Woman of the Week: Brii Biosciences’ Ellee de Groot

Taren: That is not a usual career path for folks in pharma. That’s exciting, though. And as you said, you’ve had a wide range of diverse opportunities. Does anyone stand out to you more than another in terms of just excitement, or wow, this was fantastic? Or are they all great because you don’t want to identify…

Ellee: I think I’m a person who really appreciates being in the moment with the group that I’m working with. I had a long spell at a startup company which went through different phases. It was called Rejuvenon and then Sapphire, eventually bought by a company called Helsinn, and this was like the area where I really grew. I grew from kind of a manager to a VP level, and just being in this setting of I was employee #4 to kind of growing the company, working with really incredible mentors and then becoming part of a global company was a really exciting period for me. We were developing a drug for cancer cachexia, which is wasting associated with cancer. So it was really fulfilling. That was probably the time in my life where I think I grew the most. That’s the highlight.

Taren: I love that. You know, there’s nothing like being part of a startup to learn all aspects of the business, right?

Ellee: Exactly. Exactly.

Taren: That’s awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about the technology piece, because you are in a unique position. There aren’t that many women sitting in technology roles. Do you find this challenging? Is it just not a big deal? Like, how does that work for you?

Ellee: I think I really don’t notice it that much. I think it’s of course wonderful that I don’t notice it that much. I find it pretty rare that I’m the only woman in a meeting. It just doesn’t happen as much anymore. Certainly, earlier in my career that was more the case.

I was thinking some more about this and why that is, but I think it goes back to education. So for me, growing up I had plenty of inspiration in science and math. I was always encouraged in that area. I went to college in kind of the late 80s, grad school in the early 90s, and the fields, I would say, of chemistry, chemical engineering, biological sciences were starting to transform. So my chemical engineering class, believe it or not, was 50% women. That was both in undergrad, as well as grad.

Taren: Wow.

Ellee: That’s unusual. I think that’s not true at every school across the country, but even then, it was starting to transform. And you know, I think as more and more women go into these fields, this just becomes less and less of an issue. Look at what’s happening in medicine, right, where in medical schools now over 50% of the students are women. I think this will become just something that we’ll leave behind.

Now at Brii half of our leadership team is women. The same was true at my previous company. And I think companies are also appreciating that having diversity in leadership is just critical; it’s critical for the business, it’s inspirational for the team.

I’m hopeful that as we move forward in the next 10, 20 years that this will just become something that we don’t even talk about because I think it’s going away, slowly but surely.

Taren: I hope so, too. I spoke to a woman not that long ago who is a little bit older than you but maybe just by one generation or a generation and a half, and she had noted that she was the only woman in her pre-grad and grad school, and she became the first chemistry professor at the school where she was teaching. So look how far that has moved since you just noted that it was almost half, half, half. So that’s great. So to your point, that’s encouraging. And I love the fact that your current company has looked at diversity differently than some other organizations where you still see the preponderance of those corporate – I call them corporate yearbooks – are still predominantly middle-aged white men. But you all took a different approach, and it sounds like it was almost intentional.

Ellee: I think it has been. I’ve been with the company about 8 months, but I know our CEO Zhi Hong, he is very committed to diversity. So Brii is a company that half the group is in China and half in the US. I would say on both sides of the ocean we are very diverse. We have – I don’t remember the statistics right off the top of my head, but I would probably around half are women. We’re just a very diverse group.

Taren: Fantastic. Ellee, tell me, how is that working? If you say half is in the US and half is in China, how does that affect your day-to-day operations because of the time zone difference as just one of the factors?

Ellee: I won’t say that it’s just easy. It is challenging, but we have a rhythm to it. The group in China primarily focuses on hepatitis B virus, so we separate a little bit according to disease that we’re focused on. In the US we’re more focused on CNS. Leadership, of course, like myself are kind of broader and we’re managing groups that are developing both areas. But just having teams more focused geographically in day-to-day operations helps.

We do also spend some time on kind of early morning and late evenings. I’m on the West Coast, so I often find some of my busiest period is at the end of the day, kind of 4-7 p.m. timeframe I’ll generally have meetings. But that, I think, works. We have kind of a very flexible schedule with our employees, so we allow for people to have hours that are extended so that they’re not working 24 hours a day too.

We just try newest communication tools, right? So communication is key and sharing information, and whether we’re doing that through meeting setting but also email communication, various documents that we’re sharing that enables us to kind of work across the time zones. And expectation around communication is key to having a global organization.

