The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast

Transcript of Episode 81: John Connolly

Disclaimer: Transcripts are automated and may contain errors.

Grant Belgard: Welcome back to the Bioinformatics CRO podcast. I’m Grant Belgard. Today, I’m joined by John Connolly, Chief Scientific Officer at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, also known as PICI. PICI’s mission focuses on accelerating breakthrough immune therapies by bringing researchers, tools, and collaboration structures together to move faster from scientific ideas to patient impact. In this conversation, we’ll cover what John’s working on right now, how his career path shaped the way he leads, and practical advice for anyone building in translational science, especially where data, bioinformatics, and real-world complexity collide. Let’s jump in. So, John, for listeners meeting you for the first time, how would you introduce yourself and what you focus on these days?

John Connolly: Yeah, first of all, I just want to say thanks, Grant. It’s a real thrill to be on the podcast with you and to catch up. John Connolly, as you heard, CSO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. I guess the way I’d introduce the Parker Institute is, first of all, by saying it’s a 501C3 nonprofit. We’re a cancer charity. So we, as you heard, our mission is really to make all cancers curable disease. And the organization really lives to that mission, very much focused on funding fundamental research in the field of cancer immunotherapy, and then really creating what is the highest concentration of immuno-oncology expertise in the world, pulling all of these experts together, betting on these people, not on projects, but on the people and what they do, and creating these 14 centers around the US. They’re full centers or what is known as EMR centers.

John Connolly: And this really gives a lot of autonomy to those sites to do that fundamental research. But in describing the Parker Institute, it’s not just a grant agency that gives money out. What we’ve done is we’ve really knitted these organizations together, sort of a network of networks together above each of the individual institutes. What we’re trying to do is break down those barriers, break the silos, so you’ll be able to exchange data, information, projects, people between the different institutions. So we pre-negotiate confidentiality agreements, material transfer agreements, everything is there. So you can just stand up in the middle of a presentation and send a vector to the next lab just immediately, or open up and really have these substantive discussions about what’s next in the cancer space.

John Connolly: And that’s really a major part of the institute is that funding, is that research, is finding those young investigators, building out those centers around the US. And then the next part really is translating that into real clinical trials in the real world space. And so to do that, I think there’s no better place for blue sky ideation than academia. I mean, this is kind of what it does well. But one thing it doesn’t do well is prioritize programs and execute in the clinic. So what we’ve done is we basically created a venture philanthropy arm that spins out biotech companies based on the technology that’s coming out of the network. So getting best in class from Stanford, MD Anderson and Dana Farber and pulling them all into one company and then putting that under project management. So we’ll fund those companies and actually staff them.

John Connolly: We’ve got a new co-build team that can jump in in operational roles and then push that technology out and really test it in the clinic under project management. So you actually see it executed there. And we have a business development arm that can then work with pharma to get this out to a much broader community. And so with that, I think you really do have to have that. If you want to accomplish such a ambitious goal like all cancers curable disease, you really need to have a line of sight from the blue sky kind of science all the way to commercialization. And when I say line of sight, you need to have operational efficiencies in each of those areas. And that’s really what the Parker Institute does. It’s been around now for 10 years, 2016 we started it. Really everything I just described was the idea of Sean Parker.

John Connolly: So Sean really saw this vision of there’s, these silos are really preventing the immunotherapy from really reaching its full potential. And there has to be a way to break down these silos so that people, the best people at MD Anderson can be working shoulder to shoulder with the best people at Cornell or Memorial Sloan Kettering.

Grant Belgard: What’s the problem you find yourself thinking about repeatedly right now?

John Connolly: One of the biggest problems is we’re in the middle of kind of a strategy review for the next 10 years. And so it’s thrilling to really talk about that. I’m working with Ira Mellman and who’s recently joined the Institute from Genentech and to just think about what that 10 year strategy really looks like. And it’s funny to be on this podcast, what I’m thinking about is how we recruit more kind of AI native people into the immunotherapy space. And I think the way the approach that I think works and that we’re taking is not to train people to become kind of proficient to think in this AI kind of first integration, but really grab people that are in the tech space here in San Francisco or in Asia or other where and then turn them into immunotherapists. I think that’s for me the biggest thing.

