Chapter 1: What leadership philosophy does Stacy Lindborg emphasize?
What resonates really deeply with me, and it's been a central part of how I've led across my entire career, is more servant leadership. That really is ultimately ground and humility.
That's the voice of Stacey Lindborg, CEO of Immunon, headquartered in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Listen in to hear insights from Amy about leadership in biopharma and how Immunon is working to develop medicines that harness the building blocks of life to work in harmony with the body's immune system. I'm John Simboli. You're listening to BioBoss. Welcome to BioBoss, Stacey.
Thank you. It's a delight to be here.
What led you to your role as CEO at Immunon?
I really step back and I think about where the journey began. It really started with a phenomenal company. So Eli Lilly and Company. I was there for almost half my career. And I think that where you start and who you're exposed to is really can set you off on a different course. And I was given the opportunity very early in my career.
And I think as you leave great companies, you also see how different they are. So Lilly is, I think, phenomenal in thinking about people and development and really setting perhaps expectations long beyond you can expect, especially earlier in your career.
And they gave me just a series of opportunities that taught me that I had formal training, I had industry knowledge that I was accumulating, and I had the ability to really think at a macro level, as well as really getting to know drug development. And I really think that's what started it.
I was very early given an opportunity to step into more of a leadership capacity for a blockbuster that was a product that took Uh, the lead revenue driving for Lilly after Prozac went off patent and was asked to take over the schizophrenia brand for Zyprexa. This is, you know, a product that reached, I think 4.7 billion in peak sales and we were languishing in schizophrenia sales.
So as a young PhD, I found myself with marketing staff, really talented commercial guys reporting to me, the manufacturing. capacity and then R&D and developing new indications. And I think it really taught me how much I loved that intersection between business and science.
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Chapter 2: What experiences shaped Stacy's career in biopharma?
When I joined my previous company, Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics, You know, I was getting exposed to different modalities. We had an autologous cell therapy. This was a microcap company. It was a very different understanding of, you know, really our existence and how we continue to advance an amazing product.
I went there as head of global clinical development and then was asked to step in as, as co-CEO in advance to that. And I, I think it really gave me familiarity with the breadth of stakeholders. that one needs to balance and communicate with. And as you're thinking about as a CEO, and it really then prepared me when I was asked to consider my current role.
So it was, it was really a natural evolution and it felt like any big problem. If you can break it down into what's needed, what do I bring as a strength? What am I going to not know? We'll always have things we don't know. And how am I going to seek advice and get input? And it then feels like it's a doable assignment, which we all want to succeed and add value.
And I definitely felt prepared for it.
As you assumed the leadership role in your previous company and then in your current one, what kinds of things matched how you thought it might be to be the CEO? What things were different?
In my last role, I was sharing a job. I was working with a phenomenal partner with a very... established business sphere or expertise, a broad network, a lot of things that really made us very complementary.
And I think even now at Immunon, I have a partner, an executive director who was CEO for 13 years and a very different and complementary set of experiences, a very trusted relationship both of them have been. So I think I came in and I mean, I even think about my own leadership, style.
What resonates really deeply with me, and it's been a central part of how I've led across my entire career is more servant leadership. And I think, you know, that really is ultimately ground and humility.
And I think that when we put ourselves in too big of a place, and we're fearful then of finding out something we don't know, versus just appreciating that we all are going to bring things that, you know, will shine compared to other people, but then We all have to learn.
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Chapter 3: How does Stacy define her transition to CEO at Immunon?
And in fact, we know that both healthy cells and cancer cells alike uptake the product and then start producing IL-12, interferon gamma, TGF alpha, this powerful change to the microtumor environment. It's an amazing process, that's the goal of the therapy. We can actually measure through ascites, which is the fluid in the peritoneal cavity.
We can take it out and we can actually see these many fold increases that the product is doing what we want. We see downstream effects. And then when we get to clinical data, we can see that women, the median is substantially improved. So we're seeing really what the holy grail is with ovarian cancer that we're able to, for the first time, extend overall survival.
A combination chemotherapy is the current standard of care. So more women are getting it before surgery. That used to be some were treated before surgery, some were treated surgery and then, and then chemo. Really what we're seeing now is that if women can tolerate and can accept it, almost everybody is starting to not move to neoadjuvant chemo, which allows the tumors to shrink.
then you can surgically remove more. So you're getting more of the cancer and then they continue with chemotherapy. So that's the standard of care. If we think about, I'll just start with immunotherapies because that's what our product is. So really the payload and what we're really triggering the immune system to start producing is IL-12. It's a very important cytokine. There have been
quite a few attempts at delivering IL-12. And I think a lot of it comes back to how is it being delivered? So a lot of the early attempts, and this even goes back to when immunotherapies were first being discovered, IL-12 was at the heart of the very exciting and very productive evolution for cancer treatments that have occurred with many, many tumors.
But with IL-12 in particular, many of the early attempts were actually administering recombinant 12 directly into the blood IV. And what you would see is these massive spikes. Actually, there's not a very long half-life. There were very strong toxic effects. There were even people that died in clinical trials.
So IL-12, while a very exciting, promising arena, ended up being very impossible to dose at a high F-level and do so safely. And what we discovered was a way to bring it directly into where the tumors are, to focus, that's exactly where you want to have the treatment, to allow cells to be manufacturing then this rather than delivering IL-12.
We're not actually administering IL-12, we're actually delivering a DNA plasmid that is allowing the body to produce it. It keeps it contained, we're able to show that we don't see systemic distribution, therefore we got around the safety concern.
And I believe that because we're actually administering it interperitoneally, it actually is exactly where it needs to be and therefore the survival benefits that we see. So I think the delivery, the mechanism of how to get it into the nucleus of the cell, not have degradation of the product needed. There's a lot of technical things you had to overcome.
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