Jennifer Griffin started her career at the bench at UMass Medical Center where she earned her doctorate. After stints in academic tech transfer and biotech consulting, she joined the Mass Life Sciences Center in 2017 to lead its Industry Strategy and Investments program. Jennifer led MLSC in developing MassNextGen, a $2M+ public-private partnership to support women entrepreneurs and other investment programs for early-stage companies. She also developed $10M+ in new Women’s Health-focused investment to drive innovation and industry partnership in the space.
Q: Jennifer, your experience spans academia, government, and the private sector. Can you give us a brief background on yourself, your career, and how you’ve navigated different opportunities in a wide array of fields?
A: The common thread of my experiences has been working with early-stage companies. During my PhD, I wanted to apply my science in a way that would have an actual impact on patients, and not just stay in academia.
I started in MIT’s licensing office which is one of the busiest in the nation. Here, we helped advanced researchers protect breakthrough academic discoveries while licensing out those early-stage discoveries to partner institutions. This significantly increased the likelihood those discoveries would be commercialized and get into the hands of patients.
Through this process, I learned about, and really liked, structuring and negotiating deals. It was fun and intellectually challenging and the people that I interacted with (entrepreneurs, inventors, investors) were thinking about science in ways that I found fascinating.
I decided to build on this initial experience by working in strategy consulting at Back Bay Life Sciences. Here, I worked with venture-backed, preclinical biotech companies who even in their earliest days wanted a better understanding of their exit.
During my 3 years, I did a lot of liquidity planning and represented companies on the sell side when the time came for their exit. It was a great opportunity and I wasn’t really looking to leave, but an opportunity presented itself to work at the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center in 2017.
As a Massachusetts native, and public school educated entirely through my PhD, the opportunities I had in my career to that point I felt were unique to a place like the Commonwealth. It was an opportunity to do something that had an impact and keep Massachusetts great.
We’ll discuss this work as well as my current post in VC later in the conversation, but my guidepost for both experiences has been:
How do we make sure that this very, uniquely complex biotech ecosystem stays strong? To do this successfully, we must provide founders with the tools they need to succeed and enable access to larger companies with more resources that can help them flourish.
Q: What are some of the factors that have made the early-stage biotech/life-science ecosystem uniquely challenging?
A: The biggest difference between tech founders and most biotech founders (not all) is the capital intensity of their pursuit. Up until 10 or so years ago, you needed a lab with very sophisticated and expensive research equipment.
That came along with million-dollar releases and multi-year leases, and that required several rounds of significant capital raises before even having proof of concept. Developing the product is one thing, but once it is “market-ready,” getting through regulatory bodies like the FDA is not trivial and carries significant risk.
Compare this with tech, where companies can get into an office, outfit a few employees with computers, and test their hypothesis by building a prototype and testing/refining it in the marketplace.
What I’ve been fortunate enough to accomplish in my career is helping compress product development timelines and decrease the capital intensity for biotech founders. Primarily by bringing big pharma companies into the equation earlier.
These larger institutions are very motivated to find opportunities that fill their drug development pipeline. Now they are collaborating with these innovative founders earlier, making investments from their venture arm, and helping speed the regulatory process because their endorsement offers credibility.
I’d say 15, 20 years ago, pharma’s pipeline was 25% externally sourced and the rest developed in-house. Now you’re seeing 60-70% of pharma pipelines coming from external opportunities which is accelerating the pace of innovation for the whole ecosystem.
Q: Let’s dive into Mission BioCapital a bit and your current work – what kind of companies do you invest in? How might those differ from some of the other experiences? And what are your long-term goals?
A: Mission Bio Capital is an early-stage biotherapeutics venture firm that primarily writes seed and series A checks. We are unique because we’re affiliated with a network of incubators. Currently, there are 23 incubators in 13 cities around the world – and that network continues to grow.
Our general partners saw some of the challenges I discussed earlier around Biotech company creation and the difficulty of raising capital in this complex industry. They decided to address this by starting incubators that both reduced the cost of office space and fostered increased collaboration with potential partners.
The incubators are more than just shared infrastructure. They are communities where founders can succeed by building relationships with other founders, investors, pharma, etc.
If you’re applying for residency in the incubators, we’ll hear your pitch and then provide our recommendation around who is ready for residency in the incubators.
For the companies that do get accepted, we live alongside these entrepreneurs. Before we even write checks, we’re making introductions, looking at data, observing their teams, and just generally evaluating how companies are taking advantage of what we’re offering.
After 6-12 months we will invest in a small handful of the hundreds of companies we’ll look at every year through this model. We’re a typical early-stage biotech investment firm when it comes to numbers, but we’re atypical when it comes to strategy.
We are big believers that these incubators are spaces where first-time founders can thrive. After these companies reach a stage of growth where they spin out, we help by taking temporary operational roles and then bringing in full-time CEOs following the round that gets raised.
We lead and participate in syndicates and also do a little bit of company creation as we meet really expert drug developers through the lab network – primarily around themes like sound engine therapy or neurodegeneration.
We do a little bit of everything. One of the reasons I was excited to join was that this lab network democratizes who can become a biotech founder. You don’t have to get to us through a warm intro, you just apply to the labs.
