The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast

Transcript of Episode 25: Fernando Martinez

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain errors.

Grant Belgard: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast. I’m Grant Belgard. And joining me today is Fernando Martinez. Fernando did his AB in physics at Princeton, followed by an MSC in biophysics at Stanford and a PhD in biomedical sciences at UCSD. He’s now a senior scientist at Fountain Therapeutics. Welcome, Fernando.

Fernando Martinez: [00:00:16] Thanks, Grant. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Grant Belgard: [00:00:20] Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. So can you tell us about what you’re doing in Fountain?

Fernando Martinez: [00:00:24] Yeah, I’d be happy to. I’m just coming up on my two year anniversary on Fountain. I think it was maybe yesterday. We’re a company that’s interested in longevity and anti-aging technology. It was founded by a couple of people. But one person who’s involved is Tom Rando from Stanford, and he’s quite famous for his mouse Parabiosis experiments where he showed that blood from a young mouse could actually rejuvenate an aged mouse. So we have a modern spin on that where we harvest primary cells from young and aged mice, and then we put them in culture and we train various computer vision algorithms to estimate the age of images of the cells. So we can obviously train it because we know what the age of the mouse was ahead of time. Once we have a model that can estimate the age of cells basically from microscopy images, we screen drugs and then ask the same model to basically estimate the age of cells that have been treated with drugs. And we’re searching for compounds that might be able to rejuvenate or reverse some of the signs of aging. And so far, it’s gone really well. It’s really promising. I think everybody who’s involved has been really impressed. So as to my role, I joined Fountain like I said, about two years ago and it was a pretty small operation at that time. It was still small, but maybe there’s only like, I don’t know, I think five of us. And we’re just in a temporary space, an incubator space with a bunch of other small companies. I’ve been doing a whole a whole hodgepodge of different things. My boss, Joe Rogers, he actually calls me the utility infielder for Fountain Therapeutics because I just need to play whatever position the team needs at that time.

Grant Belgard: [00:02:20] Sounds like a startup.

Fernando Martinez: [00:02:22] Yeah. So far, I’ve been happy to do it. The main things that I did during my my first two years was trying to figure out how to automate and standardize the assay that we were doing. So mostly involved buying and setting up a couple pieces of automation equipment that let us increase our throughput pretty dramatically. So when I first started, we were maybe working with only a handful of 96 well plates and now we’re processing up to 6384 well plates per week, screening a whole bunch of different compounds. So that came about through optimization of our assays, but also finding the right equipment and configuring it to work for us. The other thing that I’ve been involved in, and I got roped into this just by chance, is we had someone leave that was spearheading a lot of the computational work, especially the image pre-processing. So there’s quite a bit of pre-processing involved in getting the microscopy images ready to go into a classification network, let’s say, for machine learning. So I took over a lot of that work, improving the performance and just adding features, I guess to our pre-processing pipeline. And I’ve been working on that with a software engineer that we hired and that’s been great. So yeah, it’s actually very different from the work that I’ve done previously in my career, but I’m happy with it so far. Like I said, I get the opportunity to be a utility infielder and do something different.

Grant Belgard: [00:03:56] That’s really interesting. So of course there are a lot of hypotheses floating around about aging. Which of those do you think are amenable to being rescued in cellular models and which do you think are not?

Fernando Martinez: [00:04:12] That’s a good question, and it’s interesting that you should bring that up because Fountain doesn’t actually use a hypothesis of aging. We do unbiased screening, but there are other people that have tried to select libraries, small molecules or large molecules according to a hypothesis. So in terms of which hypotheses are amenable and which are not, I think is still an open question, to be honest. I wouldn’t say that there is a drug on the market right now that anybody says is really like a rejuvenating agent or anti aging. But I can’t give you probably my best example and that would be arthritis. I guess the hypothesis there is inflammation. If you look at drugs, that interfere with the TNF Alpha pathway and Remicade and Humira are the biggest ones. That’s definitely hypothesis driven and there’s definitely something to it because those drugs have had a huge impact on how people treat arthritis. There’s cases where someone was in a wheelchair before they had access to one of these drugs and now they can play golf. There’s actually cases like that. We also know that they’re some of the best selling drugs on the planet that have made billions of dollars for the companies that made them. So I definitely think there’s something to the inflammation hypothesis if that’s where people want to look. There’s other things like senescent cells, that hasn’t worked out for anybody yet. But, who’s to say that that it won’t.

