5 Boston biotech CEOs on their paths to success — and the innovations on the horizon

Meet the faces of Boston’s burgeoning biotech industry.

Massachusetts, and the Boston-Cambridge area in particular, has earned a reputation as the nation’s foremost biotech hub. And the biotech boom, which has already resulted in more than 500 companies in the Boston-Cambridge area alone, is showing no signs of slowing down. According to MassBio’s 2020 Industry Snapshot report, the Massachusetts biopharma industry raised $2.1 billion in venture capital investments in the first half of 2020, and about one-third of all biotech IPOs during the period were from Massachusetts companies.

To get an insider’s look at this burgeoning industry and where it’s headed, we spoke with five Boston biotech executives about their paths to success and what’s next in the field.

Carolina Alarco, founder and principal, Bio Strategy Advisors

Q: How did you first get involved in biotech?
A: I’m originally from Peru, and I moved to Boston where I earned my graduate degree at Harvard. One of my classmates was a scientist working on a project at Genzyme when the company was in the very early stages. He said they were looking to expand geographically, especially in Latin America, and said I should send my resume. I interviewed and was hired as a marketing coordinator. This was in the 1990s, when biotech was kind of new. They were focusing on rare genetic diseases and solutions for patients, and I not only found it very interesting, but I knew it was going to be very fulfilling personally to work for a company with that mission and purpose.

Q: What work are you most proud of?
A: I get to work with many different teams that are so passionate and dedicated to what they’re doing to bring in solutions for unmet medical needs.

Q: What innovations do you see coming next in the biotech field?
A: I see a lot of innovation in immunology and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS, and the continued development of drugs and gene therapies for rare genetic diseases. Gene therapy is going to be a phenomenal solution, not only for rare diseases but for more common diseases as well.

Dr. Steve Perrin, CEO, ALS Therapy Development Institute

Steve Perrin, CEO, ALS Therapy Development Institute

Q: How did you first get involved in biotech?
A: I had a love of science going all the way back to middle school. I grew up in the era of starting to elucidate the understanding of DNA, DNA being transcribed into RNA, RNA being made into proteins, and the ability to manipulate genes. All of that was incredibly fascinating and it laid the foundation for a desire to pursue a science career.

Q: What work are you most proud of?
A: When I think about the work that I’m most proud of, I like to take the words “me” or “I” out of the statement because science is more about teams. Any good scientist or senior executive has ideas, but it takes an additional group of team members to help craft the idea and really hone in on the idea of what the objective is. Then, most importantly, I think the team gets bigger when we think about execution because science and drug development is about execution. It’s a team effort, and it takes time, and I’m most proud of the ability to build those types of teams.

Q: What innovations do you see coming next in the biotech field?
A: Personalized medicine is really just in its fruition of starting to make real, relevant changes in diseases. Gene therapies, antisense technologies, cellular therapies, engineered cells to deliver therapeutics, biologics, small molecules to replace damaged cells, to genetically alter cells — all of these things are becoming prime time.

Ramani Varanasi, president & CEO (co-Founder), X-Biotix Therapeutics, Inc.

Ramani Varanasi, president & CEO (co-founder), X-Biotix Therapeutics, Inc.

Q: How did you first get involved in biotech?
A: I had a passion for all things that related to creating and unearthing questions and answers. Science, specifically the biological sciences, was something that most undergraduates in my circle aspired to do — we were all thinking about becoming doctors. Yet, as I started to take undergraduate classes, I was very intrigued by the concept of discovery, scientific rigor, and scientific questioning and the process by which you pose a question and derive an answer. I decided I was going to do graduate work in an area that I was really intrigued by, which was the microbiome, bacteria, and microbiology.

Q: What work are you most proud of?
A: As co-founders of X-Biotix Therapeutics, we felt we had technology that we could leverage to try to identify, discover, and develop novel antibiotics that will hopefully address the concern of superbugs. We wanted to address the resistance issue at its core, so we’re targeting bacterial resistance mechanisms and trying to identify ways we can really challenge the bacteria from becoming resistant. I’m proud because we’re really tackling a really challenging area that is sorely lacking in funding.

Q: What innovations do you see coming next in the biotech field?
A: Anything that’s related to AI and big data, consolidating data and using it to better predict, treat, and alleviate patients’ concerns is going to be big.

Paula Soteropoulos, executive chairman, Ensoma

Q: How did you first get involved in biotech?
A: I really wanted to be a doctor, but I ended up setting those aspirations aside when I was in college. I had a friend who was doing his graduate degree in biochemical engineering. It was the early days of biotech and I was fascinated by the whole concept of what biotech could be. I switched to biochemical engineering and that was the path I ended up taking throughout graduate school, and I went into biotech from there. I always had the notion in the back of my mind of medicine and healing people and so it got me there in a roundabout way.

Q: What work are you most proud of?
A: My role as a leader and mentor is something I find very important in all the roles I’ve had. I think it’s critically important: Just as people have taken risks on me, I’m taking risks on others, helping them be comfortable with those risks, moving on from failure, and building resilience.

Q: What innovations do you see coming next in the biotech field?
A: We’ve seen a lot recently about the emergence of these really precise tools in gene editing and that potential for a one-time, lifelong treatment. We’re in the early days of this emergence of gene editing and the technology we’ve seen like in CRISPR-based editing is an incredible advance. But what I see coming next is the potential to be able to have incredible targeting specificity with a lifelong treatment, but do it in a way that’s an off-the-shelf, one-time injection versus these very complex procedures that we’re seeing today, and be able to do that anywhere in the world.

Jason D’Orlando, vice president, Turner & Townsend Taurus

Q: How did you first get involved in biotech?
A: I’m a civil engineer by trade, and out of college I was working at Logan Airport doing construction work when I was recruited to what is now Pfizer to work on their capital engineering group supporting the manufacturing facilities. I went in and I kind of fell into more of the project management and project execution of the manufacturing side of it.

Q: What work are you most proud of?
A: When I was little, my father told me that I had to do something in life to make the world move, and I’m in an industry that is constantly pushing the boundaries and saving lives. When people come to visit our facilities and talk about how we saved their lives, it’s inspiring and something that makes me motivated every day to do what we’re doing.

Q: What innovations do you see coming next in the biotech field?
A: What I see emerging are the contract manufacturing organizations building massive facilities so companies like Pfizer don’t have to build new facilities all the time. They can rent out space that these CMOs have and have their product made there. You see a lot of companies like Kodak and Fujifilm, for instance, which are getting into this industry to build more capacity for all of these pharmaceutical products that are in such high demand to get it out there quicker.