BioBuilder Career Conversation: Lisa Stanek Transcript

Sure, so my name is Lisa Stanek. I am the Vice President of Translational Science at Finia Therapeutics, which is a biotechnology company. It’s a private, so a small, private biotechnology based out of Waltham Massachusetts, and I think through this little session and some of the slides I’ve prepared, I’ll explain what that means. A lot of people don’t know necessarily what translational science means, but I’ll sort of walk you through my career journey, how I got to where I am, sort of my educational path and then answer any questions that you might have. Okay, so just a little bit about myself personally so you get to know me a little bit better. I grew up on Long Island, new York, so I love the beach. I’m definitely a beach person. Here’s some pictures of my family. That’s my husband, grant, and our four kids. So I have a 16-year-old, a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old. So we’re very busy, full households and to make life more interesting, we just got a puppy. So that’s our eight month old puppy named Charlie. He’s a little shih tzu poodle mix that we added into the mix fairly recently. My hobbies are running. I love to run. Every fall I usually do a half marathon or some. 10k is grown in and I’m actually a yoga teacher. So when I’m not doing translational neuroscience, I actually teach yoga. I actually teach yoga at work. So we have a gym in our really beautiful lab space in Waltham. There’s a gorgeous gym downstairs and it has a yoga studio and so I teach my colleagues yoga such that we can all relax and calm down after our busy and stressful days.

So the beginning of my journey started in college. After high school I went to Union College, which is a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. It’s in Schenectady. I always I really liked biology. So in high school I took AP biology. We dissected pig hearts and I think we dissected a rodent. I was just fascinated. I thought it was so cool. I just loved like all of the experiments, like the hands on experiments that we did in our bio class.

So I majored in biology in college and my junior year. And so, yeah, my junior year in college I did an internship with my neuroscience professor. He, I really loved his class and you know he’s like you’re super interested, you love the lab component of the class. Would you want to do a summer internship with me? And I said, of course that’d be super fun. I got, I got a paid stipend, I got to stay up in upstate New York for the summer and it so happened that he was interested in studying dragonfly. It so happened that he was interested in studying dragonfly electrophysiology, so really understanding how dragonflies capture their prey. Dragonflies are expert hunters and they, like you know, they almost look like airplanes, you know, like fighter jets, and so I spent two years in his lab studying dragonfly electrophysiology. So action potentials in the dragonfly brain. They do have a very primitive brain and the setup looks like the one below lots of wires. It’s really almost like an electrical engineering setup, but I really loved it. At that point I decided I was going to go to graduate school.

So before then I thought about medical school I thought about either becoming a medical doctor or even a veterinarian. I love animals. But with the research that I was doing in the lab it became clear I really liked research. I loved asking questions and doing experiments. I loved being in the lab, um, and so he prompted me. I was so lucky to have such a wonderful mentor. He prompted me to go to a PhD program. It hadn’t even crossed my mind, it didn’t even think about it, um, but so I started looking into graduate school, specifically for neuroscience program, and, um, I ended up going to Emory University, which is in Atlanta, georgia. It’s an amazing, beautiful college and university. If anybody is interested in going to school down south, highly, highly recommend the best six years of my life spent in graduate school getting my PhD in neuroscience.

While I was there I moved away from invertebrate electrophysiology and I moved into mammals and I studied. In graduate school. I actually studied non-human primates. I did research in the Yerkes Primate Research Center, studying social behavior in monkeys, and also did quite a bit of research in mouse genetics and the company that I work at now and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in the following slides we do gene therapy, so some of you may have heard about gene therapy. We engineer viruses to deliver genes, replace genes that are missing in patients that have diseases. So that’s the work that I’m doing now, and in the next slide I’ll sort of explain a little bit more about that and stop me if you have any questions.

So I already told you I started out my career at uni college. I got a bachelor’s in biology and that led me to my PhD in Emory University. Every PhD program is different. Every PhD student’s career trajectory is different. Some people take four years to finish their PhD, some people take eight. My roommate in graduate school took eight years. So it just depends on your project, your advisor and your luck. So I was actually really lucky. I had a great advisor, I had a great project and I finished in five years, which, in the grand scheme of things, is actually pretty short. But, like I said, it was the time of my life. I loved every minute of it. I made some of the best friends friends that are still my best friends today in graduate school. So you may look at these numbers and be like, wow, that’s a long time to be in school, but not when you’re really loving it.

