From Innovation to Commercialization: Turning Research Into Tangible Outcomes With John Bamforth

Founder Shares – John Bamforth

00:00:01 – John Bamforth

We’ve got to stop denying that we’re not good at this. We’re not the only way. The first step is to accept that we’ve got some work to do. The good news, though, is the potential is real. I mean, you know, having spent five years looking at the science not only at Carolina, but at other places across the state, the opportunities are real. We’ve just got to be honest with ourselves and start to do some things that get us to a better place.

00:00:31 – Trevor Schmidt

Hello, and welcome to the Founder Shares podcast brought to you by Hutchison, a law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, that helps founders and entrepreneurs in technology and life science companies start up, operate, get funded, and exit. So whether you’re already an entrepreneur or want to be one someday, or are just fascinated by the stories of how a business goes from idea to success, or not such a success, this podcast is for you. Today’s guest is John Bamforth, executive director of UNC Chapel Hill’s Eshelman Innovation, a translational institute developing novel therapeutics, and launching new digital health companies in North Carolina, John is a pharmacist by training with a PhD in neuropharmacology. Having joined the pharma industry in 1989 with Eli Lilly spending most of his career in commercial functions, he became recognized as a builder of global brands and a leader of highly engaged teams. After retiring from Lilly after 30 years, John returned to academia to lead the institute at the University of North Carolina. In his current role, John continues to advocate for diversity and inclusion and its demonstrated impact on performance and innovation. On today’s episode, John discusses shifting focus to harness promising research across campus at UNC to tackle major healthcare challenges, emphasizing the development of novel therapeutics, and launching new digital health ventures.

00:01:50 – John Bamforth

We essentially pivoted fairly quickly after I arrived to be a both a translation oriented institute but also starting to work beyond school of pharmacy. And so we pivoted. We said, look, Carolina, it’s the same at Duke. We have $1.3 billion of research funded every year, so we won’t double down on that type of research. What we’ll do is we’ll go across campus and find the most interesting science that we think could be translated into our product or a service that could impact patients.

00:02:29 – Trevor Schmidt

Throughout the conversation, John expounded on how his motivation to help patients has been critical and consistent theme throughout his career and has shaped how he thinks about the importance of innovation.

00:02:39 – John Bamforth

One of the elements that I think is a common theme through everything that I’ve done is I still always have the patient in mind. So the desire to help patients through certain conditions or situations that they’re in is still a motivator. It’s a motivator today working at the institute, but that’s a common stream theme through everything. But that variety and variability of things that I could do was also pretty high on the radar screen.

00:03:11 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, that makes sense. Now, prior to coming to UNC, the head of the Eshelman innovation, you worked at Eli Lilly for nearly 30 years, is that right?

00:03:19 – John Bamforth

Correct. Yeah, I was institutionalized.

00:03:22 – Trevor Schmidt

Trevor, that sounds like. What were some of the ways your time at Eli Lilly shaped about how you think about innovation?

00:03:28 – John Bamforth

Sure. And Lilly, theres no coincidence, honestly, its gone from strength to strength since I left as well. Its now, from a market cap perspective, the biggest pharma company in the world. I think its the 8th biggest company all sectors now in the world. But the culture of Lilly was shaped by the family in the early days. They set out values way, way, way back, three values that I can still talk about today because they were instilled in you at the company. So excellence, respect for people, and integrity, and then that other underpinning of the patient. Sometimes when you hear negative press about the industry, I always used to think, I wish you could just come meet some of the people at the company, because the motivation to help patients was instilled in everybody. And then translating that to the current role, I still have maintained that desire to have high this respect for people that plays out in the culture you try to build within a team. So we’re very proud of the institute of the culture that we’ve built. It’s very people oriented and it’s very focused on engaging folks on the team, then put alongside the excellence in everything that we’re trying to do. So those things translate pretty well from time at Lilly over into time at UNC.

00:04:53 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, I have to imagine there’s got to be some different views as well. I mean, going from the 8th largest company to helping brand new companies, just starting off the ground. So what do you see as some of the biggest differences between some of the challenges facing maybe a startup company versus what you would be dealing with on a day to day basis at Eli Lilly?

00:05:12 – John Bamforth

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think particularly through the lens of academic translation, which is where I spend kind of most of my time today. And I think there is certainly in the academic space, there is a lot more emphasis and a lot more incentives around an individual. So you think about the incentives around tenured track faculty. It’s what grants have you got today, what publications have you done today. It’s not premised around as much around team, so that’s certainly a difference. I think the other piece for me is there really is an emphasis and a challenge around market. So I think about some of the early days. As we were deciding, with the grants that we distribute on campus, we introduced market applicability of the technology. Early on in my time in the institute, it was a set of questions that most faculty couldn’t answer. So when we said, why would this science be valued in the market? Most faculty couldn’t answer that question. It’s not generally answered in any grant application. It’s not a question that’s any grant application. So it’s very understandable that many didn’t have that knowledge. And so there’s been an education around market applicability of the technology that we’re seeing within an academic setting. So those, I think then apply translate into, as you’re thinking about startup companies coming from academia, that is a pivot that we’ve got to help many faculty make.