Grant Belgard: [00:05:46] What do you think are the strongest hypotheses in aging right now?

Fernando Martinez: [00:05:51] I think inflammation is a pretty important component. It seems like there’s definitely something in the immune system that’s not the same in a young patient versus an aged patient. We can see this with COVID. I think there could be some interesting things having to do with extracellular matrix proteins, for example. If you look at things like osteoporosis or fibrosis, where all of a sudden it’s much more common in an aged patient and a young patient, inflammation could certainly be involved there. But there might be something that’s separate from that, just having to do with the deposition of extracellular matrix proteins. That’s certainly interesting. The other thing that I would say is probably pretty promising would be some hormones or growth factors that are declining in age. I mean, that’s certainly the implication from Tom Rando’s work that I mentioned earlier. I think the trouble is that nobody’s really found like 1 or 2 molecules that are rejuvenating. But that’s not to say that we won’t. And to be honest, there are, I would say, evidence of some large molecules and hormones. I mean, certainly some people advocate for hormone replacement therapy for men with low testosterone, for instance or there’s cases where people will give human growth hormone to a burn victim or something, let’s say, because it does seem to increase the rate at which the injury heals. So I think there’s something to that. But you then you get into the question of whether or not it was worth the side effects. And I think that’s really the rub with taking any any kind of hormone, is that it usually does lots of other things that you didn’t really intend.

Grant Belgard: [00:07:34] So speaking of COVID, it’s interesting because the odds ratios for age are just so much higher than for it seems pretty much anything else. What are your thoughts on that? How do you think the kind of COVID risk that’s age related fits in with mechanisms of aging?

Fernando Martinez: [00:07:52] I’m not super well versed on it, but from the bit that I’ve reading that I’ve done, it seems like there’s a pretty substantial inflammation component. I’m not sure that there’s controlled studies available yet. There may be, but it seems anecdotally and observationally, once they started treating patients that were getting severe disease with things like dexamethasone, that seemed to have a pretty big impact on the outcome of those patients, at least that’s my understanding from the doctors doing it. So yeah, I think there is some inflammation component there and I think that’s consistent with just how sick some people get after they get severe disease. Some people stay extremely ill for months. Some of the patients who have died are or even not died have spent a couple of months in the hospital or the ICU. And this is way after the virus is gone, probably a couple of weeks after infection that you can’t test for the virus anymore. And yet these people are still on a ventilator, fluid on their lungs or whatever. So I think that’s indicative of something going on in their own bodies that’s separate from the virus.

Grant Belgard: [00:09:00] Do you think there might be any intersection between the work you’re doing at Fountain and COVID Therapeutics?

Fernando Martinez: [00:09:06] We have done some work with lung epithelial cells. It’s too early for me to really comment too much on that, but it’s definitely an area of interest for us.

Grant Belgard: [00:09:16] Cool. So can you maybe take us back to the beginning? Tell us about young Fernando growing up and what led you to do what you did and how did you ultimately end up where you are now?

Fernando Martinez: [00:09:30] Yeah, I’d be happy to. So I grew up in New Jersey. It’s South Jersey. It’s a town called Mount Laurel. It’s actually a suburb of Philadelphia. So that’s the thing that’s interesting, is that we tend to affiliate much more with Philadelphia, Philly sports teams and that sort of thing. It’s different from what you would expect from someone from New Jersey. But yeah, South Jersey is its own little region, even though it’s inside of a very small state. So yeah, I grew up in this medium sized town. I would say is pretty typical suburban childhood, moved around a couple times. So we’re always in these same small towns in South Jersey. I went to public school for most of my young life and I got started in swimming relatively early. I actually started when I was six and I continued doing it throughout high school and college. High school was relatively uneventful, small town growing up, playing sports and all that. But I got interested in physics even when I was in high school. I had one teacher who was really, really good. His name was Mr. Hessler, and he just did a great job of getting everybody really excited about physics, even taking the class outside at night with telescopes to look at Saturn and the moon and all that kind of thing. So at the time to apply to college, it’s looking around. And I knew that Princeton had a pretty good physics program. It’s right there in New Jersey. I figured why not give it a shot? So I actually applied early and I was fortunate enough to get in. This is 15 years ago. So the odds are a lot lower now.

