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Matthew Gline: CEO of Roivant Sciences
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"I think I've always found motivation from being able to take a highly technical topic and dig in. I'm never the person that knows most about the topic. But I strive to be like the person who knows third or fourth most about whatever topic is going."
– Mathew Gline: CEO of Roivant Sciences
John Simboli
Today I'm speaking with Matt Gline, CEO of Roivant Sciences, headquartered in Basel, with offices in New York. Welcome to BioBoss, Matt.
Matt Gline
Thanks for having me.
John Simboli
What led you to your role as CEO at Roivant?
Matt Gline
I studied physics, not biology or medicine, originally. And I did my first career as a quant in the finance industry, as many physicists do. And so, I worked at some large financial institutions. Then I started a financial technology company, which got subsumed into a big bank. I had caught the entrepreneurial bug at that point and, actually, I knew Vivek, who was our founder, from college; we'd known each other at Harvard. And he suggested that coming to Roivant would be an interesting way to spend the next step in my career. And so, I joined about five and a half years ago, and I spent most of that time, actually, as our CFO. But starting a couple of years ago, Vivek and I were sort of running the business together. And as of earlier this year, I formally took on the CEO role.
John Simboli
How did you decide you wanted to lead a biopharma company?
Matt Gline
For me, personally, a lot of it was about wanting to build something, to be a part of a team that was building the houses we lived in, and I wanted that sense of accountability and that sense of being a part of something. And I joined Roivant, it was five and a half years ago, it was early in the company's life, there were maybe 50 or 60 people across the whole organization and now we're over 800. So, I really wanted that hands-on sense of construction, first and foremost. And it's been interesting, as I've gone through it, I think an unanticipated, but ultimately, really rewarding piece of it has been to work on therapies and products that I sort of understand the reach of. I have family members with affected conditions; I myself have a condition that's one of our programs. And so, I think that's been a really valuable personal piece for me to add to the sense of wanting to be part of building something.
John Simboli
When you were making this transition, did it occur to you, did you think at all about, maybe I'll go have a big pharma company that has lots of already built resources, and I'll develop my ideas there versus going to a place that is in the process of building?
Matt Gline
I can honestly say it never occurred to me. The appeal for me was the hands-on construction of something early. And frankly, initially, it wasn't obvious to me that it had to be within biotech. I had been thinking about other ways in which I could have that experience and this has been a really happy coincidence in that sense.
John Simboli
When you were giving this some thought and considering different places you might want to go as your next step, did you sift through a lot of different opportunities? Or was it more like this one presented itself, and it was clear that this was the place you wanted to develop?
Matt Gline
It has always been helpful to me to find people interesting and to like spending time with my friends and my peers and colleagues, former colleagues, and think about what they're up to. And so what, since I'm always, sort of, in touch with people who are up to interesting things, so I talked to a lot of people who were doing a lot of interesting things, but that felt more just like organically hanging out with people that I knew and liked. And then once Vivek approached me with this idea, it moved very quickly and became focused in a way that very few of those other things had become focused.
John Simboli
I've noticed in this last year or so have conversations with founders and CEOs during this COVID year, I found an interesting thing, a couple of times, where a person will say to me, "When I used to go into the office, I'd be there and I would work such long hours, I would come back and my family pictured me doing really interesting stuff. And now that they see that I'm in the office right next door to where my wife is, my partner or my kids, they'll come to me and say, Dad, is that all you do, you're just on the phone all day?" So, in that aspect, when people say what do you do as a CEO, how do you answer that?
Matt Gline
Yeah, I'm on the phone all day? And this was true as a CFO, as well, and I think it's just sort of something that happens naturally as you progress through your career, is at some point, you learn the lesson that you can't always be both an individual contributor and a manager. And it's about finding that balance between just who I am and, frankly, who Roivant is as a company. I want to be really detail-oriented, I want to be in the weeds, I want to be in the Excel spreadsheet, I want to understand the biology or the physics or the paper or the software or whatever it is. But at the same time, we're an organization of 800 people, and we have a lot of things going on at once. And so, a lot of my job is, I'd say the internal part of my job, is coordinating, is working with people across the organization and helping to think through the things they're doing and making sure they're talking to each other in the right ways. And ultimately when there are difficult decisions to make being close to those decisions. But then the external part of my job is telling our story. And so, I spend a lot of my time—this is a pretty different forum than most—but I spend a lot of my time talking about who Roivant is with potential partners or investors or things like that. You're really saying the same thing over and over and over again. My fiancé and people who hear me often, they're able to recite parts of the Roivant story, just sort of by osmosis
John Simboli
That's got to be one of the hardest things, I would think, to be fresh every time, realizing that you've said something very similar the other time, but knowing for that other person, it's the first time to hear it.