00:06:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And is it just a matter of education, or how do you go about then having those conversations and helping them to think about the process of turning an idea into a business? Really?

00:07:11 – John Bamforth

Yeah. I mean, I think the phrase that springs to mind is truth telling. Sometimes you’re telling somebody that the baby’s ugly, maybe. But I think the reality is, I think the role that we have to play is bringing that market insight, that patient insight, that competitive lens to the technology that the faculty are developing, I don’t think it’s all faculty, frankly, that have the desire to translate the science, but those that do, and I think it’s a cohort. I don’t know what the percentage would be, Trevor, to be honest, but for that cohort to really have the desire to put the effort in to get the technology to a patient, and again, I come back to get the technology to a patient, then we can help them and we surround them with support. And I think that swarming of support is critically important.

00:08:21 – Trevor Schmidt

And do you find, as part of your role with the Eshelman innovation, to, I guess, find business partners who really are interested in taking a business forward, or do you find most of the businesses are founded by somebody who’s been doing the research up to that point?

00:08:36 – John Bamforth

I actually think that’s more of a rarity. It happens. We all know examples of faculty that have taken technology all the way. I think in reality, you’re trying to find partners that want to be that executives who have done it before, serial entrepreneurs who’ve done it before, be that venture, finding the venture firms who are willing to go early, because at the end of the day, most of these technologies are still pretty early. And then finally, and I think very importantly, alongside that venture, the capital, be it through venture or through other means, to enable a lot of this type of work. It’s particularly hard here in North Carolina to find really early stage capital to move these technologies forward.

00:09:25 – Trevor Schmidt

Right? Is that part of the truth telling that you have to do as well to convince somebody who’s been doing this research and has this as the background that they may not be the business leader to move forward?

00:09:36 – John Bamforth

My favorite story recently, and I’ll protect the innocent, but I remember a young faculty member coming to me and somebody giving her $10,000 grant to start a company. And, you know, I remember sitting in my office saying, okay, let’s walk through this a little bit. So tell me how you’ll take this technology all the way to a patient, describe the development plan for this technology. And of course, she couldn’t, no disrespect to her, she just hadn’t got the experience. And we had to sit down and say, first of all, this technology is probably not ready to be a startup, and you’re probably not ready to be the CEO of a startup. You’re fresh out of a postdoc. But we can help. We can help you. We can surround you with folks who know how to do it, and we can help you find the real amounts of money that are required to start a company. $10,000 probably isn’t doing it.

00:10:30 – Trevor Schmidt

It’s not going to get you very far down the road.

00:10:31 – John Bamforth

Exactly.

00:10:32 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So what are some of the biggest barriers that you see to innovation and development in the drug development space or the healthcare space, just generally?

00:10:40 – John Bamforth

Well, right now, as most people know, we’ve been going through somewhat of an ice age from a venture perspective in the industry. I still think the opportunities are real, and I think they’re there. I do think we also got to educate folks on. I think, one of the other differences between the type of science that’s going on on a campus every day versus the sort of science that’s required to take a product all the way through to the marketplace. The science often on campus is pretty sexy science. It’s the cutting edge, early stage, really novel type of science, a large portion of which may make it anywhere near a marketplace. A lot of the science requires. I was talking to an academic innovator a couple of years ago, and he said to me, I didn’t realize when I started the company how unsexy the science was going to be. The trials I was going to have to run. Everything that I needed to put together a data package for the FDA was not very interesting science. And I’d been used to the being able to go off at tangential, interesting spaces with my lab that was of no interest and probably a negative to the FDA. And so that’s, again, a bit of truth telling around what sort of things are required to get an approval from a regulatory body. There are a lot of things, be it talks, be it other elements of safety, efficacy, etcetera. They’re pretty prescribed paths. And I think we’ve got to tell folks in a university setting what the truth is in terms of an element path. And again, partnering is super important. Bring in the folks that know how to do this. Bring in the CROs and the other partners that have done this multiple times. It’s their business. It’s their business model. And let people play the right. I’ll go back to the sports analogy for a minute. Let people play the right position. Let them play the role that they’re good at.

00:12:46 – Trevor Schmidt

I think that’s key is understanding that everybody’s got their role and each role has got value to the end company, but you don’t need to play every single position on the field.

00:12:55 – John Bamforth

That’s right. I mean, the good news is there are some fact, I mean, let’s be honest, there are great examples across the country and beyond of faculty, you know, these, these. And you could almost call them unicorns, as individuals that can actually have managed to make that transition.

00:13:12 – Trevor Schmidt

Right, right.

00:13:13 – John Bamforth

They’ve been able to go from kind of the bench scientist all the way through to the CEO of a very valuable company. But they’re pretty rare, right?

00:13:21 – Trevor Schmidt

They’re pretty rare, and it’s okay that it’s not everybody.