So graduate was great and typically after you get a PhD it is very traditional to do a postdoctoral fellowship, so that’s like kind of further training. It’s sort of akin to a residency that you would do after graduating medical school. So I did my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. That’s what brought me here to the Boston area and I did that for two years and I knew even in graduate school I knew that I wanted to work in pharmaceutical drug development. I wanted the things that I was doing in the lab to really translate to human disease. I wanted to help people with the research that I was doing.

So after my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, I got my first ever job. At this point I’m in my 30s, which seems crazy. That at 30 is when I got my very first job. But I wouldn’t change any of it All of the training, the education, emory and Harvard. Not only was it really important for my career and my career development, but it was fun and you know, like I said, I had a good time in my life.

So I got my first job at a company called Genzyme. This company no longer exists, unfortunately, anymore, but it was an amazing company that was built upon the premise of treating patients that had rare diseases. So patients that have rare disease are often overlooked by drug companies because they feel that there’s not enough market for their drug, not enough people to take it, not enough money to be made. But Genzyme really changed the business model and we were treating predominantly rare diseases and actually a very profitable company making a profit. About three years into my time at Genzyme we were acquired. This is a common thing that happens in biotechnology in the field of pharmaceutical companies kind of eat up like Pac-Man, they kind of eat up little companies. And so we were acquired by a company that you’ve probably all heard of, one of the top five pharmaceutical companies in the world called Sanofi.

So what’s translational science? I often tell people what I do and they like nod and smile, but I don’t. I don’t think a lot of people really understand. So if, if you know, when it’s laid out like this kind of visually, I think it makes a lot of sense. So it sort of sits in the middle between basic science and research. Sometimes we call it discovery research and the clinic. So I will take the discoveries that come out of the basic research labs and translate them into a drug and then hand them off to my clinical colleagues.

So within a company like my current company or at Sanofi or Genzyme, there are a lot of people doing basic science, trying to innovate, develop novel drugs and, in my case, to develop novel viral vectors, and I implement them in terms of a drug. So you know what are the diseases that we could treat with this new entity, what are the animal models that we need to show efficacy or safety in? And then, once I’ve shown that this new drug works to treat a disease in an animal model and is safe, then it gets handed off to my clinical colleagues, the medical doctors that will put it into a human clinical trial. So when I brought my kids to work. We had a bring your kids to work day and I explained it. They’re like oh, you do clinical trial in animals, which is pretty accurate. So everybody knows what a clinical trial is in humans and patients.

I do it in the mice and the monkeys. So if you go to the next slide, this is my job and my job description in a snapshot. So the things that I have to do, I have to do model development. So that means, you know, are there animal models of this disease that I’m studying? If so, what’s wrong with them? How they are not patients. They can’t tell me like oh, I, you know, I’m having trouble walking or my back hurts or I’m having, like you know brain fog.

So I have to use a number of behavioral testing tools in order to understand what’s wrong with our animals, because once I can show that these animals are sick, they have some kind of what we call a phenotype, then I can treat them and show that our drug improves this deficit. Another thing that’s a big part of my job is how do we deliver the drug. So not all drugs can cross the blood brain barrier, for example, or not all drugs can go to the organs that we need them to go to. So part of my job is to understand delivery. How do we give this drug? For some of the neuroscience diseases that I study the neurologic diseases sometimes you have to deliver it directly to the brain, so that involves brain surgery.

I’ve probably in my lifetime done hundreds of thousands of brain surgeries on small animals and you know believe it or not, patients that have severe neurodegenerative diseases are not averse to having brain surgery in order to deliver these drugs. So sometimes we do that. Ideally we just give an injection, so something like you when you get your COVID shot or your flu shot.

we would give a systemic injection but, it all depends on the drug and the properties of the drug. A very big and very important part of my job is to understand the therapeutic window, and that’s really about safety. So understanding what’s the highest dose of the drug that we can give that is safe, because first and foremost, we don’t want to harm the patients, we want to help them. So understanding safety window, and then you know tolerability and scalability. So you know mice are not people Most of the work, the preclinical work, is done in mice but human organs. Human brains are a thousand times the size of a mouse brain organs. Human brains are a thousand times the size of a mouth brain. So we do have to scale up and make sure that these drugs will still work in larger species. So my work starts in mice but it usually moves up to non-human primates because we want to make sure that this is ultimately going to work in a human, and that’s the closest species that we have ultimately going to work in a human, and that’s the closest species that we have. So, in a nutshell, this is my job description. This is what I’m expected to do at my current company. If you go to the next slide, this is just some more. That’s my team, that’s the translational science team and just some of our roles and responsibilities in the company. So, in addition to the previous slide which is showing, you know, we lead the non-clinical, so the pre-clinical or non-clinical development strategy.