John Connolly: So we’re excited, but it’s something that’s because of the way we’re thinking about strategy, we’re really pushing forward. So that’s one big one that we’re thinking about.

Grant Belgard: What’s something about cancer immunotherapy that’s widely misunderstood outside the field?

John Connolly: Yeah, I think one of the things for cancer immunotherapy is this idea that, so there’s a lot of expectation with it. I think the, and it’s that you just simply sort of induce an immune response against the cancer and the cancer would suddenly go away. It’s a difficult thing to do. As much as we’ve created incredible successes in the field, and I really mean that, I think the advent of checkpoint blockade is arguably the biggest advance in cancer in 5,000 years since the advent of surgery. I mean, like really. So it works broadly across multiple tumors. It’s curative in late-stage metastatic disease. There’s just nothing else like that. This chemo doesn’t do that, nothing else does that. So it’s phenomenal. And when it works, it works spectacularly. The downside really is that checkpoint blockade works in 20 to 30% of people, and that’s it. In certain cancers, it works very well.

John Connolly: In others, it doesn’t. And so getting a better understanding of why that is, being able to predict, requires a deeper understanding of how the immune system really works. And so I think that’s a big one. The other is this idea that it’s a free ride, right? There’s any kind of novel therapy that comes in that overactivates your immune system. There are obviously side effects, and mitigating those side effects and amplifying the effective nature of the tumor, anti-tumor effect, is totally essential. And that’s another obviously big area of research.

Grant Belgard: What’s a recent moment where you thought, this is why we do the work?

John Connolly: Oh man, this is, luckily for me, this happens a lot. But we’ve recently taken, a lot of efforts gone into immunotherapy, tackling big cancers, man. Lung cancer, all over the place, right? So we’ve got tons of programs and projects in that. Big efforts in breast cancer and others, and they’ve made true progress, like phenomenal progress. But what I’ve recently done is taken a step back and challenged the network to live to the mission, what I said was all cancers curable disease. Not all cancers, just treatable disease, okay? So, I mean, let’s see what we can cure. And so actually doing a scoping, looking at cancers that are highly responsive to immunotherapy, right? And saying, let’s move beyond just treating those cancers. Like rare subtypes of melanoma with Antoni Ribas at UCLA and Paul Nghiem doing Merkel cell carcinoma up at the Hutch.

John Connolly: Actually saying, guys, what if we actually took all of these incredible tools that have been developed for these very common cancers, like lung disease, like lung cancer or breast cancer, and instead focused on rare cancers that we know are gonna be responsive, and actually cure these things. Let’s tick some boxes here, let’s get these things off the list. And so phenomenal work, again, from Tony Ribas, recent publication in rare subtypes of melanoma showing just cures. It’s really, really spectacular. And I’m proud to say we’re putting a clinical trial together at Dana Farber now, which is a combination cancer vaccine for Merkel cell carcinoma. We really dove deep into, can we induce a really potent immune response against this thing that’s highly responsive to checkpoint blockade?

John Connolly: Can we then clone the T cell receptors, ship those to the Hutch and have cells ready for those patients so that if they do recur, they can be treated immediately and cured. So I think just eliminating cancers, like truly curing a whole class of cancer is something that is really near and dear to my heart. I think it’s just on the horizon.

Grant Belgard: How do you translate such a big mission into a concrete research strategy?

John Connolly: Well, I mean, the first thing is some humility, right? So saying that there’s so many things we just don’t know yet, and we don’t know about the immune system, about how cancer interacts with the immune system, and going to find those people that are really focused on those questions. I think in building that networked based foundation, I think this is an essential portion. It’s really the value of the Parker Institute. It’s just the people and the incredible investigators. And then asking them, guess what is it about the current funding mechanisms or the current mechanisms within your university that are holding you back? You talk about all these projects, but it’s been 10 years and we still haven’t seen something come out. And a lot of this has to do with grant funding, review process, bureaucracy, the slow nature of all of this.