00:13:24 – John Bamforth

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

00:13:26 – Trevor Schmidt

So Eschelman Innovation was founded in 2014, is that right? Correct. With $100 million gift from Fred Eschelman. And you were appointed executive director in October 2019.

00:13:36 – John Bamforth

Correct.

00:13:36 – Trevor Schmidt

So tell us a little bit about Eshelman innovation. What was it founded to accomplish? And I guess, how do you measure success as you think of it now?

00:13:44 – John Bamforth

Yeah, I came in about five years into the journey. You know, the original goal, or should I say the early goal, which was achieved fairly quickly, was to, you know, the gift was to the school of pharmacy at Carolina, and it was part of a fairly ambitious goal to take the school to a number one ranking across the nation, top pharmacy school in the country. And that was achieved relatively quickly. And thankfully, we’ve maintained that. So we just went through another set of ranking tables and we were still number one in the country. But as I say, that was achieved fairly quickly. And so we essentially pivoted fairly quickly after I arrived to be both a translation oriented institute, but also starting to work beyond school of pharmacy. And so we pivoted. We said, look, with this, Caroline, it’s the same at Duke. We have $1.3 billion of research funded every year, so we won’t double down on that type of research. What we’ll do is we’ll go across campus and find the most interesting science that we think could be translated into a product or a service that could impact patients, ideally, and this is the mission that we crystallized over that period of time, is we wanted to take a swing at the biggest healthcare challenges that were out there. What were we going to take? Take the science, take the talent at Carolina, and really take a full on swing at solutions? So we focus on two domains in particular. Surprise, surprise, we’re a school of pharmacy. We’ve got a portfolio of novel therapeutics that we’re developing again, from not just school of pharmacy, but from across, across campus. And then we also, over the last three or four years, started to build out a venture studio in digital health. And so we’re starting brand new digital health firms, in this case not just at Carolina, but across the state. We’ve built out hubs beyond Chapel Hill, in Asheville, in Greensboro. We’re in dialogue right now in Charlotte and Wilmington. So our goal is to have five hubs across the state and over the next three years, launch 15 brand new digital health companies across the state.

00:16:10 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, was that a. I don’t want to say a harder conversation to have, but I mean, like you said, the school of pharmacy, the novel therapeutics, kind of seems like a natural transition. Was the virtual studio or the venture studio, was that, did that just make sense because it’s so adjacent to what you’re doing, or was that a bit more of a conversation?

00:16:28 – John Bamforth

No, I mean, to give credit to Fred, each time we’ve suggested extend, well, not just Fred, right. The dean of the school of pharmacy at the time, the chancellor of the university. Each time we said, actually, we’d like to go a little broader than we are right now. So we’ve gone through several evolutions. You know, we’ve gone through, it’s just school of pharmacy to, can we look at innovation across campus. Then we started to say, hey, we think there’s an opportunity to build out hubs for the venture studio across the state. Because of some work we’ve been doing up in Appalachia, there’s some work now potentially collaborating with Tennessee and Kentucky. And very recently, there’s an opportunity that emerged, of all places, in Finland, bringing technologies from Finland to North Carolina. So each time we’ve gone to Fred and the chancellor and the dean and said, hey, we’re thinking about something a bit bigger. Each time they’ve said, cool, let’s go. You go do it. So I think through that lens, it’s been great. The other goal, though, that we’ve had is to turn this institute into a self sustaining institute. In other words, let’s get to the point where we’re driving returns back to the university and back to the institute. So, obviously, to do that, you need to get products out the door. You need to get companies out the door. The beauty about the venture studio, we all know with therapeutics, the timelines with therapeutics are incredibly long, and the probabilities are incredibly low. So if you think it through that sustainability lens, we wanted to have a hedge. And so the venture studio is an unashamed hedge for that sustainability story, because we know we can get out companies pretty quickly in this digital health space with the partners that we have, and we’ve got two really important partners in that journey.

00:18:18 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, talk about that timeline. I mean, for the therapeutics accelerator, do you have any companies that have kind of moved on to. I wouldn’t even say commercialization yet, but, like, further down the path?

00:18:28 – John Bamforth

Yeah, still a work in progress. Probably the best example. And it’s not a conventional example, but we. It’s a really interesting story. One of the. And I did not know this when I came to Carolina. Probably one of our biggest strengths on campus is virology. We have 30 some labs working in the virology space. And ironically, I’m not sure ironically is the right word, but nine months before the pandemic, three of those faculty came to us and said, we think there’s going to be a pandemic, and we think we need novel antiviral drugs for that pandemic. Will you put some money in? And we. We agreed to do that. Lo and behold, nine months later, they were right. And we were all in the middle of the Covid-19 challenge. We built over the next two years to two and a half years, we built a brand new global nonprofit developing these antiviral drugs. So we built ready it’s called ready. It’s based in Chapel Hill, but it’s literally, as of very recently, who is asked ready to lead all therapeutic development for future pandemics? We raised around $100 million. We hired a local CEO who is a past biotech CEO. We’ve got a board that has folks from the Gates foundation, from J and J. So we built an organization now that is positioned to hopefully get us to a better spot next time one of these novel viruses emerges. Because the reality is, if we invest, we should have a stable of antiviral drugs ready to go across the viral families that represent the biggest threat. So that’s the best example so far, I think, in the therapeutic space. But we have other therapeutics that we’re excited to continue to develop.