Matt Gline
It helps to really like people and talking to people.
John Simboli
What have you learned about your management style? What works for you what makes it you?
Matt Gline
I've always been a pretty detail-oriented person in terms of technical things. I grew up in the mid to late 90s, thinking I was going to work in computers because the dot-com thing was happening. And I spent a lot of time studying that world. And then I got to college and got derailed, quickly, by my love for physics and spent a lot of time in that world. So, I've always sort of been around technical things. I think I've always found motivation from being able to take a highly technical topic and dig in. I'm never the person that knows most about the topic. But I strive to be like the person who knows third or fourth most about whatever topic is going. So, in a room, I'm always sort of conversing on whatever the subject is, and, frankly, I find that exciting. One of my favorite parts of my job is there's something new—it's a legal topic related to a deal that we're doing, or it's really understanding the biology of a new mechanism or a new disease, or it's understanding the computational physics capabilities in our platform. where I start out low on the learning curve in a roomful of people who are saying things I don't understand. For me, it's super motivational. So I feel like that's obviously a part of my so-called "managerial style." I'd like to think it's something that people who work with me respect in the sense that they appreciate that I get in the weeds with them when I'm able to sort of speak to their work in detail. I suspect it can get frustrating in two ways. One is, you know, sometimes I'm just saying gibberish, and I feel like I'm on point but they're like, no, you're talking about, but that's obviously a piece of it. And I feel like the other piece is sometimes when you work in finance, and you go through that training process, you have this knack for—I can take a really big, complicated Excel spreadsheet and find the one thing wrong with it in about 30 seconds. And I feel like that can drive people crazy, sometimes. But I feel like my detail-oriented nature is an important part of who I am.
John Simboli
Matt, do you remember when you're eight or nine or 10, whatever is the right age, what you thought, probably what you thought your parents thought, you should be when you grew up? Did you have an image of yourself? Like, that's what I'm going to do?
Matt Gline
I would say my first ambition was train conductor, which bears no resemblance to what — it bears almost no resemblance to what I do now. You know, I'm focusing my time a lot on keeping trains on rails, so in that sense, maybe there's some overlap, but obviously, a little bit more distant. And then I mentioned, I spent some time through my childhood up until college, I really thought I was going to be a computer engineer, I thought, whatever, Steve Case from AOL, or something like that. I thought I was going to be like a tech entrepreneur or an engineer. And then I got to college and as it turns out, there's just all of these interesting things in the world that you don't see in high school. And I quickly fell in love with physics. And I spent a period thinking I was going to be a theoretical or an experimental physicist. But if I'm honest, I wasn't smart enough to be a theorist. And I wasn't nearly manually dexterous enough to be an experimentalist. And that's when I kind of landed in finance. And even in finance, I guess, going back to the detail-oriented piece, I loved the fact that those problems are all socially complex, interesting problems. But it's made working in biotech all the more satisfying because you get to work on complicated problems that the kind of reach that biotech problems have.
John Simboli
Can you recall a moment or maybe a couple of moments when you were in college, and you had that realization that it was the thing that was grabbing hold of you that you were falling in love with was physics? What was it about that? What was that realization that this is a thing that really intrigues me?
Matt Gline
There was a social element to it. I just found myself drawn to a lot of the other people in the physics department. There was a professor, Howard Georgi, who was an eminent physicist at Harvard who taught an undergraduate class that had a real social bonding element to it. And he made it sort of tangible. And I think this does affect the way that I think about all kinds of problems in the world. I don't know how much time you spent thinking about physics, but a huge amount of physics comes down to symmetry, this idea that like that, actually, the world behaves kind of as you would expect it to behave. People talk about, you squeeze on a balloon, it pops out some other place. If you can understand the system as a whole, that a push always comes with a pull and a pull always comes with a push. And I feel like that idea is just something, mathematically, that drew me in and I really liked the cleanliness of the way physicists approach that problem. I think it has been current in everything I've done since to think about those kinds of symmetries, whether it's in a business transaction or understanding a biological system or an organizational problem?