Taren: Perfect. Talk to me about what your role as CTO entails. What is a typical day for you, if there is such a thing as a typical day.

Ellee: I have a very capable team. I’ll start by saying that. Brii actually has very experienced employees. We’ve benefitted from kind of this experience. In my area of CMC we have a very experienced leadership team that has been there done that, so to speak.

Part of my job is to make sure they have the resources they need and can do their work. We are primarily a virtual company, so we have offices but all of our manufacturing is done with partners. We have contract manufacturing groups literally around the world that we’re working with. And so the team is managing those groups. So making sure that we’re making our active ingredients, our drug product… we have some development work that we’re doing where we’re trying different formulations, for instance, testing them out, getting results, digesting those results and then kind of moving onto the next step. Making clinical supplies is a major piece of the job. So my team is managing those things. I’m checking in those team members, making sure we’re on track and again, enabling them to do their work.

Similarly, I have kind of a quality team both in the China and the US that I’m working with to make sure we have the procedures in house. The company is less than five years old and has really grown from, I would say, a handful of people to where we are today, which is I think around 140 people or so. And so in that kind of growth, developing quality systems takes time. We have an additional challenge of being in China and the US, and so developing quality systems that work for both teams is important. We have, again, really capable quality leadership and I’ve been working closely with them to develop our processes.

And then finally on the program management side, again, working with the team members developing processes that we can use for all the different projects and ensuring that we have great communication.

So my job, I think, is in part just to kind of make sure that all my teams have the resources that they need. And then, of course, working with my fellow executive team to set the strategy for the company, think about where we need to be in five years, developing manufacturing strategies that are moving alongside of the clinical development, investing at the right time, thinking about what things would look like when we have commercial products, et cetera.

I like things, as you’ll find it in this interview, that I like to be continuously challenged and do different kinds of things. And so this job is really suited to me in that I get to work on a lot of different areas and think about the overall strategy, which is what I love to do.

Taren: Fantastic. Yes, and obviously you’re not afraid of being part of an early stage company. It sounds like this is – the company is five years old, you were part of a startup before – that you like to be on the ground floor.

Ellee: I do. I do. I’m a doer, and so I enjoy the kind of sense of accomplishment that you have and building something up as a small group.

Taren: Fantastic. Let’s talk about some of those leadership strengths that have gotten you to this point. You noted earlier on that during one of your engagements that it took you from one level to the next level and then to the next level. So how would you describe your leadership strengths?

Ellee: I have a genuine passion and enthusiasm for what I do, and I hope that really translates to the people that I’m working with. I think that’s important for a leader is to really be genuinely enthusiastic about what you’re doing. People are not going to be inspired if you’re not doing that. So I love the sense of gratification that I feel in working in the biotech and pharma space, the sense of helping patients – even as a chemical engineer and not at the bedside, but I’m doing something behind the scenes. I love that.

I think it’s also how I interact with team members. I try to be very present when I’m with people and be attentive, be listening, actively listening and asking questions. When I think about mentors that I’ve had, great leaders that I’ve seen in action, they are present. They are giving you their undivided attention and seeking to understand what you’re trying to tell them. So I try and emulate those leaders that I’ve been most inspired by in work that I do.

Taren: That’s great. I think that’s an excellent leadership tip is to be present, because there’s so many demands on time and focus, that being able to prioritize that is really a very key leadership lesson. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.

I’m going to ask you to dig into your other toolbox. What are some of your keys to building high performing teams? Obviously, you’ve had to do that over the course of your career, and you’ve been successful at it. So, what can you share with our audience what are some of your key tips?

Ellee: I think first of all, for a team to be high performing they have to have a clear sense of purpose, a clear sense of their goals, clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Because without that base kind of set of expectations, it’s very hard for teams to perform well. So that’s really, I think, the starting point.

The other thing I found through my career in working with different teams is teams are made of individuals, and they have different needs. So you may have a team like mine now; my team is very experienced. So they’re doing really well in kind of solving technical challenges. And so the best thing I can do for them is give them a little leeway and just support them, and guide, help with key decisions, make sure we have the right investments at the right time, work on the logistics pieces, help set the strategy moving forward. But the day to day, they can handle.

I’ve got other teams that are really young, and they need much more mentorship and day to day. And so, understanding – and of course, you might have a team that has both. You may have a team that has very senior people with really young people. And so, understanding what your teams’ needs are in terms of resources; maybe they’re missing a key talent that needs to be hired. So to enable a team to be successful is really understanding the needs of those individuals that make up the team.