00:20:19 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. And like you said, it’s just a long journey.

00:20:21 – John Bamforth

It is a long journey, without doubt.

00:20:23 – Trevor Schmidt

So how do individuals or entities participate in one of these programs? Do they have to have some tie into UNC, or are you applying the cohorts?

00:20:32 – John Bamforth

Increasingly, our tent is becoming broader and broader. I mentioned Finland can be more broad than starting to step outside of the US on campus. In the domains that we operate, we’re again constantly talking to all faculty about opportunities within their labs with their work. But we’re also engaging students. It’s pretty cool. For example, in the digital health space, we run these sprint exercises in particular domains, and we’ll bring students in as fellows to help build these concepts for venture backable firms. And I’ll use a business school example. You bring in somebody who is a physician, who’s studying for their MBA into building a real company. It’s not casework any longer. It’s potentially building a real company. So there’s a student lens to this, be it school of pharmacy school, frankly, there are lots of student opportunities, and then we’ve got to have these external partnerships. So the obvious frame is venture and the biopharma industry on the therapeutic side of things. But one of our best partners on the digital health front is Amazon AWS, and they’ve been an amazing partner building out these tech companies. They, on campus have been training labs on low code, no code apps that they have, providing free cloud credits. The first company that we were in the middle of launching right now, they gave us a part time CTO free of charge to help build the MVP. Finding partners like that, finding investors like that, finding foundations that want to fund research, all of those opportunities are real.

00:22:26 – Trevor Schmidt

How much of that? I’m thinking about how you divide your time. How much of your time is spent bringing in new partners, how much your time is spent working with young companies? Is it across the board? How do you think about how you divide your team?

00:22:38 – John Bamforth

Yeah, I mean, the lens, for me, we’ve got a great team. I mentioned earlier, we’ve got a great team, a great culture, and that frees up my time to spend. My lens is largely external. So I think about myself in kind of the traditional role of a CEO, where it’s about partnerships, it’s about fundraising, and for the long term viability of what we do. I think that’s the lens that I need to play. I mean, we did a similar. I was, when we were building ready the antiviral nonprofit, I was the interim CEO while we got to the first funding, raised the first money to say, okay, actually, now we can credibly go, go get a full time CEO for that effort. And we went out and hired Jimmy Rosen to do that. And that lens is super important, that external lens. I think in many ways, that’s the value that I can bring both to the university and to the region.

00:23:42 – Trevor Schmidt

William, I want to jump back to something that you had said. You talked about one of the goals for special men, innovation, was making the institution more translation oriented. I think I’d read an article that said that North Carolina ranks second in research investment, but legs 20th in translation. So why do you think that is? Is it really a matter of focus and emphasis? Is a different skill set that you need to bring in people with that skill? Talk about that a little bit.

00:24:09 – John Bamforth

Yeah, I think it’s a, you know, it’s. I’ll be honest, it’s a bit of an endless frustration, because I think that for me, and I used to have this conversation endlessly with, with the chancellor, the potential. And I’m not just talking about Carolina. I think this is true for the state. The potential, particularly in this entrepreneurship startup domain, is really significant, but there are a few barriers. One is simply capital. There is not a lot of pre seed capital here in North Carolina. Second, there is, through an academic lens, there’s a little bit of a misalignment on incentives for tenure. Faculty get recognized for the grants that they bring in, the publications that they get published, and generally speaking, not much for something that’s translated right. It has to be almost like a personal motivation, not a promotion, tenure lens. And then finally, for me, one of the most important things is we’ve got to start telling the truth about where we really are. When you see statements sometimes about, I’m not picking on Carolina here. You could probably lay this at the door of most of our universities in North Carolina. We claim to be good, and we’re not looking at the data and saying, well, actually, we’re not that good. In fact, NC innovation, as you may know, which is the new organization launched by the general assembly. Their entire focus is funding improved translation from the universities in North Carolina. The General assembly has supplied, I think, $500 million, and the entire tenant of that investment is to improve translation from the universities. And actually, that data you quote Trevor, is from the front page of their website. We’ve got to stop denying that we’re not good at this. We’re not the only way. The first step is to accept that we got some work to do. The good news, though, is the potential is real. I mean, having spent five years looking at the science, not only at Carolina, but at other places across the state, the opportunities are real. We’ve just got to be honest with ourselves and start to do some things that get us to a better place.

00:26:34 – Trevor Schmidt

And is there a tension, I guess, in the academic world between this idea of translation and creating commercialized businesses and pure research and kind of the academic pursuit is there.