John Connolly: And you and I both know that just the way the concentration of expertise works is these centers attract good people that attract good young people to kind of get there. And so what we’ll do is we’ll come in and bet on those people and say, look, your area of focus, let’s give you a block gift, largely discretionary funding, right? With some obviously project guidance through a steering committee. But that’s it, it’s really up to you. How do you want to spend this money? What do you want to do? And then do it in perpetuity. So they know they’re never going to have to worry about that money again, because it’s coming every three to five years, there’s another gift coming, another gift coming. So that takes that constant grant writing off the table for these academics. The second is when we do have steering committees, at the end of the committee, the money immediately goes out.

John Connolly: So it’s just a review, quick review, and then yes, no, modify it, yes or no. And then the money’s out the door at the end of the meeting immediately. So for all those funded projects. And so that kind of speed, it just changes things. I can just speak from experience, if you’re a PI in a lab, and you want to have the ability to, you’re thinking all the time about what your areas of focus constantly, 24 hours a day. And you want to be able to go out on a bike ride and come up with an idea and immediately hire two postdocs to work on it. Like this is what the institute’s kind of funding brings. And it’s just an essential kind of thing that just changes the dynamic.

Grant Belgard: How do you decide what not to do, even if it’s scientifically exciting?

John Connolly: So, I mean, the focus on immunotherapy, even if immunotherapy kind of is turning out of favor in like the investor community or the pharma community, I think this is staying on mission. This is really extremely helpful. So no matter whether it’s a project that we’re funding, or if we’re building a company, or we’re looking at an investment opportunity, or doing a partnership with pharma, the first thing I always ask is, is this mission? That’s all, is this mission? And if it is, then we’re aligned. So we can work together as companies, we can move forward, we can invest in that company or build that company, we can invest in that project or that person. And so I think that that really is a North Star for us, is this idea of all cancers curable disease and a focus on using the immune system to get there.

John Connolly: The other is, there’s a certain, staying in touch with the network, doing regular site visits, getting out there, is really essential to understand where the momentum in the field is going, and where the early results from early stage clinical trials, the innovation in this space is going. So that also kind of helps an idea of which direction and funding is going to go. The other is, I think some of the best ideas out there are coming outside our space. I mentioned AI and other things, but there’s those inventions that come in sideways to try to solve problems that people have been banging their head on for a long time. I look for those all the time. I also look for contrarian troublemakers too. I love those people that’ll jump in there and the worst thing you can have in a network is just everyone saying the same thing.

John Connolly: You definitely want people that’ll go against the grain and shake things up.

Grant Belgard: What are the biggest friction points that slow progress in multi-team science and how do you try to reduce them?

John Connolly: That’s a great question. So I think the biggest kind of hurdles that you have to overcome, and this is probably true for any organization of our size, is that bureaucracy that I talked about. In worst case scenario thinking, this idea that you have to constantly worry that you’re working with another investigator and they’re going to take your ideas or the IP or something like that, or that that university is going to have a better position than a new company build. That kind of worst case thinking just sort of breeds mistrust and what it does is it eliminates opportunities because you end up just taking a defensive position. You see this across a lot of organizations. This is why it’s really essential.

John Connolly: When you understand the Parker Institute, you understand that it’s a network of people, people that trust each other, the people that get together twice a year in these really intense retreats that we do, sharing unpublished data and just getting it out there and really trying to show the best in class. So that trust within the network, it’s kind of a secret sauce. It’s almost impossible to kind of recreate just with money. It’s something that these guys see each other as Parker Institute investigators before they do Harvard professors. And I think that that’s just an important thing that came with the great work of Jeff Bluestone when he built the network, as the first CEO of the Parker Institute, Sean’s vision of building this and pushing it out. And I think the work that my team and I have done pushing it forward.

Grant Belgard: Yeah, how do you design incentives so that collaboration is real and not just a slogan?