And then finally, it kind of goes back to communication. I think when we talked a little bit about communication across the ocean, setting expectations around communication and just an example of this is how communication needs to flow. Teams can easily fall into silos where they’re not communicating even with one another, and certainly not across to different stakeholders and such. So setting expectations around communication, setting an example of how communication needs to flow is an important aspect of setting the team up for success.

Taren: Fantastic. Is there anybody who has had a particular influence on your career as a mentor or as a sponsor?

Ellee: There has been. I was thinking about this question. Again, this is the company that I was working for, Sapphire, where I was growing so much. I joined this company – again, I was employee #4, and the company had been set up by a gentleman named Roy Smith. Roy was a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, but he had previously worked at Merck, and he had hired some Merck retirees to guide the company as consultants. The consultant that had been hired in my area, his name is Dr. Seemon Pines, and Seemon had been 40 years at Merck. So he had risen essentially from bench chemist to vice president of process R&D. So he was this incredible man, had just had a very successful career at Merck. This is the early days of Merck, so he was – I wouldn’t say it was a startup, but he was one of the kind of early leaders when Merck was growing to the incredible company it is today. And so he served as my mentor. And again, I was kind of a manager level when I joined him, and he just took me under his wing, and I was able to watch him in action with our contract manufacturing groups. He taught me chemistry. He taught me tips on scaling up processes. So he’s lending me his kind of technical wisdom and lending me his managerial wisdom, and I really flourished under his mentorship. He was kind of my lifelong mentor that I still reflect now with my team, I say ‘I had this mentor, and he used to teach me…’ blah, blah, blah. And so I still find myself reflecting on his lessons. He was a real gift in my lift.

Taren: That’s fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. You know, I always think that there’s so many connections within the life sciences industry. And somebody listening to this podcast might also have been influenced by him as well. It’s just an incredible connected kind of ecosystem we work in. Do you consider yourself to be a role model?

Ellee: I hope so. I think it’s a great compliment if someone calls you a role model. I think even more so if one of your children calls you a role model. The greatest compliment I think I’ve received is from my daughter to call me a role model. I think being a role model is not only one’s day-to-day behavior and doing the right thing and such, but it’s also I think a responsibility for role models to mentor. It’s probably maybe about 10 years ago, when I felt like I transitioned from a person who was very focused on achievement for myself and perhaps that was part of my role is that I was working more independently. I didn’t have many direct reports and such, but where I transitioned that into really kind of being very focused on my success is when other succeed. And mentoring kind of the next generation became a real joy for me. And so, I think it’s a responsibility of role models to really pass it on if you will and it’s something I really enjoy doing.

Taren: Fantastic. You touched on a little bit earlier about the different aspects of Brii’s pipeline. What excites you about the drugs that are in development there?

Ellee: So Brii’s a really unique company. I feel very fortunate to be working for this company. One of the things that was attractive to me about Brii and Brii’s leadership is that it’s very focused on understanding patient need and treatment preferences. In fact, our name Brii stands for Breakthrough Innovation and Insight. So it’s this patient insight that really inspires the company on how we think about treatment of disease. We’re very much focused on diseases where there’s true unmet need. And we spend a lot of time talking about, thinking about how to innovate around this unmet need.

An example, in the CNS space, we are developing new treatment options for postpartum depression and other depressive disorders. So in postpartum depression, there’s actually only one approved therapy that’s specifically for postpartum depression and it’s delivered as a 60-hour infusion. So the patient is in the hospital receiving this infusion. So Brii is developing an alternative formulation. It’s a single injection which we believe will really benefit both patient and child. And similar kind of long-acting injections have been very successful in other areas within CNS, so schizophrenia, addiction.

And then more recently, in HIV space. So there are a number of members of the Brii team that have been working in HIV and developing these long-acting formulations and they’ve just been transformative for these patients. And so, that kind of experience that some of my colleagues have had at other companies really serves as a springboard for us as we think about developing new therapies in CNS. And then in infectious disease – and I mentioned we are very focused on hepatitis B virus in particular and chronic hepatitis B virus is really a major health issue in China in particular. And many of those patients face social stigma, discrimination. And so, our focus is developing combination therapies to address HBV so we can reach what’s called a functional care and this sense of mission that we have around this disease in particular which is very inspiring and something that I’m really enjoying working on at Brii.

Taren: That’s fantastic. I can’t believe there’s a 60-hour infusion. It’s mind-blowing. That’s crazy that that’s the current treatment paradigm for this.