John Simboli
What do you say when people ask, who is Roivant?
Matt Gline
I would say we are a next-generation biopharma company. And we aspire to have the scale of big pharma, so to grow to be the size of a Pfizer or Merck or an AbbVie, but with a business model that draws from elements of the finance world, obviously, but also technology of a sort that are deployed at Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Tesla. So, I think, sort of a next-generation big pharma company, powered by a more modern toolset,
John Simboli
What makes Roivant different from other biopharma companies?
Matt Gline
So, I think there are two main components of it. I think the first component is an approach to talent. And probably this is the thing that is most visibly different about Roivant, from the outside. Most pharma companies, not all, but most pharma companies are effectively structured to be sort of monolithic entities. We are built so that we can scale without ever truly getting big. We're built as a family of small companies, we call them vants, they're sort of operating units, each one with a leadership team that is truly designed to feel independent, to be the masters of their own enterprise, the leaders of their own enterprise. And with all of the accountability that comes from being a CEO and a C-level team, versus if you run a division at a big pharma company or an operating unit of a biotech company or something. I think that sort of talent approach flows through a lot of what we do in terms of the way we think about accountability, the way we think about recruiting people from all different places, and the way we think about empowering people to run the projects they're interested in. And I think that has allowed us to recruit some really interesting and talented people to be leaders of vants who might not be willing to come in and run projects if they didn't have that kind of autonomy. So I think that is something that is visibly different. And it leads to an unusual presentation from the outside, there are all these companies running around whose last names end in "vant," sort of a family, but big families. So that's one way in which we're different.
Matt Gline
The other way in which we're different is this investment in technology that I mentioned. We were born with a view that computational tools are underutilized in this business and that there's an enormous opportunity to take the best generation of what exists in the world right now and apply it to problems in biotech. And that ranges from problems that sound really complicated, like molecular dynamics, like what Woody Sherman in Silicon Therapeutics and his team does, to problems that sound more operationally complicated, but maybe less technically complicated. We have a company called Lokavant that has developed a clinical trial risk monitoring suite. Clinical trials are these incredibly, operationally complicated things where you think of them as maybe science experiments, but, actually, in the end, you've got hundreds of doctor's offices with 1000s of patients, and you're shipping 10s of 1000s of bottles of medication with only barcodes and no other labels. And your job is to get the right patient into the right office on the right day to take medicine from the right bottle with the right barcode. It's a very operational problem. And what Lokavant does is it deploys all kinds of really interesting technology towards giving us real-time information and risk evaluation of the clinical trial sites and the patients enrolling in the trial, which gets to the quality of the data, which gets to the speed of execution of the trial. And so that's an example of a different kind of technology that's also core to what we do. So those are the things that I think really sort of separate us from our peers.
John Simboli
When you describe the Roivant story the way you have been with me, and a certain number of people are going to understand it; a certain number of people are going to misunderstand it, are there some patterns about things that they might misunderstand that you can tell me about it, then describe how you get them back on a track about what the company is really about?
Matt Gline
People often mistake us for an investing institution. They think of us as a private equity firm or some kind of investing firm. And some of our management team come from a finance background. Obviously, many do not; many come from within the industry. But I think certain aspects of our model, that sort of "vant" model kind of rhymes with certain things that happen in the asset management or private equity world and so people sometimes assume that that's what we're trying to do. And I think the answer there is simple, which is just that's not us. We're not building to sell; we're building to develop these medicines and deliver them to patients all the way through. And we're just not set up as an investment company in any way. We should measure ourselves based on patient impact, which ultimately winds up creating value for all of our stakeholders. But we're not investing institution. So, I think that's a pretty common perception question that we have to work through.