John Connolly: This is, so it’s really matching, it’s kind of impedance matching on capability. I think that’s really what it is. Because I don’t think that collaboration all the time is such a great idea. We fund projects that are very similar to each other in individual labs, like real competitive projects that I’m happy to fund if we think we need to double and triple down on the idea. One lab’s not gonna solve this problem. So even if there are very similar ideas and things like AI based protein design or TCRT therapy, there are programs that are extremely competitive labs. These guys have been competing for decades and I think the Parker Institute isn’t gonna solve it. But I think this impedance matching concept that I was getting to is really the real deal. So if you have someone like Chris Garcia at Stanford, Chris is a genius and he was successful long before the Parker Institute.

John Connolly: But one thing that the Parker Institute brings is, now what Chris is doing is he’s building these incredible proteins, these incredible systems, but then they’re immediately getting transferred over to Carl June in Penn, who’s then taking them into the clinic and moving those forward and really seeing Chris’s work applied to medicine. And I think that that kind of matching of capability where you’ve got the people that just live in structural biology that then pass it off to someone who’s a development expert who then passes it off to someone who’s a clinical execution and do so seamlessly because it’s exciting. This is how those projects really move forward. And again, touch base, just always going back to that touchstone of mission, is this something we wanna work on?

Grant Belgard: How do you measure if your strategy’s working, what metrics matter and what metrics can be misleading?

John Connolly: Sure, for sure. So one metric that can be misleading, I think, is publications, so nothing against it, but if you sort of get the absolute top people in the field, you’re gonna get a lot of publications. I guess just kind of, because that’s a metric of universities. And it’s a good one for universities. So it’s very important to get out there to communicate, to spread the word and to excite and attract other people. But for us, I think that some of the key metrics are this sort of full circle. So I mentioned the idea of moving blue sky science and pushing things forward and paradigm changing kind of ideas into execution in the clinic and then into distribution through pharmaceutical companies or through large biotechs to the greater patient community.

John Connolly: So for us, the first thing really has to go back and ask how many patients are actually benefiting from the research that’s happening at the Parker Institute. For me, that’s a big one. And that’s just really looking back on, and we have hundreds of clinical trials with ideas and therapies that have come out of fundamental research at the institute. We keep really good track of that and just see how things are going. I think that’s, for me, that’s probably the biggest one. And I think this is, it takes a lot of time, unfortunately, to get something that someone that’s City of Hope or UCLA comes up with and then translate that into a phase one clinical trial, execute that into the clinic, and then really begin to push it forward, benchmark it in a phase two or three trial and actually see that applied to patients. But this is really what it’s all about.

John Connolly: There’s wonderful organizations who are here to fund just sort of, just fundamental research, right? And the NIH is clearly the global leader and the actual backbone of all research funding and progress that we’re making in the field. And that’s an important and incredibly amazing thing, but that’s not what the Parker Institute is doing, right? Mission is all cancers curable disease and we do what it takes to get there. And so for us, when we go back and check, we ask that question, how well are we doing by looking at what kind of impact in the patient population we’re making?

Grant Belgard: What are the failure modes of cross-sector collaborations and what guardrails help?

John Connolly: Yeah, I think, I mean, some of the failure modes, I mentioned that trust idea, right? So anything that threatens that, because when it’s working, when people are openly sharing data with an expectation and understanding that working together is better than working in silos, that anything that kind of comes in and threatens that is problematic. I mentioned that I love taking contrarian troublemakers, but I don’t want a room full of them. So it’s like, for me, that’s really the big take home is making sure you maintain that network effect. And to do that, you have to listen to the network too.

John Connolly: So one of the most important things about the job at CSO is getting out to the sites, meeting regularly with the center directors, meeting regularly with the young investigators that are coming up, and talking to them about what their hopes and dreams are, but most importantly, like what the problems are. So part of this job is representing not necessarily PICI or the sites, it’s representing the network, this effect that’s happening. So if there’s a problem that we’re doing back at Central, then we need to know, I need to know, so we can go back in there and fix it and really maintain this network-based effect.

