INTRO:
Lisa Deschamps is currently the CEO of AviadoBio, a private gene therapy company based in the UK and the US, focused on neurological indications. Lisa was previously a 20-year veteran of Novartis, where she led a highly successful executive career encompassing sales, marketing, and general management across disease states and geographies.
Her career management wisdom is manifest in the course of this lively and personal interchange. Welcome to a wide-ranging and richly textured conversation with Lisa on the art of becoming/being a Biotech CEO.
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William Holodnak: Lisa, you seem to have been pragmatic from an early age, and that pragmatism impelled you toward a career in business. At the same time, you must have had a fantastic side which inspired you to start professional life in a glamour industry.
Lisa Deschamps: Yes, I always had a love for fashion and writing growing up, and thought I would either be a journalist or work in fashion merchandising. Neither of which I do today, at least professionally. Or came true, or not yet, anyway.
William Holodnak: How did you course-correct? What brought you to the pharmaceutical industry?
Lisa Deschamps: I owe my mother a lot because I went on an interview in pharma, just to appease her. A friend of the family who had been in pharmaceuticals his whole career would always tell me that I’d be great in pharmaceutical sales. I had been on the fashion track, working for Chanel.When I began to ponder the future, second thoughts emerged. Coincidentally, there was a robust expansion happening at Sandoz prior to the merger that led to Novartis, and this is where our family friend worked. But it was my mother who served as the catalyst in encouraging me to go on the interview. I just showed up to appease her, but fate intervened, and I got the job. The rest is history.
Once on board, I adjusted quickly and was helped by a mentor whom I met at the time. He was my manager on the sales side. I quickly came to love working in healthcare. There was true purpose and a mission in the work.You can truly make a difference in a very different way than in fashion, which has an impact on people's well-being. In addition, I loved the entrepreneurial aspect of being in sales and managing my own territory. So here I am, over 30 years later. And it's been an amazing journey.
William Holodnak: You are an artful improviser, pivoting once out of fashion to pharma and later pivoting out of pharma to biotech.
Your pharma career was marked by richly varied responsibilities. How did you direct your progress? In which ways did your intellect and personality drive you once you were within the belly of the beast? How did you negotiate the transitions? Did you move with self-education in mind, or were you more uni-dimensionally ambitious?
Lisa Deschamps: That's a great question. My family life was a great influence. The acorn didn’t fall far from the tree. I had the real luxury and privilege of also having a very personal mentor in my dad, who was a tech entrepreneur and serial CEO in large companies, as well as a number of different startups.
So from a very young age, I was exposed to business in a creative setting. He used to take me on trips. I would do the demos and open up these meetings in big scary boardrooms, and would do the intros, and he would say, “This is so easy. Even a child can do it.”
Along my journey, I've worked for many other leaders, some who offered encouragement and were great role models, and others who weren’t as usefully engaged. In every experience, you learn. And so, I think of the career journey as a lot of twists. I don't think of transitions as dramatic pivots, more as foundational layers that one builds upon.
William Holodnak: I've noticed in pharma careers that successful leaders often begin in sales. Then they migrate to marketing, and then a combination of sales and marketing. Then, a further progression to business unit management. Becoming an effective salesperson serves you well, no matter what your position or evolution in life. It is the foundational business skill.But sales by itself doesn't prepare you for general management. Business success requires push, and it requires persuasion, but full success also requires lateral vision and thinking big, beyond the next transaction.
Lisa Deschamps: Yes, definitely. With every experience, you have to have a certain level of intellectual curiosity. I approach every role with what I hope to be enlightened enthusiasm. And it's not just doing the task right. I always want to understand the bigger picture. The macro context.
I think sales is a great foundation. Working with people, collaborating with people, building teams, and influencing others is a great skill to have in any career. As you think about marketing, it's more about strategy. And then the combination of sales and marketing is about having that vision and putting a strategy together, and then being able to execute, implement, and deliver results.
William Holodnak: Well, that's a classical description of the way executives can decisively progress. You’re moving from enthusiasm to introspection, to influencing and execution. At Novartis, which assignments propelled you forward in a distinctive fashion?