Matt Gline
And then I think the other goes back to our early history. We, like all startup companies, got our start focusing on the problems that were available to us. You don't get to choose what you work on when you first start; you work on the things that you do. Some of our early programs were taken off what I would call the discard piles of pharma companies, which is not to say anything about those medicines, that's bad; those are still incredibly important medicines. Two of them have been approved now and are treating patients with significant unmet medical need. But I think there was a perception that we were sort of trawling for seconds, as it were. We never really believed that characterization, in the sense that it wasn't how we thought of the drugs that we were developing. But also, frankly, as we got better and better at what we do, as we got better at developing medicines, as we got better at thinking creatively about development strategy and as we just proved ourselves, as we successfully ran large phase three studies and even unsuccessfully ran large phase three studies. I think those things get you credibility from execution perspective, that got us access to medicines that were really important to the academics that developed them or were at the center and heart of a biotech company's pipeline. And I think that's changed the profile, the kinds of drugs that we have been developing in some ways. And I feel like the world has been slow to come around to that change. And so that's also something that, sometimes it just takes some education from our perspective to help people understand the kinds of things we work on now, versus the kinds of things that we were able to work on when we first got started as a company.
John Simboli
What kind of partners are a good fit with Roivant?
Matt Gline
Some of our earliest partners viewed us in more of a transactional context; they had a drug that they weren't developing anymore and we persuaded them to sell it to us. And that was about it. And I think as we got better and more creative—and this is something that we strove for even our earliest days—this is not a recent development. But as we got better and more creative around development strategy, and as we proved our execution capabilities, I think, increasingly, people viewed us as a first-class partner who could help solve development problems. We have academic partners at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, this investigator, Punam Malik, with a sickle cell disease gene therapy, or we have a collaboration with the University of Michigan, with Shaomeng Wang, in the field of targeted protein degraders. What I think they both wanted was to see medicines that they had poured their heart and career into successfully developed and made available to patients, and done with a high quality of execution, and most importantly, fast and with good throughput. And I think, using all of the tools that we've built and thinking about our business model, I think those partners increasingly view us as differentially capable of doing that for them.
John Simboli
What kinds of people thrive at Roivant?
Matt Gline
I think intellectual curiosity is a really important thing for a place like Roivant. I mentioned that our goal is to scale without getting big and I think part of that is a lot of individual accountability. And so I think you want people who want that accountability, who want to dig in on problems and really explore the possible and not to be confined by a narrow statement or construct or swim lane or whatever, but to think of their job is to find solutions to "lowercase p problem" instead of a specific "uppercase P problem." right? Like instead of a textbook, here's a question, answer. They will construe their work in a broader way. I think that's a really important property. I think we pride ourselves in the breadth of our recruitment. It's interesting, for example, we have a campus recruiting program and recruit a class of analysts every year. And we go to all kinds of universities, but, you know, a number of top universities—Harvard, MIT, Stanford, other places too, but it's interesting that we rarely in that program run up against other biotech or biopharma companies. It's just not the kind of place that most of those companies recruit from. We run up against financial institutions, we run up against Google and Microsoft and Airbnb. We run up against med school recruiting and law school recruiting and things of that sort. But most biopharma recruits from either other biopharma or from other kinds of programs, and I think one of the things that been a source of differentiation for us is pulling people in from backgrounds that are less common to biopharma, and then pairing them with people who have done it, who've been at biopharma companies and have developed medicine successfully. And I think that combination has actually been really powerful for us in being able to come up with new ideas.
John Simboli
Matt, what's new at Roivant?
