing research as a PhD.
Speaker 1: But what I am so grateful for after this encouragement
Speaker 1: was the journey of becoming a physician and all of
Speaker 1: the things it teaches you about the human experience as
Speaker 1: well as you know, what it provides you in terms
Speaker 1: of your capabilities to really help people directly. So you know,
Speaker 1: through that, then it being at Stanford as a dermatologist
Speaker 1: and where I was combined in both my love of
Speaker 1: research and now taking care of patients as a dermatologist.
Speaker 1: It was through that lens where I started to see
Speaker 1: unique opportunities for discovery and invention that I thought would
Speaker 1: be better addressed through technology and being in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: I was then, you know, really thinking about, okay, do
Speaker 1: I leave the walls of academia and my lab bench
Speaker 1: and my patients and pursue you know, invention and discovery
Speaker 1: through really you know business. And that's how I became
Speaker 1: a CEO. Was making the decision to do that. It
Speaker 1: was a bold jump, but now looking back, I feel
Speaker 1: like I was born to do it this way. So
Speaker 1: so take us through the beginning of metabal How did
Speaker 1: you think about it? How hard was it to get started?
Speaker 1: And what were the early days Like When I was
Speaker 1: a resident physician at Stanford, I started to see a
Speaker 1: really unique opportunity. You know, I was doing clinical research
Speaker 1: in rare disease. So my my research study, you was
Speaker 1: around identical twins with rare disease and trying to understand,
Speaker 1: you know, why with a similar genetic background, one person
Speaker 1: would develop a disease and another person wouldn't. And I
Speaker 1: was really up against so many of the traditional barriers
Speaker 1: of research. How do we connect with patients? How do
Speaker 1: I find these patients? How do I capture data that
Speaker 1: is bigger and more informative than that which we can
Speaker 1: capture in a traditional clinical setting. And I realized that
Speaker 1: basically every researcher in the world was struggling with some
Speaker 1: subset or this entire set of barriers their own research.
Speaker 1: So I started to become inspired to to take a
Speaker 1: leap into the startup world, and I started to attend hackathons.
Speaker 1: I somehow convinced one of my mentors to invest in
Speaker 1: what was the you know, first iteration like the jump
Speaker 1: star of metabal and I was able to you know,
Speaker 1: garner fifty dollars of c funding and hire a couple
Speaker 1: of developers. And I really was doing this in the
Speaker 1: evenings while I was still working in both in research
Speaker 1: and in my job as a physician. And I had
Speaker 1: a really strong set of partners who continued to carry
Speaker 1: that forward. But it got to a point where we
Speaker 1: had built something that had a lot of value and
Speaker 1: I had to make the choice was I going to
Speaker 1: say at Stanford and do my research or was I
Speaker 1: going to really embark on full time pursuit of the
Speaker 1: medical vision. And I encountered um In early just by fate,
Speaker 1: really inspiring individual actually two of them, Um Bob and
Speaker 1: Bob dug In and Macisanagi who were founders are Actually
Speaker 1: they were running a company called Pharmacyclics and it was
Speaker 1: a biotech company, and they understood what the medical vision
Speaker 1: was and they backed us with a three million dollar investment,
Speaker 1: and I made the leap and we started kicking off Metabal,
Speaker 1: and I grew the engineering team, I developed a sales team.
Speaker 1: We really gan to see that there was traction for
Speaker 1: the product um and you know, today what's so exciting
Speaker 1: is our platform serves over a hundred thousand patients. Last year,
Speaker 1: we did fifty clinical trials in over sixty countries and
Speaker 1: in forty languages, and we're showing that this approach can
Speaker 1: really accelerate the development of new medicines by making research
Speaker 1: ubiquitous in terms of the access. We'll be back with
Speaker 1: senecas made by women after this short break. Well, that's
Speaker 1: kind of an incredible amount of success that you had
Speaker 1: early on and that first real break. You know, we
Speaker 1: often look back on that, and I hear that from
Speaker 1: a lot of entrepreneurs sometimes it seems like it was
Speaker 1: faith that intervened. Can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, absolutely, I think is an entrepreneur, anytime
Speaker 1: you're fundraising, you get a thousand nos to every yes.