We drive the execution of all that research, the animal research, through what’s called an IND. I don’t know if you guys have heard that term before. An IND is an investigational new drug. An IND is an investigational new drug and you have to file with the regulatory agencies, the federal government, an IND that they have to review carefully and approve if you put anything in a person. So that’s why you know you. You may like hear things or no. That’s not FDA regulated, like these homeopathic medicines that you could buy at CVS. It’s not FDA. That means that nobody has provided like a significant data package to the FDA and hasn’t gotten the gold stamp of approval To do any kind of human clinical trial. You have to get FDA clearance, and so you could do that by submitting an IND.

Another part of my job is indication selection. So that’s defining the diseases that we want to study, and this all depends on what kind of molecules, what kind of viruses are being developed by that basic research team. So they sort of hand me something and they’re like what can you do with this? And, depending on the molecule or what we’re talking about, it’s like I could treat Huntington’s disease with this. Or, you know, this is maybe a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. So, depending on what you know the basic research team discovers, you know, I will implement it into a disease indication.

I work not alone. We work in a huge network. I leverage a lot of academic partners. So we have to appreciate that we’re not the only ones studying this disease. Nor can I be an expert at every disease under the sun. So a big part of my job is identifying key opinion leaders or people in the field that really understand this disease really well and forming relationships. I also support our business group at the company. So we are a company, we are not a non-for-profit, so we do need to make money, earn revenue, and part of that is by forming collaborations and partnerships with other companies. So I might have a great virus that treats the kidney, but we don’t really have the bandwidth to have a kidney program, so I might sell that virus to another company. So that’s part of how drug companies earn revenue and make money.

I write papers, so I publish papers, I publish patents, so a big part of my job is a lot of writing. So probably the part of my job I like the least. To be honest, I find it really boring and time consuming. I love doing the research. I love crunching data. This would.

This picture of me in the lab is a. It’s almost a joke because I probably step foot in the lab maybe once a year. It’s not even more frequent, infrequent, but I wish I just don’t unfortunately have the time and I’m lucky to have a team of wonderful scientists that can execute the work for me. A better part of my career. I looked like I did in this picture.

But that certainly seemed to be some of what you were saying through your yeah, I think people think of a scientist like a nerdy scientist, solitary in the lab, in a dark. You know lab that that’s not the case at all. You can’t be successful in a vacuum.

No, it’s not at all, and that’s a really interesting distinction that you identified. So we’re a virus company. Sometimes you might hear of it as like a platform company, like building and developing novel viruses are a platform. So, as the translational scientist and I’ve told you, I’m a neuroscientist by training, I have to go where the virus take me and currently, right now, they’ve taken me to the heart and even though I’m a neuroscientist, the brain is my comfort zone.

Yeah, that picture was taken in our animal facility in the middle of a necropsy. So in the laboratory, our analytics lab, for example, we would just be wearing a lab coat and goggles and that’s it. Uh, when we are taking out brains and hearts and guts and livers, oh, we like to dress from head to toe. So, um, yeah, that was a, it was an all hands on deck. I think we were taking down 98 animals over the course of a couple days days. So and yeah, it’s not glamorous, we were all sweating under there. It’s hot in there like you know.

It is yes, but we’ve had, yeah, people who run vivariums. Right, there are veterinarians who run vivariums for companies and, yeah, so I and the last last week we had a gal whose dad was a taxidermist and that’s what got her involved oh, Sam yeah.

that are A really good question, I so if you ask a hundred scientists that question, probably 99 of them would say none, because drug development is really hard and probably only less than 1% of drugs make it to the market like where they can be utilized by a patient. I’m really fortunate. I worked on a drug, a gene therapy drug, back when I was at Genzyme for spinal muscular atrophy, so if you guys want to Google that, it’s called the Zolgensma with a Z, and patients with SMA or spinal muscular atrophy don’t survive to their second birthday the gene therapy drug that we developed for them. There are patients it’s standard of care now and there are patients that are, I think, eight years old and still alive and happy and healthy and running around with their parents. That would not have survived past their second birthday.