Matt Gline
It's been a really busy couple of years for us. So, what we've always been good at since the beginning of the company, where we focused a lot of our time on is what I call target and pathway identifications. So, finding interesting biological targets or biological pathways and understandings where there were holes in the map. And we do this with a combination of M.D. Ph.D. investor types and translational and development scientists, and then with a team of data scientists and machine learning experts. And we formed these pods with those different phenotypes. And we go and we hunt the map of diseases and drugs and targets and pathways and look for blind spots—a target that's on a pathway where target one on the pathway and target three on the pathway have been really heavily studied but target two was maybe a little bit less so. And what we've always done historically with that is we've boiled the ocean and we found the programs in the wild, at academic institutions, biotech companies, etc. that met the thesis that we had developed. And we'd go, and we'd acquire that program and build a "vant" and we were off to the races. And what we found over time, is that our conviction in this target identification got better and better. And in that process, we started to have targets where we would boil the ocean and nothing would rise to the top, there was just no one else who had discovered a drug that met exactly that thesis. And it's probably the biggest area of investment that we've made over the past couple of years, is we still do everything we've always done and we still, when something does rise, we go when we try and bring it in and build a "vant" around it. But now we are also working on an engine to discover our own drugs so that when we come up with a target or an idea that is not something that an existing academic institution or biotech company or pharma company has developed, we can still go out and design a novel chemistry against it. And so that's the biggest evolution or addition for us. And I can go into much more detail about how that engine works, but we wanted to focus on an area where we knew we could make a difference. And so, we focused on taking some of those same machine learning experts and deploying them in computational chemistry to design new molecules. We settled further on an area called targeted protein degradation as a particular area of interest for us. We built capabilities by an academic collaboration with the University of Michigan and an acquisition around digital chemistry, wet lab capabilities, basic chemistry in that area. And then finally, as we got deeper into it, we realized we wanted molecular dynamics capabilities to supplement the machine learning toolkit, and that's where our acquisition of Silicon Therapeutics came in. And now I feel like we've got a totally unique engine for that purpose.
John Simboli
In what way will the acquisition of Silicon Therapeutics and expansion into computational drug discovery, more broadly, change the company? Change Roivant?
Matt Gline
So I think it's part of this evolution that I was just talking through. It's an additional capability for us in adding to the scope of medicines that we can ultimately develop. And I think one of the things that's unique about us is, we've had this target and opportunity identification process for a long time. And I think we are proud of our ability to identify new opportunities to go after. And then we were born as a clinical drug development company, so we've always done that; we've run nine, phase three studies, eight of which have been successful. These are large multinational studies with 1000s of patients and big diseases. We know how to do that, obviously, we learn new things about it every time but we have an understanding for what that looks like. And so I think we get a relatively unique place in the drug discovery landscape, in that many companies that are born into drug discovery, then need to figure out development. And frankly, there are companies that build great engines for drug discovery that are sort of in want of a good problem to solve. And because we started out figuring out what problems we wanted to solve and learning how to develop drugs in the clinic, we now get to situate this engine in the middle. So, I think it's a really nice fit from a capability perspective to have it in. I think Silicon Therapeutics, in particular, it's the largest acquisition we've ever made. It's got a large team of people, it's a new site in Boston, it's some new phenotypes. It's a fresh cultural infusion that I think is really exciting for the company. It changes the shape of the Roivant team at the center in various directions that I think are really good for us. So, I think it will also impact the day-to-day feel of the business. I like opening up in Boston and having access to that community as a place to recruit. So, I think there'll be a lot of other similar incidental changes, but from a strategic perspective, it's really what I said.
John Simboli
How does the Roivant pipeline express your vision for the company?
Matt Gline