Speaker 1: And I think this when you look at the data,
Speaker 1: you know, this applies more to outsiders who are not
Speaker 1: you know, women and minorities. I just think it's real,
Speaker 1: it's this is just the reality. But no is a
Speaker 1: common thing for every entrepreneur. So as I was working
Speaker 1: on Metabal, you know, I had the opportunity really to
Speaker 1: meet Bob and Mackie just on a on a whim,
Speaker 1: essentially in a chance encounter in Silicon Valley, like many
Speaker 1: of the amazing people I've met in Silicon Valley, and
Speaker 1: we had the opportunity to talk about, you know, what
Speaker 1: metabal was all about, and they said, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: we have really just are in a unique position to
Speaker 1: start making some investments. They had just sold pharmacyclics to
Speaker 1: Abby and medical was their first technology investment they made
Speaker 1: um after they sold their pharmaceutical company. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean really it was not that I had reached
Speaker 1: out to them. It wasn't investors that we were pursuing
Speaker 1: at that but we happened to meet them and it
Speaker 1: was life changing. They've actually become, you know, some of
Speaker 1: my most valued mentors in addition to being our investors.
Speaker 1: So it seems that the world was really lucky that
Speaker 1: this chance encounter happened, because medical obviously is providing so
Speaker 1: much value, and particularly right now during COVID. How has
Speaker 1: the recent pandemic affected what you're doing and how have
Speaker 1: you responded? The pandemic has definitely changed the way that
Speaker 1: people can conduct research. So prior to the pandemic, our
Speaker 1: approach was an edge case. It was seen as a
Speaker 1: riskier approach because you know, we were using new technologies.
Speaker 1: This is a highly regulated industry and in general people
Speaker 1: were more comfortable and sticking with the status quo. And
Speaker 1: I'm referring to the pharmaceutical companies who are planning the
Speaker 1: strategies around clinical trials now. Once COVID hit, the world
Speaker 1: really changed because access to the clinics was shut down
Speaker 1: and so subtly, you know, really within I remember I
Speaker 1: was traveling in Europe, and I left Europe at the
Speaker 1: kind of peak of the first you know, wave of
Speaker 1: the pandemic in it was early April, and within weeks
Speaker 1: we were contacted by clinical sites in Italy who are
Speaker 1: shut down, asking to use our technology to continue to
Speaker 1: connect with patients and trials that had been under way
Speaker 1: for several years, so we started to quickly establish new
Speaker 1: relationships even in trials that were already under way. And
Speaker 1: fast forward to today, over seventy of all clinical trials
Speaker 1: are now planning or already using these connected technologies. So
Speaker 1: the world has really changed dramatically. I think we provided
Speaker 1: a really you know, an important technology capability in a
Speaker 1: time of need. But fundamentally, I think the world has
Speaker 1: also shifted to see the value of this approach in
Speaker 1: the ability to provide patients access to clinical research. So
Speaker 1: in this moment, though, when this is all happening around us,
Speaker 1: and obviously we see that the benefits of metabal, the
Speaker 1: world feels pretty difficult for a lot of people. And
Speaker 1: as an entrepreneur, I'm sure you've faced many many challenges
Speaker 1: throughout your career. We always see kind of the success,
Speaker 1: the shiny success, but you know, there's obviously so much
Speaker 1: that goes into what you do. You know, what is
Speaker 1: it that gives you strength during these difficult times? The
Speaker 1: last year has been challenging for everyone. Is you know,
Speaker 1: suddenly our lives changed so dramatically, and you know, the
Speaker 1: people that we love spending time with become harder to see.
Speaker 1: Just as an example, you know, I haven't spent nearly
Speaker 1: as much time with my parents as I usually do.
Speaker 1: And you think, when you look worldwide at the prevalence
Speaker 1: of depression and social isolation, clearly the last year has
Speaker 1: been extremely challenging. What gives me strength during these times?
Speaker 1: Are you know, some of the basic things like getting
Speaker 1: outside and exercising and um, making sure that I have
Speaker 1: a routine on a daily basis that is giving me
Speaker 1: that makes me feel a sense of wellness and health overall,
Speaker 1: is something that just gives you, I think, more resilience
Speaker 1: as a person, but I think it, you know, in
Speaker 1: a more macroscopic sense. What what gives me strength is
Speaker 1: the way that I see in this industry of life sciences,
Speaker 1: the spirit of collaboration and really this kind of stop
Speaker 1: at nothing attitude around developing a way out of COVID
Speaker 1: through the vaccines and therapies. And and I think humans,
Speaker 1: as you know, as a human race, when is the
Speaker 1: last time we've been tested like this collectively? I think
Speaker 1: often challenges are posed to much smaller subsets of humanity.
Speaker 1: But when you look at really what the world has
Speaker 1: accomplished in the last year, it's just profound. The results
Speaker 1: are incredible. We've never developed a therapy or a vaccine
Speaker 1: in the timelines that we've developed the COVID vaccine sans,
Speaker 1: and I think it says a lot about what's possible.
Speaker 1: You know, It's kind of like running the four minute mile.