00:26:47 – John Bamforth

There’s a little bit of that with some. The good news? It’s clearly not all. And I think if we’re talking about the biggest challenge, I think probably on campus, is there are so many things to get done right. We have a research enterprise, we have an educational enterprise. There are lots of things. We go all the way back to facilities and some of the other things that sport you think about in this state in particular, some of the emphasis of the sporting ventures that we have across the universities and some of the rivalries and all that good fun. There are lots of things that need to get done on campus. On campuses, sometimes translation falls down the list of priorities. But, you know, there are some great examples of companies that have come out of universities that have done the right way, have been able to fuel, you know, by returns, fuel some amazing things on campus. I remember a drug that we licensed from Princeton and meeting the academic scientists that actually developed that drug, and he did quite well. The school of chemistry at Princeton is kind of palatial, and it was all driven by one successful multi billion dollar oncology drug that they developed. And so I think that’s potentially the missed opportunity. This could done well. This could fuel a lot of the other things that are important to the campus.

00:28:24 – Trevor Schmidt

And I think about that as you talk about capital resources being hard to come by here in North Carolina. Is it going to take that one blockbuster drug or that one super successful company to come back and then reinvest in this space to kind of change the ecosystem in a meaningful way.

00:28:39 – John Bamforth

Yeah, it could. But I think there are also the venture studio model, and as you know, Trevor, it’s been a, a model, it says a relatively new model in the venture space. Generally speaking, venture studios have a much more successful hit rate than traditional venture because the venture studios are building, they’re going through a process to identify and build. They’re not waiting for a founder to walk in the door. They build the company, then they go find the founder to run the company. And they’re living not only on unicorns, but they’re living on the base hits and the sort of smaller companies. So if you’re hitting seven successful companies, maybe including a unicorn, versus one out of ten, which is obviously traditional venture, then there are some interesting things that can happen in an ecosystem. Our venture studio partner, shout out to high Alpha. Innovation did this in Indianapolis while I was living in Indy, and they have built, the founders had a big exit of a company called exact Target to Salesforce, about a $2.3 billion exit to Salesforce. Salesforce moved to Indianapolis because of that. The biggest building in Indianapolis is Salesforce Tower, which all came from these four guys that launched exact target. Well, they went back and started high alpha, and high alpha in Indy. And nobody would see Indianapolis as a tech hub, right? I don’t think anybody would see. When you’re writing down tech hubs, Indianapolis, generally speaking, is not top of the list, but through high Alpha, they’ve launched over 60 companies, tech companies in Indianapolis. And you create, obviously, when you have successes, exact target, which just happened to be the first success, all of a sudden you create this virtual virtuous cycle where multiple tech companies, because you’re creating some wealth within the ecosystem and entrepreneurs tend to want to keep doing it over and over.

00:30:47 – Trevor Schmidt

Some wealth, some experience.

00:30:48 – John Bamforth

Yeah, exactly. So that’s one of the things that we would love to do here with the venture studio is get the momentum going, start to build these companies, and hopefully, you know, we’ll start to do similar sorts of things here in North Carolina.

00:31:00 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So beyond Redi, what are some of the early successes today for Eshelman innovation as you think about that?

00:31:06 – John Bamforth

Yeah, sure. You know, the other example, which is again, a credit to the General assembly and to, we have a group on campus, the North Carolina Collaboratory, they came to the venture studio, to our venture studio, probably two, maybe two and a half years ago now, just as they were getting the first opioid settlement funds into the coffers, so to speak. And they said to us, could you point your innovation process at the opioid crisis? Is there a way to use your process to find some solutions? So, we knew enough to be dangerous about the opioid crisis, but we took our partners up to Asheville, up to Appalachia, which, as everybody knows, unfortunately, is the epicenter of the crisis. And we sat down with all the partners up there that are dealing with patients, with Oud, with opioid addiction, every single day. And we went through the first sprint process to see if we could find some venture, backable companies to solve, to solve the crisis. And the first company out of that work is a company called Goldie Health. Goldie Health. There’s a new emerging emergency response team for patients in overdose. And it’s a team that goes to folks in overdose and brings, usually, somebody who’s had a lived experience with opioid addiction as well. And the EMT will deal with the acute situation, then the peer support person will help guide that patient through everything they would need to get to recovery. The problem with port teams, as they’re called, is everything that these folks do right now is manual, so they’re best using spreadsheets to bring these resources, so be it. Housing, food, treatment, access to doctors, etcetera. And so Goldie Health is basically automating all of that process. And so the company’s been formed. Now we have a serial entrepreneur as the CEO, actually, this case from Wilmington. He has lived experience with opioid addiction. He has a couple of family members that passed because of drug overdose, opioid overdose. And so that’s the first example of a company that we’re very excited about that, hopefully, is I mentioned earlier, about taking swings at big healthcare challenges. Obviously, the opioid crisis is a big, big challenge. But we have three other companies that’s come from that work that are in a warehouse now, ready to be launched with capital as we raise it. So the exciting thing about that work, if we go back two years and say, if we’d have thought we’d have four potential companies all taking swings at different elements of the opioid crisis, we’d be pretty excited about it. So that’s a fun piece of work.