Grant Belgard: [00:11:05] Which they seem to tout. Like there’s always a press release every admission cycle, it seems.

Fernando Martinez: [00:11:10] Yeah. I mean that the odds of admission keep going down. I don’t know. I guess that’s a good thing to the admissions office. Not sure how I feel about that, but once I got there, I had an advisor that told me that my interest in physics might have been important for me being accepted because there is a big push by the department actually to get more students in that were interested in physics. The department is very small there. It’s usually only like 25 undergraduates or something like that, that choose to major in physics. The thing about physics is a pretty vast area of research. You can have nuclear or particle and theoretical and experimental disciplines, all these different things. So it’s up to the student to decide what they want because you obviously can’t know everything. But I started to get interested in biophysics and that’s from meeting a couple professors that were pretty interesting and influential also just because it’s still a relatively small area of research, I guess. Not that it’s not important, but there’s a lot of questions in biophysics that can be addressed with relatively small experiments or just some creative theories that it hasn’t evolved to the point of something like high energy physics where it’s not really possible to do a very impactful experiment in high energy physics, unless you have access to a huge staff and a particle accelerator and all these kind of things, that’s just how things have evolved.

[00:12:41] So I’d say that biophysics is still at an earlier stage where it’s still possible to do thought experiments or benchtop experiments that still have a very high impact. The two professors at Princeton that were really important for my decision to continue studying biophysics were David Tank and Bob Austin. So David Tank is a pretty distinguished neuroscientist. He worked at Bell Labs back in the 90s, and he contributed both experimentally and theoretically to what we know about neuroscience, especially neural networks, and also these high tech recording techniques that let people probe individual neurons and neural circuits and try to figure out what’s going on. The other scientist, Bob Austin, he’s a condensed matter physicist who’s interested in biological materials. So he’s got a wide ranging research like looking at devices and things like that that can be used to analyze or sort biomolecules development of fluorescent probes and things like that. So yeah, that was college, I guess.

Grant Belgard: [00:13:48] I assume you’re also a party animal.

Fernando Martinez: [00:13:50] Yeah, I was a bit of a party animal.

Grant Belgard: [00:13:54] I was not expecting that response.

Fernando Martinez: [00:13:57] It’s important to be social when you’re young.

Grant Belgard: [00:13:59] Well, for physics majors usually aren’t.

Fernando Martinez: [00:14:02] It’s tough, right? There’s a lot to manage there. If you have 3 or 4 pretty complicated physics classes. And then I was swimming about 20 hours a week, like the maximum that the NCAA would allow, pretty much. So I had to juggle my homework, my classes and that kind of thing. So every now and then you just need to go out with your friends and have a good time and not worry about that stuff.

Grant Belgard: [00:14:25] Were you in an eating club?

Fernando Martinez: [00:14:27] I was in an eating club. I don’t know maybe I should say something about that. I guess that people might not be familiar. But Princeton, we do have fraternities, but it’s not a very big scene in terms of the social life the university has. It’s 11 clubs now. They’re quite old, a lot of them. The history goes back at least a century. Probably about two thirds of the upperclassmen, juniors and seniors will join one of these clubs. And it’s really just number one, a place to eat. So instead of the university dining hall, most people take their meals there. Number two, it’s a place to socialize and meet people. So for the most part, they’ll host parties and other events a couple of times a week. You can hang out with your friends and meet new people, that sort of thing. I was in an eating club called the Cloister Inn. We just call it Cloister, but it had a reputation for having a lot of swimmers and rowers, so we probably had about half the swim team and half the rowing team in Cloister and a bunch of other people from the university as well.

Grant Belgard: [00:15:30] So your masters was still in biophysics so it sounds like it was a slow transition from physics to bench biology. Can you tell us about that? And I know you did some things in the intervening periods.