Grant Belgard: What role does bioinformatics play in your strategy?

John Connolly: Oh, it’s huge. So one of the big things with the big opportunities we have at the Parker Institute is really to become kind of a central database for all of this scientific and clinical data across the network. And it’s important that it’s written into the master collaborative agreement that knits these centers together. And so in doing so, we’ve really collected some amazing cohorts that are out there. We have the world’s largest cohort on adverse events in checkpoint blockade, just looking longitudinally at thousands of patients that are treated with checkpoint blockade. We had our RADIOHEAD cohort. And then we just published very recently with Mike Angell at Stanford, a large consortium on the BRUCE cohort, which is the largest collection of brain cancer spatial data that’s out there.

John Connolly: And all of these things are analyzed and we work at Central to make sure that that’s accessible to the network and that’s out there. And there’s many other cohorts that are like this across the network. And what that gives us is it gives the network an ability to dive in and to ask questions, whether it’s a target discovery question in the BRUCE cohort or better understanding of myeloid responsiveness in glioblastoma, for instance, or it’s something like we can predict adverse events or response to checkpoint blockade across multiple different clinical indications. All of this is available and they can dive in and really work closely with the informatics group, as well as their own informatics team. So we really are talking about the top centers in the world with some of the brightest informatics groups internally. So I think that’s one of the major areas.

John Connolly: The other is from this seat as a CSO is to push and encourage to get up there at these retreats and say what I was saying to you, which is we need to start turning the questions away from small questions to big questions and applying both informatics and large language models to the data that we’re generating. And if there’s something that’s missing, come and tell us. Like what is that data set? What is the problem that you want to solve and what’s the data set that’s needed to solve it? And so this, at Parker Institute, we can actually pull that together very quickly, put together a data strike for us to try to build that cohort. We can immediately fund large projects like that to get them off the ground. And these projects can be multi, multi, multi-year projects in order to answer really important questions.

Grant Belgard: When you’re working across multiple sites, what are the hardest data standardization problems you face?

John Connolly: Oh, so for sure. So this is my informatics team is pulling their hair out like every day, right? So always trying to stand, I don’t know, the hardest standardization. A lot of it’s probably, first of all, the simple stuff, right? If we’re doing clinical studies across real world hospitals, then it’s going to be data entry, coding, what you call like this chemo versus that chemo. Going in there, it’s actually kind of hard to, you have to go in and standardize that. The others are real batch effect things like blood processing effects. So we try to control all of that by providing templates to the hospitals prior for data entry.

John Connolly: We have our own red cap system and some of these cohorts they can enter immediately into so they’re familiar with the interface and they can put it in and it standardizes how they’re calling things like the over-the-counter meds that the patients have prior to therapy or the outcomes. The other is we use a lot of centralized core facilities when we put together these big cohorts and that’s, I think, really important. And it was a decision made really by Fred Ramsdell when he was CSO to do this. And I’m just completely benefiting from that when I’m looking at the quality of the single cell RNA sequencing on these cohorts is spectacular. It’s really, really good.

John Connolly: So being able to just take that first step, build the infrastructure to standardize that and saying, guys, for the proteomic analysis where everything is going to one site or the single cell sequencing, one group is running all of it and the samples are centrally archived and curated and we make sure that that’s taken care of. So yeah, I think that we try to tackle those problems. They’re the same problems I think that others have that are out there. But it’s important to do really.

Grant Belgard: How do you think about analysis readiness in real clinical trial data sets? What must be true before you trust downstream conclusions?

John Connolly: So I think one of the terms I just said before is real world. So one of the things, we’ve got a lot of cohorts and you and I have been involved in clinical translational studies where you’re doing deep analysis of say a phase two clinical trial, like this long data analysis where you get multimodal proteomics, flow cytometry, tumor biopsy, spatial, all of it and you get this incredible data set that’s just around each of those patients. The downside is that the patients in those academic medical centers that have those resources to do that, these are really highly selected patient populations. So when you then translate that out into the real world, those biomarkers, they don’t really translate well into real world settings. And so starting off and starting your large scale studies that you want to train these models on in the real world.