Speaker 1: Once someone does it somewhere in the world, suddenly you
Speaker 1: find that humans all over the world and that caliber
Speaker 1: can can now do that. So I think that we've
Speaker 1: proven we can develop therapies faster. I think we can
Speaker 1: apply warp speed to every disease area in to some degree.
Speaker 1: And I think what we'll see is that the next
Speaker 1: five to ten years in drug development and ultimately treatments
Speaker 1: for human suffering will uh be moving much faster, and
Speaker 1: we will be able to treat diseases better and we'll
Speaker 1: be able to reduce human suffering globally as a result
Speaker 1: of some of the proof points that we can take
Speaker 1: away from the last year in terms of timelines and
Speaker 1: really showing what's possible. You've been recognized by and have
Speaker 1: worked with Springboard Enterprises. How has that relationship been important
Speaker 1: to you? And medical Springboard is is a unique group
Speaker 1: to be a part of. I think, you know, fundamentally,
Speaker 1: you know I think of Amy and Kay and the
Speaker 1: entire network of women that I've had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: get to know, and this is just an authentic team
Speaker 1: who are behind you at all points in time, good
Speaker 1: or bad. You know. I think being a CEO of
Speaker 1: a company, you find that when things are going well,
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of allegiances, but it's when the
Speaker 1: times are challenging that that number is fewer. And Springboard
Speaker 1: is just really the group of people who are behind
Speaker 1: you in the good times and in the bad times.
Speaker 1: And I think this is incredibly valuable. Springboard is not
Speaker 1: an investor. They do not hold equity in our company.
Speaker 1: They're really in this to support women entrepreneurs, and you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's just a support system that helps you stay
Speaker 1: in the game, helps gives you strength when you're wondering,
Speaker 1: you know, how do I really get through this? And
Speaker 1: you're looking for you know, that that support, in that
Speaker 1: kind of ray of hope. So I think that Springboard
Speaker 1: is extremely unique in the authenticity of the mission and
Speaker 1: the support that they provide for women entrepreneurs. And what
Speaker 1: have you learned in your journey that you wish someone
Speaker 1: would have shared with you when you were first starting out.
Speaker 1: I think starting your own company is just an incredible
Speaker 1: source of learning and also personal freedom. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that I've learned is that there's nothing that's
Speaker 1: going to make you ready to do it other than
Speaker 1: just going for it and jumping in and you know,
Speaker 1: moving that idea forward, moving the company forward, really what
Speaker 1: stands out to me. Where we are today, I would
Speaker 1: have never even guessed that we would get here. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, all along, I knew that I
Speaker 1: would find what it would take to stay in the
Speaker 1: game and drive the vision forward. So I guess you know.
Speaker 1: My fundamental advice is if there's something that you're passionate
Speaker 1: about and you are thinking about starting your own company,
Speaker 1: go for it. And I think that you figure it
Speaker 1: out day by day. It's not that you start with
Speaker 1: a line a straight line to the successful, you know future,
Speaker 1: But every day you sort it out and you figure
Speaker 1: it out, and you have resilience and you lean on
Speaker 1: your network and your support systems, but you just stay
Speaker 1: in the game, and before you know it, you will
Speaker 1: have made more progress than you could have even originally imagined. Michelle,
Speaker 1: it's been great having you on the show. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: For joining us. Thank you so much, Kim, I just
Speaker 1: have I really enjoyed the conversation and having the opportunity
Speaker 1: to share my journey as a woman entrepreneur. I'd like
Speaker 1: to thank Michelle for sharing her incredible story about how
Speaker 1: she's created success with Metabal. Here are three points I
Speaker 1: took from the conversation. First, the path to entrepreneurship is
Speaker 1: not always a straight line. Michelle thought her career would
Speaker 1: be as a physician and researcher, which she did do
Speaker 1: for a time and love. But when she saw that
Speaker 1: she could innovate even better through technology, she left the
Speaker 1: comfort of the lab and took the bold leap. Second,
Speaker 1: persistence is a key ingredient to success, as Michelle says
Speaker 1: as an entrepreneur, if you'll get a thousand knows for
Speaker 1: every yes, and another key trait is being open to opportunity.
Speaker 1: You never know where that next door will open. With
Speaker 1: a clear vision for Metabal, Michelle was able to turn
Speaker 1: a chance encounter with two potential investors into a successful
Speaker 1: business relationship. Finally, and on a related note, being prepared
Speaker 1: and sticking to your vision is key. You never know
Speaker 1: when or how quickly the world can change. The pandemic
Speaker 1: close clinics around the world and made medicals remote technology
Speaker 1: increasingly desirable. Michelle had stuck to her vision and she
Speaker 1: was ready to step forward with her product in that
Speaker 1: critical moment. Made by Women is brought to you by
Speaker 1: the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio, with
Speaker 1: support from founding partner P ANDNG