Fernando Martinez: [00:15:42] So yeah after undergrad, I decided I would apply to grad school. I didn’t consider too much what else I would do. I applied and I got into Stanford into their biophysics program, which was a very small program. I think it still is. There’s typically only like, I don’t know, six or so students per year that they accept. So I moved all the way across the country. Until that point, I had grown up and lived in New Jersey. I think it was the first time I’d been in California, other than my interviews at Stanford and Cal and a few other places, and I started in the biophysics program there. So I actually started in a PhD program. I left early. That’s why I have the Master’s. So I’ll touch on that in a second. But the lab that I joined was pretty hardcore electrophysiology, so I was doing single cell recordings from slices and in Vivo Mouse Brain, really classic like patch clamping that people have done for a lot of years. So that was a pretty interesting experience. I’m pretty happy that I did that actually, because that’s a pretty unique skill that is not that common anymore in traditional biology as everything has shifted towards cellular and molecular. So I mentioned that I started a PhD program there and I actually left after three years, I think. So what happened was I actually injured myself pretty severely.

[00:17:07] I was rock climbing and I had a pretty bad knee injury in my second year of grad school. I ended up having five surgeries on it and I spent six months, maybe more on crutches. So there’s a pretty complicated injury. And the doctors just didn’t know what to do. And I just had one surgery after another and hundreds of physical therapy appointments by the end of it. It really put me in a tough spot and cut into what I was able to do. I ended up leaving after three years with my masters, and I joined a company at the time. It was called Hyperion. Hyperion was a pretty interesting company. It was founded, I think, about 2007ish, like right after Shinya Yamanaka published his famous induced pluripotent stem cell work. So the whole point of Hyperion was to get IPS cells from patients and differentiate them into various kinds of neural tissue. At the time, we were mostly working with motor neurons, but we moved to astrocytes and also cortical neurons. So the idea was to differentiate these neurons from patients that are affected with various neurodegenerative diseases and screened drugs against them to see if there was something we could find that would reverse this disease phenotype. So I spent two and a half years at Hyperion, which was a pretty interesting experience. We actually had five different CEOs in the two and a half years that I was there.

Grant Belgard: [00:18:41] How large was the company at the time?

Fernando Martinez: [00:18:43] At the time I joined, the company was about 15 people, and the biggest that we got was 50 people towards the end of my tenure there. But it was a pretty volatile place in a lot of ways. So the rapid turnover of senior staff that I mentioned, it was also at the time Hyperion was a pretty hot topic. It was funded by Kleiner Perkins, while the firm was still in their heyday. There’s a lot of money and a lot of expectations that came with it. So while I was there, I worked on their ALS and their SMA program, and that was my first opportunity to learn about high throughput screening and small molecule screening, because that was so important to the company. There were a lot of people there that were extremely expert in that you had having come from Lake Merck, ultra-high-throughput screening labs. So that’s my first introduction to robotics, compound handling and high throughput screening.

Grant Belgard: [00:19:40] And they’re ultimately acquired by BMS, right?

Fernando Martinez: [00:19:43] Yeah, that’s right. So Hyperion was acquired by BMS. Let’s see, I left in 2011, wrapped up my work and we submitted a paper. Then I went back to grad school at UCSD, and then a couple of years later, Hyperion was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb. It was acquired based on some work that we had done on an Anti-tau antibody that was intended for some rare familial tauopathies and an Alzheimer’s disease. I forget what the dollar value of the acquisition was. It was pretty significant at the time, $600 million or something like that, including the milestone payments. And then the thing that’s interesting is that Bristol-Myers Squibb then sold the company a couple of years later. After wrapping up a phase one trial, they sold the company to Biogen because they decided they didn’t want to work on neuroscience anymore. Biogen actually still has the asset, the antibody from Hyperion. It’s in a couple clinical trials. One of them flunked, unfortunately, maybe a year or two ago, but they still have it going in at least one more that I know of. So yeah, I’m still rooting for them and hoping for the best at Biogen.

Grant Belgard: [00:20:57] Do you consider those assets your babies jointly?