First of all, it's an incredibly diverse, especially in the developing stage pipeline, just an incredibly diverse pipeline. I won't go into all the details about them, but take three assets from the top of our pipeline, some of our most advanced programs—We have a topical therapy for psoriasis called Tapinarof, where we've run phase three studies, have gotten really exciting phase three data and really exciting long term extension data. It's a topical formulation of a small molecule. We have, via Immunovant, which is a publicly-traded company, but a 57% owned company by us, is an antibody against the neonatal FC receptor, which is an injectable biologic therapy against severe immunological disorders. And then we have, I mentioned earlier, that we have this gene therapy for sickle cell disease via partnerships in Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which is a gene therapy. And then our discovery pipeline is mostly comprised of small molecule-targeting protein degraders. So it's an incredibly diverse pipeline, both in terms of modality and in terms of therapeutic area. And I think that's a reflection of our strategy, which is not to have an antecedent commitment to a specific modality or therapeutic area. So I think that's one way in which it's a reflection of who we are. And then I think it's also clear from looking at those medicines that they are either unique approaches to diseases that are important—so I'm a psoriasis patient—our therapy for psoriasis is a topical agent. I don't know how familiar you are with the treatment of psoriasis, but 85% of prescriptions written for psoriasis are topical medicines; they're creams or ointments or whatever, it's the only kind of medicine I've ever been on as a psoriasis patient. An enormous fraction of the innovation and treatment of psoriasis over the past two decades, has gone into what I'll call really big guns: systemic biologic therapies that are systemically immunosuppressive, have all kinds of side effects, are very effective at treating psoriasis. But there's been almost no new innovation in novel topical therapies that address some of the gaps in the existing topical corticosteroids and things like that. So, I think that's an example of a therapy where there's the psoriasis treatment landscape had a hole and we saw a unique opportunity to get in there and do something innovative to fix it, or to plug that gap. And then you think about things like the gene therapy for sickle cell disease, where it's a really exciting thing for a human person to be able to say, but the table stakes for developing genetic medicine for sickle cell disease right now is clinically curative efficacy, You look at Bluebird's program, or the CRISPR-Vertex program in gene editing, you know, these programs are clinical cures for sickle cell disease. And where we got involved with this investigator, Punam Malik at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, saw a problem with those other medicines, which is that they required this very high intensity busulfan-based myeloablative conditioning that required a multi-month hospital stay. And she realized that, just for example, the sickle cell population in places like India and Africa is enormous. And it's not obvious that in all those regions, the possibility of a multi-month cleanroom ICU stay is going to be on the table. So, she developed a therapy that, by virtue of being more potent, didn't require that kind of myeloablative conditioning, and will allow for sickle cell patients to be treated in a way that we believe and hope will be curatively effective, with significantly reduced-intensity conditioning is another example. It's an important disease, where we saw a unique angle or unique approach that we thought we could differentially make an impact.
John Simboli
Do you still find time at this stage of your work to think, to take that deep breath, and think what good can I, what good can Roivant do for the world if we're successful with some of the ideas we're pursuing? As opposed to just not having the time for that right now, just having to focus 100% on making it work.
Matt Gline
One of the great things about the biopharma industry is the extent to which those things are overlapping. And I think we have to spend an enormous amount of our time thinking about how to deliver patient impact and have it delivered quickly and how to deliver a differentially from a shareholder value perspective. The way you create shareholder value in biopharma is delivering value to patients. And so, we have to think about our impact from that perspective. We also have given thought to beyond the commercial, what that looks like. And we have this social ventures philanthropic organization that we have launched that is, actually, maybe it's a great example, one of the main projects of that enterprise right now is thinking three steps forward on the sickle cell program, how we take this medicine, which, for a variety of reasons will be first available in the United States, and how we start thinking about the steps that would be required to make them available in other parts of the world. And I think that's absolutely something that we also dedicate time to thinking about.
John Simboli
Why did you and Roivant choose to locate in Basel and have offices in New York City?
Matt Gline
We have offices in a couple of places, I'd say our biggest offices are in New York City and Basel right now. First of all, a number of us were based in New York City in our prior careers and actually also, it's a pretty differentially interesting place to be based as a biopharma company. There's definitely a rich pharma industry presence in this area, Pfizer is a New York City-based company. There are many large pharma companies in New Jersey. There's not as much of a biotech ecosystem, as in Boston or in the Bay Area yet, but there's some and there's a growing tech ecosystem. So, there's a lot of good engineering talent in the New York area, including folks like myself, who I would describe as refugees from the finance industry. And there's a bunch of finance industry, people and other industries, media and academia and things of that sort. It's an interesting sort of talent melting pot in New York. And Basel just has a rich history of pharma, it would be a company town if there weren't both Roche and Novartis there. And there's a really interesting group of biopharma experts in Basel, there is a growing biotech community in Basel, and Europe is an under-appreciated landscape for the discovery and development of new medicines. And I feel like having a physical presence there is helpful in unlocking some of that value as well.
John Simboli
What organizations do you find can be useful to gain information, to share information across geographic boundaries, across disciplines?