00:34:06 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, this may not be as applicable when you talk about the opioid crisis, but it brought to my mind, I guess, one of the tensions, maybe in the therapeutic space or maybe in the healthcare space in general, which is identifying a venture backed company as compared to something that might necessarily help a group of people, because there may not be as much revenue in treating opioid addiction as there may be in some other spaces. So how do you kind of think about that? How do you talk to these businesses about that as they think about their market space?

00:34:37 – John Bamforth

Yeah, and I don’t think we can dismiss opportunities just because we don’t think venture would back it. So I’ll go back to that ready example we worked at. The industry, generally speaking, is not very interested in developing antiviral drugs for diseases that don’t exist. It’s not exactly the most compelling idea, by the way. There might in the future be a disease with a virus that might emerge. Right. I mean, you go walk into a venture firm with that concept, you, generally speaking, get thrown out. That’s why with ready, as we went through the strategy work, we said this is probably a nonprofit, not a not for profit. Now, there are probably opportunities within that with existing disease as you go through that work. But the frame that you build an organization that’s appropriate to the opportunity, I think is really important. That’s why if we were to find things in the opioid work that wasn’t necessarily a for profit venture, backable firm, but could still impact the crisis, then we probably find ways, through grant opportunities, through other methodologies, to make that work. Because I think with big healthcare challenges, we shouldn’t dismiss things just because we don’t think we can get venture to invest. So I think we’ve got to be open to that.

00:36:03 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. Well, 100%, if you really are taking big swings to solve big healthcare issues, some of them are not going to be venture back.

00:36:10 – John Bamforth

That’s right.

00:36:10 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s great to hear. So what is it the organization’s working on now that you’re personally most excited about?

00:36:17 – John Bamforth

The opioid crisis is probably the obvious one. But the other piece, the other hub out towards on the way to Asheville is out in Greensboro. And we’ve been working with NCAnt, the Humana foundation, and UNC Greensboro around a couple of domains that the Humana foundation is particularly interested in, and that’s in food insecurity in the african american population in particular, and mental health in the african american community as well. And we’ve got one company that came out of the first sprint that was again funded by the Humana foundation. It’s a business focused on in particular. This is a fact that kind of blew my mind when I learned about it as we went through the research. In an average health system, 40% of their employees are food insecure.

00:37:20 – Trevor Schmidt

Really?

00:37:21 – John Bamforth

And you think, how can that be? But it’s a truth. And so this business is, as you may know, there are hospitals and hospital systems out there that actually have their own farms and are starting to think about how they grow, produce and provide healthy produce to the community around the hospital. And so the startup company, which again, is in stealth mode right now, is helping hospitals both to build those farms and then provide a benefit to these food insecure employees to get produce to them and get healthy food for what they particularly need. But again, a bit of a mind blowing thing when you dig into the problems, because we were thinking, honestly, when we were going into it, we were thinking about, okay, the broad community, how do we get improve food deserts and the like. And lo and behold, as we talk to the health systems themselves, they say, well, actually, some of that food deserts here within our own employees. And you kind of go, when you think about it, when you think about some of the lower paying jobs, you kind of, all of a sudden you’re like, oh, yeah, I guess that could be true, right?

00:38:35 – Trevor Schmidt

Because these are massive institutions.

00:38:36 – John Bamforth

Yeah, massive. And you think about some of the lower compensated roles, you kind of understand why that might be the case. But still a little mind blowing when you hear it for the first time, right?

00:38:46 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s right. Oh, that’s fascinating. So what are some of the challenges, and you touched on some already, but what are some of the challenges facing Eshelman innovation right now and reaching its goals? And how do you think about overcoming those?

00:38:58 – John Bamforth

Yeah, for me, and I’ve mentioned it already, access to capital remains both a challenge. I think it would be a challenge from any academic institution, I think here in North Carolina, particularly challenging. So that would be one, without doubt. And I think that particularly sitting in an academic institution doing a better job of aligning incentives and helping. I was talking to a young faculty member, very talented chemist, just yesterday, and the challenge for her, and we’ve got partners involved in her work, and we’re helping her navigate some of these, some of these difficulties. But she has so many things to do on campus, above and beyond her lab, teaching, a whole array of committees. One things we do work really well in academic institution is committees. But we’ve been working on different methodologies with somebody like her to take some of her team members who maybe a postdoc who’s ready to look at the next stage of their career and free them up from some of the elements of academic life to focus on translation. And so taking some of the burden off faculty, I think is super important to enable some of this translation. So those would be the two that jump out as being super important.

00:40:28 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, is it realistic for these faculty members? I mean, at some point in time, are they forced to make a decision between staying at faculty versus really jumping in full feet to the, to the business? Or are they able to kind of operate in both worlds?