Fernando Martinez: [00:20:59] Yeah me and hundreds of other people that I’ve worked on it since then. I think that most people that were there are very proud of it. But it goes to show you how long some of these things can take, right? Because I left the company in 2011 and Biogen is still working on it now. In 2021, there’s hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into that since then. So as I mentioned, I left the company in 2011 to go back to grad school.

Grant Belgard: [00:21:33] Why did you decide to do that? Because you went like full on biologist at that point, right?

Fernando Martinez: [00:21:38] Yeah. That’s a good point. I kind of over the years moved away from physics. I haven’t used an oscilloscope or something in probably longer than I can remember. I wouldn’t say there’s really a conscious decision to continue to to move in that way. I think it’s just easy for me to transition to different spots in my career, I guess, by doing that. And the other thing is I really did like the work that I was doing at Hyperion because I felt like we really had a chance to help someone, not that a physicist can’t help someone. But it was pretty rewarding to work on something that could be a medicine one day that someone would actually take and it might improve their life. For those reasons, I was comfortable moving more and more towards biology. So yeah, I guess as to the question of why decided to go and do my PhD, I wanted to do that for a while. I felt like I had been dealt an unlucky hand, I guess, and that I should take an opportunity to correct that, I guess, if I could. The only thing that really cost me was time. There’s a few years spent working on a master’s degree, that’s not that important for my career anymore, I guess. But you still learn something during that time.

[00:22:57] I certainly don’t regret the time that I spent at Hyperion. I certainly learned a lot there. Having thought all of this through, I got to like an inflection point at Hyperion where I had wrapped up a project and we had put packaged everything into a paper. This is actually the first small molecule screen that I know of where we screened maybe 20,000 compounds in IPS derived motor neurons from ALS patients. So we put that together into a paper and it was just a pretty good place. If I were ever going to leave the company for me to move on because it’s had achieved a major milestone. So I took that opportunity to apply to a bunch of other schools in California. California had become home for me, I guess at that time. I’d been there for so many years. So I got accepted to UCSD and I went there and met a few professors that I actually still am in contact with now. I really liked them in the work that they were doing. The main people that influenced me were Larry Goldstein, Gene Yau and Bruce Hamilton. So there are three pretty distinguished full professors there. I was just so impressed with their work and the conversations that we had that I accepted the offer from UCSD and moved down to San Diego.

Grant Belgard: [00:24:17] This is a bit of a diversion. But speaking of California, has your attitude on that changed at all over the years?

Fernando Martinez: [00:24:23] Yeah. There’s a lot of things that have happened, I guess over the intervening years. So let’s think, I got to California in 2006 and I’ve lived in Palo Alto, San Diego, and various other places in the Bay Area. So there’s still a lot of things that I like about California. I mean, it’s full of wide open spaces.

Grant Belgard: [00:24:45] It is beautiful.

Fernando Martinez: [00:24:46] Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot there. There’s the mountains, the desert, and a huge and very beautiful coastline. So I was fortunate to be close to there when I was in San Diego and in the Bay Area as well. But there’s a couple things that I’m not too crazy about. Just to give you an idea, when I was working at Hyperion, I was renting a pretty old apartment that wasn’t the best in Burlingame, and I was renting it for about $1,000 a month. This is kind of like 2008 to 2011. And the landlord actually only gave me a month to month lease because they told me that the building was in such a state of disrepair that they were considering demolishing the entire building and building something else. So if you fast forward to 2017, when I was moving from San Diego back to the Bay Area, it’s looking around for apartments. And I came across the exact same apartment that I had rented in 2011, and it hasn’t been demolished. And to my knowledge, there hasn’t been any significant improvement to the building. But instead of renting for $1,000 a month, which at the time was extremely expensive, it now rents for $2,200 a month. So I would say that that’s pretty typical story for most of the populated areas in San Diego where the commercial development over the time that I’ve been there has just exploded. And for various reasons, the residential development has not kept up.

