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Woman of the Week: Cambrian BioPharma’s Juliette Han

Welcome to the Woman of the Week podcast, a weekly discussion that illuminates the unique stories of women leaders who are catalyzing change throughout the life sciences industry. You can check out all our podcast episodes here.

Storytelling is a critical part of attracting the attention of potential investors, and Juliette Han, with her dual finance and scientific background, has become an expert in detailing Cambrian BioPharma’s unique business model — part biotech, part venture capital fund and part incubator.

As an academic scientist, Han’s mission was to bring neurological developments to the market. And to achieve her ambitious goal, she intuitively understood that she would need a diversified skillset. She began her journey from academia to consulting to finance, and ultimately to the C-suite as CFO and chief operating officer of Cambrian.

“We have a conglomeration of best practices … across industries to make biotech or the development of drugs more efficient, which allows us to advance moonshot efforts,” Han said. “And in my role as a COO and CFO, I’m able to tell a sophisticated story to financial investors (on) why our model is going to be a much better bet for them as they want to enter the biotech industry, as well as when we work with scientists, to explain to them that we are here to be their true partners in bringing their innovations out of academia. I am very lucky to say that I have many experiences that allowed me to be the leader I am today.”

Cambrian, which bills itself as a “distributed development company,” creates opportunities to bring academic discovery through to drug development, with a focus on creating therapeutics that extend the “healthspan,” specifically drugs that “target damage that occurs at the cellular, subcellular and tissue levels of the body.”

In 2022, the company closed a $100 million series C financing to advance its pipeline, which since 2019 has expanded research into aging-related diseases from three products to more than a dozen.

“What excites me is the diversity of the pipeline we have,” Han said. “We don’t take just one singular bet on one mechanism. [We are] not looking for a magic pill or the fountain of youth that’s going to cure us all … we don’t know the ultimate answer to why we age and how we age. So each program, beyond being the treatment for immediate indication, is targeting different mechanisms — how they illuminate how we age over time together, is really the most exciting aspect.”

In this episode of our Woman of the Week podcast, Han details her career trajectory, the pros and cons of creating a company culture from scratch and why a “concentric circle network ecosystem” is one of the keys to success.

Welcome to WoW, the Woman of the Week podcast by PharmaVoice powered by Industry Dive.

In this episode, Taren Grom, editor in chief emeritus at PharmaVoice, meets with Juliette Han, CFO and COO, Cambrian BioPharma.

Taren: Juliette, welcome to the WoW Podcast Program.

Juliette: Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Taren: Well, we’re delighted to be able to speak with you today. Juliette, Cambrian BioPharma has a unique model. It’s a company that’s a biotech business, a VC fund, and acts as an incubator. Can you tell us about this intersection and what your role as CFO and COO entails in coordinating all of these different pieces of the puzzle?

Juliette: Absolutely. So Cambrian Bio, as you have shared, is really a conglomeration of the best practices that we can find across industries to make biotech or development of drugs more efficient and allows us to advance moonshot efforts. And in my role as a COO and CFO, I’m able to tell a sophisticated story to financial investors why our model is going to be a much better bet for them as they want to enter the biotech industry; as well as when we work with scientists, to be able to explain to them that we are here to be their true partners in bringing their innovation out of academia better than other biotech partners that they could find. I’m able to do that because I also have a scientific background as well as finance and other corporate backgrounds as well, so I’m able to bring that complex problem and make it simple for all of our stakeholders.

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