John Connolly: So go to set up in community hospitals and put the staff in there to actually pull those samples out. There you’re getting people that are checkpoint naive, they’ve got a job, they’re showing up at, you know, they’ve got real world problems. They are not the highly selected patient population that’ll make it into an academic medical centers clinical trials. So we’ve done that across 50 different hospitals for one of our cohorts now that the data is just, it translates much better into the real world. I think that this is, that’s a big one. But you do have data readiness problems when you start to do that, because these hospitals are not staffed to do any of this stuff, nor do they want to. So there’s not even an enthusiasm to do it.

John Connolly: So the other thing you won’t get is, you know, advance multiple biopsies and things that an academic medical center would do that your local hospital is just, if it didn’t have to do with care, they’re not doing it. So it’s, and they’re not funded to do it. So what we’re doing is, this is where we’re really putting in place resources at those hospitals to really acquire that data. And the other is to recognize them too. You know, when we publish these papers, we make sure that those physicians are authors on those papers, that this is moving forward. When we present the data, it’s always with those 50 hospitals in mind, the work that they did, even through COVID, to collect a lot of the data on that cohort. So, and then pulling that forward, I think, into PICI Central, where we do do a lot of QC, QA on the data sets themselves. This is, so far, this has been a, that’s a heavy process.

John Connolly: You know what I mean? This is what we hope things like AI algorithms can help with and they have to a degree, certainly for the QA they have. But, and the other, of course, is sample archiving. So, and biobanking. Always challenging when you’re doing that at scale. It’s a full-time job. We subcontract a lot of that out to CROs that I think do a pretty good job at tracking them. But, you know, there’s always the spurious sample that people are mislabeled or whatever. So, keeping on top of that, making sure you’re project managing all of it. This is, these are challenges. But I can’t emphasize this enough. The value of real world data in real hospitals is enormous to translating to something that’s actually effective in clinical setting.

Grant Belgard: What data types tend to drive the most useful decisions right now? Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, imaging, clinical notes, something else.

John Connolly: There’s no doubt. In the clinic right now, genomics does, of course, because we’re entering this kind of era of genomic medicine and targeted therapies. So, anything that has a matching therapy to it that’s easily available can be, that’s in the US is approved and can, you know, can be used in a doublet combination. So, this is where genomics comes in. Because everybody is getting, you know, a Caris report or a foundation report or, you know, you name it. And there’s all of this, or if you’re at some of the big academic medical centers, they have their own, you know, MSK impact or something, which does similar things. And so, with that information, you do get a bunch of really nice genomic data that can be used to guide care. And I think that that’s hugely valuable, particularly in combination with immunotherapy.

John Connolly: Right now, we’ve got, you know, tests like PD-L1 positivity in the tumor microenvironment. So, okay, well, you’ve got lung cancer, you know, it’s PD-L1 positive. We know you may, you’ve got a high likelihood of responding to checkpoint blockade. And so, that’s why, you know, it’s first line. But the questions that we want to know are not just what’s right for the median of the population, you know, but what’s right for the you personally, right? So, what is that genomic kind of workup that says, hey, maybe I should be, maybe I should start with another therapy. So, maybe I should like a MEK inhibitor or something or platinum based chemo plus, you know? I think that that’s, and then personalizing that journey is really valuable. So far, that’s really come from genomics and just sequencing for sort of driver mutations.

John Connolly: As we move forward, we’re starting to see things like, as I mentioned, what does the tumor, what does that tumor neighborhood look like, you know? So, is it PD-L1 positive? Is it rich in leukocytes? Is it, you know, what does it actually look like? Is it highly fibrotic? All of that can guide care, you know? So, and what I’m most excited about is not so much the research grade, highly multiplexed analysis of the tumor where we get huge amounts of information back. I’m really excited by the large language models that are going in and looking at just H and E stains and they’re trained on outcomes data and the genomics data that’s, or in the transcriptomics data that’s already there to actually predict, hey, this is a KRAS G12V mutant, you know, like just by looking at the H and E stain. These models are getting better and better and better at giving us more and more information.