[00:26:20] And it’s put people into a pretty tough spot including myself. I mean, the proposition of paying someone $25,000 a year for a property that they were previously considering demolishing. That’s kind of an interesting thing. But yeah, I would say that’s something that’s not terribly positive about California. It’s only gotten worse in the time that I’ve been there. 2011 moved from Bay Area to San Diego to start school at UCSD. So I joined the Biomedical Sciences program, which is pretty vanilla bread and butter, a biology program. I rotated through a couple of the labs that I interviewed with when I was there visiting Larry Goldstein’s lab, Gene Yau’s Lab and Human Genetics Lab, Joe Gleason’s lab. I had a pretty good time everywhere that I rotated in. But I decided to join Gene Yau’s lab, which was a risk at the time because at that time, Gene was still an assistant professor as opposed to Larry and Joe that were like full professor in HHMI. But I decided to join Gene’s lab for a couple of different reasons. One was Gene was and still is really focused on RNA biology and an RNA binding proteins. And of course, when I was at Hyperion, one of the proteins that we were interested in when we were working on ALS was TDP-43, which is a pretty famous RNA binding protein. So I knew that Gene was interested in TDP-43, and I knew that I could get opportunity to look at the protein in more detail and the mechanisms of disease.

[00:27:57] I guess in ALS, which we were less concerned about at Hyperion because we were busy screening small molecules and all that. The other thing was that Gene, he was and he still is a really enthusiastic guy. He’s always excited about science. It doesn’t matter too much what it is. He’s always excited and he’s able to recruit and get a lot of people into the lab that were also really enthusiastic and really excited. Sometimes you’ll come across an academic lab where a lot of the postdocs don’t really want to be there, like people are just looking for the exit whatever they need to do to get their next thing. And somehow Gene’s lab didn’t have so much of that. Most of the postdocs that were there were really stoked about the work that they were doing and they were still engaged. So that’s why I decided to do that. And he ended up being my advisor for the five years that it took me to finish my PhD. We’re still friends, we still talk. He actually had his ten year anniversary of the founding of his lab when he got his assistant professor position and he invited myself and a lot of other alumni back to San Diego and we had a great time. So it’s become a community of people that that still talk and look out for each other even years later.

Grant Belgard: [00:29:14] And then you went into biotech.

Fernando Martinez: [00:29:16] That’s right. So then I went back to biotech. After I finished my PhD, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was doing a bunch of different things. I was interviewing for all kinds of different jobs, biotech companies. I was interviewing with venture capital firms. I interviewed with some management consulting, even investment banks like sell-side equity research, just all kinds of things. I probably took maybe 60 job interviews or something like that, and I still hadn’t really decided what I wanted to do. So I needed some way to pay the bills. And that’s how I got started working with Verge Genomics. Verge actually hired me as a consultant because the company was so small and early stage at that point. They hired me as a consultant to work on some of their early programs on ALS and a couple other things. That worked for me because I was working remotely and helping this small company to grow and plan their next experiment. But at the same time, I could still take plenty of time to go around and talk to people trying to figure out what I would do next, I guess.

Grant Belgard: [00:30:22] Cool. And so been going through your education and dipping in and out of biotech and going back and all this, what would you say are the most impactful things you’ve learned?

Fernando Martinez: [00:30:31] I would say probably the most important thing that I’ve learned is that your relationships matter, maybe even more so than what milestones or what your salary was or whatever at any particular place, because biotech is still a relatively small community. It’s obviously growing, but where I am here in the Bay Area, a lot of people know each other, either directly or by association and work together for a lot of years. So your reputation and your relationships, that’s really important. I can’t stress that enough. Be nice to everybody. You never know where you’re going to run into these people again. And they they may be able to help you or you may have the opportunity to help them.

Grant Belgard: [00:31:15] Was there anything that surprised you? I guess in your case, you had already worked at a biotech before doing your PhD, so maybe you weren’t as influenced by misperceptions as some other students might be.