Lisa Deschamps: There were a number of different milestones. The first one was an international assignment, which came early on in my career. I grew up in New York with a very insular view of the world. All this changed when, as a junior marketer, Novartis asked me to go and live with my family in Switzerland. For three and a half years, I worked on global campaigns and global launches. This experience at a personal and professional level expanded my horizons.
The second milestone occurred just when I came back from my global role. I was now running a mini franchise: a richer combination of marketing, sales, market access, etc. This was a small business unit for inflammatory diseases, so I worked on a brand that was actually a couple of different things. It was not only my first general management role, but it was also on an ultra-rare orphan indication (one in a million) involving a different method of drug development for Novartis. The peak sales were projected to be only $2.3M, and I was like, “Why would I come back fromSwitzerland to take a very small role like this?” That said, the charter had real breadth and involved R&D innovation. Finally, it was a brilliant career move.
It was the poster child for the new way Novartis did drug development, but it also taught me a very important lesson, which was that what appeared to be on the surface wasn’t necessarily always what was underneath, and being open-minded to something that looked very different could be just as big a learning. Something that to someone else perhaps seemed very obvious.
William Holodnak: So those were two formative jobs, one because of international exposure, and the other because you're taking a backward step in revenue oversight but taking on a much broader and more textured decision-making role. It sounds like they would both prepare you well for the radical uncertainties and diminished resources of biotech.
How did you happen to get engaged in CNS?
Lisa Deschamps: I first went into neuroscience as a group marketing leader, where I had a number of neuroscience brands earlier in my career, and then I went back later on in my business unit roles in the US, then as global head of neuroscience. So, I was in and out. I enteredAlzheimer's in 2009/2010, when there was very little innovation. And it's only recently that we've started to see more scientific advancement in Alzheimer's. So, I've seen neuroscience come in and out of favor, and it continues to represent such a significant unmet medical need, with high risk, high reward.
William Holodnak: As I recall from prior conversations, you wound up running what was an independent company in AveXis, and this was an exposure to a different modality: gene therapy. How did you get into that role? Because that was maybe the purest analog for what you're now doing, if not only in terms of subject matter, but sociologically in terms of running a “foreign body” within a larger corporation.
Lisa Deschamps: Yes, absolutely so. It set a great foundation for my current role. I was leading our US neuroscience business, then asked to take on the global business role within Novartis. So, I moved back to Switzerland, my second time in that country. As part of building out the neuroscience franchise, we were looking at spinal muscular atrophy. We had a proprietary product in our internal translational group.
We started a landscaping exercise just to see if this was a product we wanted to bring from translation into the franchise. And then we found AveXis, a CNS gene therapy company with multiple assets, but the primary near-term one was an AAV9 product for spinal muscular atrophy. This treatment was for kids who would otherwise, in its most severe form, die before the age of two. And the data was just so compelling that we decided to go after the company from an acquisition perspective. So, my team did the acquisition. I led the integration and then went over to lead the worldwide launch and commercialization of Zolgensma, which is still to this day the most successful and prescribed gene therapy in the world.
William Holodnak: Amazing, and that brings us to the present, as in the past four years. I remember doing the search for AviadoBio. The search committee did its usual thing. The ideal candidate was somebody who had been in Pharma and had moved to biotech and made money for shareholders.The alleged risk-free profile. It's far from that, because you have to get somebody who is successful and remains motivated. You now know how hard the CEO role is in biotech. If somebody is successful at it once, you have to make very sure that they have the character/mania to do it again.
Our approach was comprehensive. We showed them serial CEOs.Then, we presented first-time CEOs from biotech, usually Chief BusinessOfficers, a candidate category that's de-risked by virtue of prior exposure to biotech. But the risk revolves around the issue of whether or not such individuals can ratchet up to being a full general manager.
You, Lisa, were the only person that we presented from the third phenotype, somebody out of Big Pharma. Normally, there's antipathy to your species because the members are usually regarded as political and overly reliant on corporate resources and branded identity. And the AviadoBio search committee was not favorably disposed to the category, but for all the reasons that are now readily apparent to our audience—the vivacity of your career in big pharma, your demonstrated improvisational ability, your cross-cultural sensibility, your creativity, curiosity and self-awareness—they embraced casting you against type.