00:40:43 – John Bamforth

No, I think they can operate in both worlds. Yeah, I mean, don’t get me wrong, they have to spend some time thinking about prioritization. But I think as long as you bring the right partners to the table, I mean, they’re not going to be able to do it all on their own. Let’s a rare animal that will be able to do that. But I think if you can surround really talented faculty with the right resources and the right advice, I think I’m pretty excited about what we can accomplish. It’s a segment of the faculty that has the genuine interest. It’s also then another sub segment of that segment that have technology, that have market application. And so in reality, this is not something for everybody within the institution. And that’s okay, that’s okay. But for those who have the interest and have the science and the technology, we should be all in to enabling them to achieve the goals that they want above and beyond the pure science play. Right. It should be Grant’s publications and the joy of translating this. And you know, if I was sitting in their shoes, if my science had the possibilities of impact in a patient, I’d be super excited to get it there. They have that desire to make it to a patient, and I think we should help them do that.

00:42:04 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, I wanted to go back and ask a question. So you talked about the goal of making the organization kind of self sustaining on a go forward basis. Does the organization take equity in these companies that are coming out? Is it part of the licensing from the university? How does that structure?

00:42:18 – John Bamforth

Yeah, so there’s a couple of domains. First, there is a from a licensing opportunity, and we have agreements within the university, some of that license those licensing funds would flow back in our direction, which would be great. And then as we built out the venture studio, because the venture studio is an ESHML innovation venture studio, we in some cases, we have a position on the cap table as well.

00:42:43 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:42:45 – John Bamforth

As others invest will no doubt get diluted. But being on the cap table as we’re helping to identify and establish these companies, I think is something that we should get some returns from 100%.

00:43:01 – Trevor Schmidt

It makes a lot of sense. Any common mistakes that you’re seeing some of these young companies make that future companies can avoid.

00:43:09 – John Bamforth

Yeah. I think the one that springs to mind is, again, sometimes the vision is super bold and sometimes too broad. Right. So we’ve all seen this where I’ll take a therapeutic example and I’ll pick on a pharmacy example, the company that wants to develop a new therapeutic also in a new delivery system. Well, we know what our friends at FDA think about things like that. The more complex the solution is, the more challenge it is when we get to a regulatory authority. And so I think educating folks, that sometimes you have to simplify your technology back and take the development of the technology and the company in stages that will get you to, again, we’re trying to get to, in many ways, proof of concept for the technology as quickly as possible to get you to a venture background that people are excited because they see the path to a relatively easy approval, and then you can layer on the lifecycle, play around that company. I think we overcomplicate sometimes in our journey to develop companies. So I think that would be the one that jumps out to me. And then the second piece for me is, is surrounding, particularly faculty talent with experienced founders. So be that. Folks that have done the early stage preclinical development of a product and the clinical work all the way through to CEO’s who have genuinely raised money, not pretending they’ve raised money, not faking it. You can see in black and white that they, the CEO that we have now around Goldie Health is a serial entrepreneur who’s built multiple companies and sold multiple companies actually in this EMT space as well. So not only has he got the chops around entrepreneurship, but he’s got it in the specific space that we’re trying to build this company around. So building the right talent around the scientific talent, I think, is super important.

00:45:35 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, I think it’s an interesting tension going back to your first point. The goal is to take super big swings, but how do you take that big swing in bite size increments so you can actually reach that end goal?

00:45:46 – John Bamforth

And it goes, in my mind, the opioid crisis example is we broke down that problem. The first job that we did out in Asheville was to sit down with all the experts, who, by the way, were super skeptical when we walked in. They’re dealing with the crisis every single day of the week. They’re sitting with patients every, and we walk in from Carolina like, hey, we’re here to help. The good news is, over the first six months, the credibility grew over time. And my favorite story is that one of the most skeptical individuals, a physician up there, ended up being the chief medical officer on Goldie. So we went full circle. But the first thing we did with that effort is we went deep on understanding the problem, and we mapped out a patient journey from first exposure to an opioid all the way through to recovery and all the needs along that journey. And that helped us to double down on, okay, where were we going to start first? What was the problem we were going to try and solve first? And then as we moved along and as we developed the first four companies, and I think there’s more opportunity beyond that. We were hitting individual needs that need to be solved or problems that need to be solved. So that is an important part of the process.

00:47:07 – Trevor Schmidt

If you were thinking about founding a company or joining a company in this space, what would you be looking for with regard to the opportunity, do you think about it market? Do you think about specific technology?

00:47:20 – John Bamforth

Yeah, I mean, I would. I’m a marketing guy at heart, so I would always be, you know, pretty focused to start with understanding the marketplace and understanding, particularly in the domain that I operate, the patient. I mean, I, you know, my, my training over the last 30 years has always been around, let’s understand what the patient need is. What is the patient in? What are the patient insights? What do we really understand with this patient with x disease? So I would be starting by understanding, does this firm really understand the marketplace and the patient that’s maybe dealing with this particular disease? And then I would be really curious to understand what the company believes is the unique selling point of the technology that they have and can they articulate that really well? And then I’d be interested in the experiences of the folks that are running the firm, but I’d be Uber focused on the market understanding and patient understanding.

00:48:22 – Trevor Schmidt

I want to step back too, and ask you about. We’ve talked a little bit about how some of the struggles for academics kind of coming out with business. Do you think we need to start earlier with regard to how we approach students and teaching kind of our undergrads and postdocs about business in general and commercialization? Or do we really just wait for people to self select and this is something that I’m interested in.