John Connolly: And so, for me, I think I need that for immunotherapy. So, I want to, you got to move beyond just PD-L1 high, which is really just a interferon signature to not, is checkpoint blockade going to work? Yes or no? But this, your checkpoint blockade won’t work, but NK cell therapy will, or a targeted cytokine will, or an innate immune activator will. Being able to use these models to begin to predict the quality of response to immunotherapy would be absolutely, absolutely thrilling. And then from the transcriptomic side, I think there’s a lot there from the research stage, but it’s just not yet applied to medicine, you know? The biggest thing I run into is you can get a huge amount of information about these patients, but then you go and look at what therapies are available now to actually, you know, actionable therapies that are there to move on that information.

John Connolly: And there’s nothing there, or there’s maybe just one thing that’s available. So, the Parker Institute, our push, if you look at the companies we spin off, they’re a vast majority of therapeutics companies. You know, there’s like very few that are in sort of the diagnostic space. And I think that’s really because that’s where the need is. We just need more options and opportunities based on the huge amount of data that’s really coming out and a deeper understanding of that tumor.

Grant Belgard: What’s a common trap in translational interpretation where people overreach from interesting biology to clinical claims?

John Connolly: So, one is that the last thing you said, which is interesting, biology. You become just enamored with the cool idea, right? So, these ideas, I don’t wanna bash on the NK cell guys, but I’m just gonna use that as an example, that this really works incredibly well in the mouse models that we’re working on, and even in some of the tumor organoid systems or PDX models. But when we then go to apply that to someone that’s actually gone through three rounds of chemo and their immune systems beat up pretty well, and the tumor has been immunoselected to resist the immune response for the past seven years it’s been growing inside of you, this is a totally different world than a transplanted mouse or cell line that you’re trying to kill.

John Connolly: And so, this kind of dependency on clinical data, on preclinical data and this belief in it, and you become enamored with the mechanism and understanding of how it works, this leads you then to misinterpret responses on your phase one trial. So, you’re coming in, doing a safety study in phase one, you see two partial responses, you jump up and down and think this is the best thing in the world. What you missed was the eight non-responses. So, it’s one of those things that’s having, and it’s really because the mechanism works so well in preclinical data. And so, you push to the phase two, again, maybe some, and those patients are heavily selected at your academic clinical trial, so you’re just picking the patients you kind of think will work. And then, once it hits phase three, it’s 50-50 on every clinical trial, it’s a coin flip.

John Connolly: And it shouldn’t be, because you’ve been through so much to get to that point, you should have seen that this thing was gonna miss. And so, again, this is a great place for AI to come in and to remove a lot of that subjectivity from that. I think one of the most exciting things about the path I just described is, even if the drug doesn’t work, you start to, you learn a lot. There is something to be said about experimental medicine. And I think some of the best innovation in this space is really coming from clinical trials that didn’t work the way we expected them to work. It’s throughout the history of science, its serendipity has been an essential portion of it. And it continues, it’s incredibly valuable when it happens in a clinical trial, where you really say, hey, hold on a second, I’m not getting what I want, but I’m getting something here.

John Connolly: It really teaches you a lot that mice and in vitro organized just don’t.

Grant Belgard: Switching tracks now, what did you originally think your career would look like and how did reality diverge?

John Connolly: That’s a funny question. I think from a career standpoint, I’ve always wanted to be, obviously be in science. And someone had asked me a couple of years ago this, I don’t remember a time where I didn’t want to be a scientist. There’s never, never, even when I was a little kid, I had my test tubes and things like that, chemistry kits and microscope and everything in the just bedroom, even when I was six years old. So it’s always kind of gone in that direction. I think the track, as I was coming up, the traditional track would have just been an academic professor doing great things, but very siloed, where you’re doing your thing, you’re kind of in the corner of the lab, you’ve got the main project that’s driving, but you’ve got these side projects that keep you excited. I think that for me was always the track that I think people, you’d always go on.