Matt Gline
The pandemic has been interesting in that regard. On the one hand, it's hard, right? Like it used to be you'd go to the JPMorgan conference in California, or the Jeffrey's conference in London, and these investing conferences actually just became foci for the industry to gather in one place. And, you know, we would go to those conferences, and we would have huge groups of people who were spending zero time with investors, and 100% of the time, you know, all of the companies gather because they have to be there to talk to the investors, and then they all can talk to each other, because they're all there. There's a certain amount of organic interaction that takes place at those things but it's hard to replicate in the pandemic era, in the sense that there's no lobby of the Hilton in 2021, it just didn't exist. And so, you don't run into random people that you haven't seen in a couple of years. And that version of an idea exchange doesn't happen. But I participated in a call a little while ago with a bio ventures association focused on Italy. And I was talking to this group of Italian biotech entrepreneurs. And there's no way in 2019, or hopefully in 2022, that someone sitting in New York City gets invited to the monthly meeting of the Italian bioventures association, it just doesn't happen. They meet in a bar in Milan, and they have their meeting that way, we're not a part of it. So, I do think there's a version of the global—everyone in the pandemic is in the same situation sitting at home doing this. And so you have the opportunity to participate in localized groups that otherwise might not be available. So that's been a positive change. More generally, I would say, there are certain events, the bio conferences, the JPMorgan conferences, and some of the other investor conferences, that just become really good opportunities for everyone to get together. And then the other big piece of it is, and this is less me personally, and more people at the company, I think biopharma is a very academically and scientifically rich industry. And a huge amount of that idea sharing takes place at the important scientific conferences, at ASH, and things of that sort. It's not exactly an association or organization, but I think it's a really good thing to be a part of.
John Simboli
What have you learned from your experiences with late-stage clinical successes and failures?
Matt Gline
First of all, we've had our share both. As I mentioned before, we've been very fortunate, we've run nine phase three studies, and eight of them have been successful. We learned a lot from the failure, we learned a lot from the successes too. It's a boring answer, but you just learn how to do it. You think you know how to run a clinical trial. And then you want a bunch of them. And you realize that even people who have done it for a long time, as you put a new team together, the team figures out how to work together, and you understand how it's going to work in the "vant" model and you understand what accountabilities look like, I think that's been valuable. It's important to not have religion, about your programs. The world's going to reveal things to you. You are running scientific experiments. One of the great things about our industry is, if you're doing it, right, a huge portion of the time you were asking a question that has never been asked before, and you get unexpected answers. And sometimes those answers are the drug doesn't work. And sometimes it doesn't work the way that you thought it was going to work. And I think you've just got to be open-minded to what the data are showing you and you've got to be willing to make dispassionate decisions after and sometimes it's really frustrating because you predict a certain outcome and you hang a lot of value on that outcome. And then you get sidetracked by a new finding. But I think if you can look at those findings, as we found, if you can look at those findings as opportunities or if you can look at those findings as ways to learn more about what you're doing, it can be helpful. When you start on a new development program, you begin a new proof of concept study, you always imagine the end of that proof, 100% of the time, anyone beginning a new proof of concept study imagines the end of that proof-of-concept study as providing a definitive answer, this thing worked for this thing didn't work. And I will tell you that 95% of the time, the experience of reading out a proof-of-concept study is the experience of you put some data up on the screen and you look at it, you think, huh? The best I can tell, a universal experience within biotech is the experience of what you predict it's going to feel like versus the actual what it feels like the first time you look at that data, it's always a sort of quizzical moment, and I think getting used to that and developing the reps that like, OK, well, we've got some answers. And we've got some new questions, so we're going to figure this out. I think that's just an important part of what it means to be a biotech company.
John Simboli
How challenging is it to try to keep something moving forward when there are so many different pieces of it in motion at the same time?
Matt Gline
That's what makes building something fun at some level. Issue spotting is a thing that people have this intuition that issue spotting is this valuable thing, right? They see a problem, and they come to you and they're, like, I have seen a problem. And I'm often like, come on, man, like, look around, they're everywhere. The experience of building a company is that it's not hard to find the problem. You can spot 100 issues, that's worth nothing. And if you can fix two, that's something. So I feel like there's a lot to that, honestly. And then you know, every single expression about the best-laid plans of mice and man or whatever. And I think one of the joyous things about our industry, but I suspect this is true about any kind of startup entrepreneurial environment, is you never know what is around the corner. And, at least what has been helpful to Roivant in dealing with that is just a thirst for optionality, a thirst for being able to take advantage of whatever you find, because you never know what you're going to find. I do think that's something that's been important to us. Humility is a word. I think a sense of humor is another word.
John Simboli
Thanks for speaking today with me, Matt.
Matt Gline
Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.