Fernando Martinez: [00:31:30] Yeah, I think I was fortunate about that. I would say that and maybe this goes into another piece of advice, I think it behooves people to think pretty carefully about where they decide to work. One thing that you see with students who know that they want out of academia and they want to go to a biotech is they think that basically any biotech job is going to be better than whatever their alternative is. That’s just not the case. Just because you land a job at a biotech, doesn’t mean that it could be a very unpleasant place to work in general, or it could be the wrong place for you to work. That’s one thing when I talk to students, I try to tell them to do some due diligence on these places that they’re considering working. A lot of small biotech companies are founded on the promise of some new technology. And a lot of times that it’s untested. So one thing that I tell students is to look at whatever technology this biotech company is pitching and ask yourself if you really believe it yourself or not, because everybody sees the seminars or a paper that has a ton of things in there that nobody really believes. And if that’s the cornerstone for a new company, then you should not go. Probably be preferable to stay in an academic postdoc or hold out for something else than to jump on a bandwagon that’s not really there, I guess.

Grant Belgard: [00:32:59] Are there any other pieces of advice you have for students looking for their first biotech job?

Fernando Martinez: [00:33:05] Networking and talking to everyone that you can either formally or informally is critical. A lot of people send out applications for a job cold and that can work. Plenty of people have gotten jobs that way. Plenty of people hire that way. But I think if you can engage with someone in a conversation. This could be someone that you connect to through LinkedIn, through an alumni network, through a professor that has contacts somewhere. If you can speak to someone, you can make a case for yourself and be considered for a job where you might not ordinarily write for. For example, if you’re just submitting applications cold and you don’t have like every single checkbox, there could be somebody there that’s just going to put it into the trash can or a low priority pile, whatever it might be, and turn to the next one. But if you can actually speak to a person and say, look, I’m a little bit underqualified for this, but over here I did like X, Y and Z, and it was great. Then you have opportunity to make a case for yourself and be considered for something where you ordinarily wouldn’t be.

Grant Belgard: [00:34:14] I think that’s a great point, having written up a number of job specs now. I think very often what’s written may not be entirely the perfect depiction of what they really need. There may be certain requirements that are a lot more important than others, even though on a page they’re given equal weight.

Fernando Martinez: [00:34:33] Yep. Makes sense.

Grant Belgard: [00:34:34] The classic Peter Thiel question, what’s something you believe to be true that most others don’t?

Fernando Martinez: [00:34:40] I’ll give you something. Maybe it’s a little bit controversial, but I think that people don’t want to be told what to do. A lot of people might not agree with this. I wouldn’t say that it’s a truth that I find self-evident, that nobody does. But I think a lot of people think that other people want to be told what to do or need to be told what to do, or that they will make other people’s lives much better by telling people what to do. And it’s my belief that most people want to do their own thing, whether it’s in life or their career, whatever it may be. And they want to figure out things on their own, draw their own conclusions, make their own observations, and then pursue whatever goal or desire it is that they have as opposed to buying into some kind of centralized goal or necessarily getting a lot of input from someone who’s in authority. So that I would say is my truth, that I believe that many other people don’t.

Grant Belgard: [00:35:44] And how do you think founders of biotech startups can take advantage of that?

Fernando Martinez: [00:35:50] I think the key is to give your employees the latitude and the independence that they need to pursue goals that are important for the company in their own way. So I would say that a lot of founders, they certainly have a vision for the company and they have goals and then they will hire people. And for the most part, those people if they’re going to a company that’s small like that, a lot of times they’re also excited by the vision and the prospects of the company. Founders could do a lot more to just trust the motivations of the people that they have hired without trying to impose tons of external culture influences, for example, or micromanaging or ad nauseam like goal setting where every single activity is monitored and tracked. I think there’s some founders, mostly because they’re so passionate about their own vision. They want to impose a lot of a lot of strict rules about how people should pursue that vision. I think they could be a lot more productive by just trusting that their employees vision and their own is aligned and that the employee will actually figure out how to get things done, maybe more efficiently than someone who’s at a very high level handing out mandates, I guess.

Grant Belgard: [00:37:14] Do you have any closing words of wisdom for our listeners?

Fernando Martinez: [00:37:17] You guys should keep an eye on The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast. I listened to a couple of these podcasts and honored to have the opportunity to be here and I’ll certainly listen to more in the future and advise all the other listeners to tune in when you have time as well.

Grant Belgard: [00:37:36] Well, it’s our privilege to have you. Thanks so much for joining us Fernando.

Fernando Martinez: [00:37:38] Thanks Grant.