Ellee: Well, it’s the entry point and things will continue to get better. But I think companies like Brii placing attention on this is also part of our duty I think is to kind of really raise attention around diseases where there’s some social stigma. So postpartum depression, many women live with some shame, some sense of shame. And so, saying this is a priority, we are going to help these patients, is a first step. And then developing different options that will better meet their needs is important.

Taren: Fantastic. Well, thank you for all the good work you’re doing in that area. I’d like to also just kind of circle back to the beginning of our conversation, if you don’t mind and talk about your interest in chemical engineering. What is it about chemistry? What is it about the chemical engineering field that drew you initially to that area of focus?

Ellee: I think part of it – when you’re a student, part of it is a little bit of luck is where you end up starting your studies and does it continue to inspire you. I’ve enjoyed chemistry but what I enjoy about chemical engineering is the sense of applying the chemistry to practical solutions. And I think that’s what engineers do is just apply the science part to solving problems in various technical areas. Specifically, for pharma, I just enjoy the sense of how to bridge research to clinical and commercial development of drugs. And so, when we think about what equipment do we need to manufacture the drugs or do we need to develop some new process solution that was more efficient. How to make things more economical. These kinds of problems are ones that I really just find are enjoyable and give me a lot of gratification.

I think even when I was young and studying, the practical things that we do in the lab or the problem sets that we would have were ones that inspired me. A funny thing as an example, when I was an undergraduate at MIT, my design class was taught in part by Bob Langer and Bob Langer is one of the great, great, great giants of chemical engineering and drug delivery in particular; he’s developed many, many different technologies. He was actually a fairly young professor at that time when I was taking this class from him and some of the problems that we would do were ones that are now commercial drugs. So when I reflect back on that experience, just how inspiring he was as a professor and looking where I am now and even at Brii where we’re again working on drug delivery technologies to deliver drugs over long periods of time in a very controlled fashion, that all kind of goes back to kind of the inspiration that Bob Langer has provided for the whole field.

Taren: That’s wonderful. Thank you for sharing that story with us. It’s amazing how sometimes everything comes full circle, right?

Ellee: Mm-hmm.

Taren: Fantastic. It also illustrates your penchant for being a doer, right? That practical application of solving problems and applying the chemistry to solve a different issue. I love that. It’s really quite inspiring. We are sadly at the end of our time here. So I’d like to ask you, is there a wow moment that had either changed the trajectory of your career or has left a lasting impression on you?

Ellee: I was thinking about this. The thing that actually happened to me a few years ago, I’d like to share a little bit about it. A little over 10 years ago, I was in a very good part of my career. I felt like I was a subject matter expert. Things were going along smoothly. The company I was working for was global. I had a lot of responsibility. But I just was feeling very restless and felt like I could do more but wasn’t sure how to make that happen. And my boss at the time had previous in his career gotten an Executive MBA and he encouraged me to think about doing that. And so, I was looking at Houston at the time and looked into various executive MBA options and ended up doing a program at Rice University. And it just gave me new life and just really transformed my perspective.

The executive MBA program, you take everything from accounting to strategy to leadership, all different kinds of courses. And I just met so many new interesting people. Being in Houston actually, a number of the classmates were in the oil industry. A few were in healthcare but it just gave me something different to do and gave me a broader perspective I think on business in general which helped me when I went back to my company to really contribute at a different level, I think. Also, the leadership classes, the strategy classes that I had had just helped me to be a better leader, a better teammate. And then it ultimately actually kind of changed my trajectory a bit. So it gave me broader responsibilities at that company.

So in addition to the CMC responsibilities I had, I started doing more work on new indications that we could be looking at for the company for the drugs we had. I started taking over program management in the US. So it just broadened my ability to contribute. Then ultimately, kind of helped me make some connections also that helped me get my next job. It was just a very transformative thing for me and I think for the listeners, if you’re finding yourself being stagnant, think about doing something that really pushes you to learn more and challenges you in a different way. And going back to school, this was something I fortunately was able to do while I was working. So I did it kind of every other weekend. But going back to school, whatever age you are I think can sometimes be a really great way to reset and give you a whole new life in your career.

Taren: Fantastic advice. Ellee, it’s been such a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you so much for sharing your broad range of experiences and illustrating that just because you start off in one industry doesn’t mean you can’t transform to another industry that you’re equally passionate about and doing such great work towards making an impact for many patients. Thank you so much.

Ellee: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to this episode of WoW, the Woman of the Week podcast. For more WoW episodes, visit pharmavoice.com.