Now, some questions for you around the transition to entrepreneurship. What was most on your mind when we asked you to think about disrupting a brilliant career at Novartis? I'm sure there were bigger and better jobs ahead of you in the Novartis hierarchy. What inspired your interest, other than our charm, to make this move in 2021?
Lisa Deschamps: Going to biotech was for me always more of a when rather than if. I always had an interest in doing something a bit more entrepreneurial, and I felt like all the experiences that I had along my career journey at Novartis really set me up well for that transition. AfterI had done the gene therapy role, I felt like I couldn't find anything else atNovartis that would feel as inspiring. And so, when you called, I was ready.
That said, it had to be for an opportunity about which I was passionate, and one that I felt had all the foundational elements for success. AviadoBio was in the right disease area, had a great group of committed investors, and a brilliant, charismatic scientific founder, Professor ChrisShaw, a person with whom I connected instinctively and intellectually. At the same time, it was a company that was, I would say, the least secure financially among the alternatives I was considering. AviadoBio had less than six months of runway, was just seeded, and needed to do a Series A. But it just felt right tome. It just spoke to me, and I felt it was the right time to make the leap. It was scary. I would be lying if I said it wasn't. But it just felt right.
William Holodnak: After taking the leap, what’s been the biggest adjustment? Biotech CEOs have to be raising money all the time.Then there is assembling and leading a strong team so that you can leverage yourself for setting the vision of the company. And then there are boards of directors to populate, or manage and repopulate. All obvious challenges.
Lisa Deschamps: The biggest challenge, and the one that still keeps me up at night, is not having revenue to offset my spend. So, to your point, I'm always raising money, and that is different than what I had done before. In my previous roles—especially in the last 10 or 12 years atNovartis, where I was leading large, therapeutically focused business units—I also had products that were minus 10 years to the market, so they were still in translation or early clinical development. But at the same time, I was managing products that were in the market, so I had revenue as well as spend. At AviadoBio, we still don't have a product on the market that's generating revenue.
Getting into that mindset and being comfortable only spending, while recognizing revenue, is very different. As you say, raising money was a skill that I had to develop, and very quickly, I mean. Even before I officially started, I was talking to investors about the Series A, and I had never done that. I remember looking up what a tranche is and learning the lingo, too. Making sure that I could sound intelligent from day one was scary.
William Holodnak: Any advice for those contemplating the move to Biotech?
Lisa Deschamps: Overall, I think if people are interested in making the transition, the most important thing to think about is: what are the transferable skills that you've learned and developed across your career? As there are going to be a lot of new skills that are going to need to be developed on top of that. So, really understanding what you're bringing to the table and what you can leverage, versus what you have to learn that is new, I think, really helps to prepare yourself for the calculus of taking the leap.
William Holodnak: Last question. What was the biggest surprise? Obviously, you had to adapt to the unending need for cash, but was there another, more subtle, or just different circumstance that you did not expect?
Lisa Deschamps: I would say, another thing is on the people side. When you work in biotech, you often have—especially in the early days of forming a biotech company—a little bit of an imbalance of academic experience versus industry experience. And how do those things balance out?What do they look like? What does the company need in the early days versus as the company is developing and getting either more toward the clinic or toward commercial, etc.? Understanding that dynamic, the gaps, the opportunities, and the strengths that people bring to the table is really important.
Another lesson I learned early on is: when you're raising money, don't just think about the money you need to do the work now until the end of the runway. Think about the money you need to effectively evolve, what amount will also cover you to the next raise. Because you have to have the data to generate it, but then you also need the time to use that data to raise off of. That might add another six, or nine, or even 12 months to the runway. So, that was something I didn't initially know, and I learned as we went.
Then I would say also, when you're hiring talent in biotech versus in big pharma, you have to think: what do we need for the next two years? Whereas in pharma, I was very trained, especially as I continued to grow in my career, that you want to hire leaders who have runway for five, 10 years,15 years to build a career within the company. Here in biotech, you're looking for—I mean, that's ideal, if you can find that. But at a minimum, you need somebody who has the skills and the expertise and could be off and running for what you need in those next two years.
The balance of the talent in the organization between academic and industry experience, I would say. Making sure you have cash not only to do the work, but to raise off of the work that you're doing. And then making sure that you have talent who can be on the job in the moment and do what you need for the next two years. These were my three reflections early on that provided key learnings for me.