00:48:46 – John Bamforth

No, it’s a great question, Trevor. My bias is the self selection mode, but I don’t know whether I’m right. I do think there is an opportunity, without doubt, to educate students early. I’ll share one example. We have 600 pharmd students every year at the school. Increasingly, as the institute has become stronger and stronger over time, the interest from our own student body, both in terms of the kind of work that we do and roles for pharmacists in the industry relative to more traditional pharmacy roles, has ramped up over the last five or six years. Now we have over third of the students student body are interested in more entrepreneurial roles and industry roles in the industry than ever was before. And I think they see the richness in the roles. I think that’s the appeal. And so certainly exposure for students takes them down, without doubt takes them down a different path. I remember very talented young lady who I met early on in my time at Carolina. She was just finishing up her pharm D, and she ended up going to a fairly traditional fellowship role at Lilly to start off with. But then I kind of prodded her to go try out a marketing role, and then in short order, she got hired by Nvidia before Nvidia went through the roof. So I hope she got some stock, but she went to Nvidia, and now she’s running all kind of digital health healthcare innovation at Nvidia. And so there’s a pharmd student who went through all the traditional training, but is in a completely different type of venture right now in probably the, I don’t know, top three, four company in the world.

00:50:50 – Trevor Schmidt

Picked a good time to go to Nvidia.

00:50:52 – John Bamforth

Very good time to go to Nvidia. And Chelsea’s doing great. But, yeah, I think you can, I’ve seen it at Carolina. You can stimulate the student body to start to think about their careers in very, very, very different ways.

00:51:06 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. And just understand that the options are there and the path you choose initially may not be the path you end up on.

00:51:12 – John Bamforth

That’s 100% right.

00:51:13 – Trevor Schmidt

So we are the founder Shares podcast. So I’d like to ask all of our guests, if there’s one piece of advice that you would share with somebody who’s thinking about starting a company or, but just hopes to someday, what would that advice be?

00:51:24 – John Bamforth

Yeah, I was thinking about this. I was thinking about a couple of books that I, one I read very recently, one I read a while back. But I wish somebody given me this book, like 50 years ago. Maybe not 50, but a few years ago. One’s a book called the Comfort Crisis, and the author is a guy called Michael Easter that talks about how we, as human beings, particularly here in the US, are living in a never in an uncomfortable situation. So the example, the statistic they use in the book is over 50% of the us population never leave a climate controlled environment. They go from the house to the car to the office to the car to the home. They’re never out in the natural world and all this sort of stuff. And I think through an entrepreneurial lens, guess what? We’re all going to be really uncomfortable. Most of the time we’re living in entrepreneurship, things are going to go wrong. Things are not going to the direction you expect. And a second book, which I absolutely love, and this is the one that I wish somebody gave me, maybe setting out on my career. It’s called the obstacle is the way. And it’s written by a guy called Ryan Holliday. And it talks about the stoics, which was a greek philosophy. And it’s this frame of the obstacles away, which is stuff is going to happen. That’s life, and we should all expect it and not get down in the dumps when bad stuff happens. It’s like, no, no, that’s the challenge of life. We’ve got to work out how we navigate this, whatever challenge that’s put in place. And this job, my last job at Lilly. Yeah, that stuff happens all the time. But it’s the way we react to those situations. And I think that’s so applicable in the world of entrepreneurship because guess what? It’s almost daily of ten times a day.

00:53:25 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s right.

00:53:26 – John Bamforth

Stuff is not going to go the way you expected. But the most successful companies are the ones that know how to embrace that challenge and pivot and all those wonderful things that entrepreneurs do every day.

00:53:37 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, great. Two new books for my reading list. I appreciate that. And John, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. How can our listeners connect with you and with Eshelman innovation to learn more about what you’re doing or to potentially partner 100%.

00:53:49 – John Bamforth

So my easiest, probably way to communicate with me is on LinkedIn. So connect with me on LinkedIn. Without doubt, the institute has a page on LinkedIn as well. So follow us on LinkedIn and then we have a website. So eshelmaninnovation.org, you know, you can connect us through the. Connect to us through the website as well. And there’s a few videos on to learn more about the institute as well.

00:54:11 – Trevor Schmidt

Very good. Thank you so much, John.

00:54:13 – John Bamforth

Thanks, Trevor. Appreciate the time.

00:54:21 – Trevor Schmidt

That was John Bamforth. To learn more about his work at Eshelman Innovation, visit eshelmande innovation.org. that’s eshelmaninovation.org. thanks for listening to this episode of the Founder Shares podcast. If you’re a founder or business owner and need legal advice, be sure to check out our team@hutchlaw.com. that’s hutchlaw.com. we have the capacity to help you out with just about any legal need your company may be facing. We’re passionate about the innovation economy and ready to help you on your entrepreneurial journey. The show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Trevor Schmidt, and thanks for listening to the Founder Shares podcast.