John Connolly: I think most people that came up even now have that in mind as a potential. I think the difference really came with, as always, with the mentors that you have as you’re coming up. And I think just pointing out some great ones in Mike Fanger of Dartmouth. Mike was head of the department, but he also started a company called Medarex and a number of other companies as well. But Mike had this kind of entrepreneurial spirit, and I think that was highly inspiring. So just to watch him run the department, to do his thing, and to also run this big company at the same time, and almost seamlessly, when he’s thinking about it, he’s thinking the same way. He’s the same guy in both places. He’s just interested in solving the problem. The company, the academic position, the friends, the networks, the service that he has on profits, all of that was toward one thing.

John Connolly: And each of these different things was like Dartmouth, medical school, and the company. These were all ways to get there in service of his greater kind of vision, what he wanted to accomplish in the cancer space. And so he went on to develop CTLA-4, PD-1, all of these great breakthroughs, identified them, and then internally developed them within Medarex, which was then acquired by BMS. But I think that that, the way he worked and the way he thought was really important for me. And then moving on, I think working with Jacques Banchereau at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research was big for me, because Jacques thought he was very much a high-energy company person. You know what I mean?

John Connolly: Getting into an environment where teamwork was essential, you had to work together with each other to get anything done, and think purely about the human disease, not so much about the mouse models, about really getting things into the clinic and testing them there. That was a change that moved me away from this idea of just the lone professor in the corner, more toward this team-based biology. And so I think those two people were highly influential. That and everybody else, you go through life. But it definitely changed the way I was thinking and the direction. You come to realize that to get anything really substantive done, you can’t do it alone. That’s all, there’s only 24 hours a day. You might be the best at everything, but there’s still only 24 hours in a day. So you really need to have a team of experts and collaborators and networks.

John Connolly: And that really led me to what I think is just a great network in the Parker Institute.

Grant Belgard: What skills turned out to be career compounding, the kind that kept paying dividends?

John Connolly: Oh, it’s mostly, it’s just the ability to work with people, you know what I mean? And enjoy it. I think some of the true, for me personally, one of the true joys in life is working with people to build things. And that for me is absolutely, it’s probably true across most careers. I said, if you like to work with really smart people, you hire people that are smarter than you and empower them and recognize them, this is really essential to building effective teams. And I don’t say that from kind of a business book. I only say that looking back on my life and what has, continues to be a really successful formula. It’s just that the ability to have joy in the successes of others and the rest of your team is really what drives this and has worked out.

Grant Belgard: What did you have to unlearn as you moved into broader leadership?

John Connolly: I think you had to unlearn the idea that you could be, I may be the best CFO, legal guy, CEO, whatever, it just doesn’t matter because again, that concept of 24 hours in a day, if I can only put four hours on that project, then it doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you only put four hours on it, that’s it. And it requires 12. And so building a team of effective people that you trust, that you work well together, this is something academia does not teach you at all. I tell this story, but in my academic lab, there’s kind of no problem that’s too small for me to have an opinion on. Somebody asked me, what color paperclips? And I’d be like, it’s blue, like everything, it’s your lab, so you’re running the whole thing.

John Connolly: And that’s great because it allows you to deeply explore big ideas, but going into companies and I think probably one of the good examples when we built Tessa Therapeutics and working with a really effective team there, I knew I could walk out of a room and the right decision would be made because the people that were there, they are doing their job as well as I do my job. They are just as effective, they’re really good. And once you have that trust within the team, it just amplifies everything you can do. And again, I think that that’s something academia does not teach you. You really have to learn that in the real world or in certainly in the biotech setting.

Grant Belgard: How do you maintain scientific depth while taking on more organizational responsibility?

John Connolly: You just got to go and talk. First of all, you have to have some enthusiasm to the science, but you got to love it, right? Because you’re going to be hit with a lot of it. It’s really talking to the investigators, going out. Part of this job is to travel around to the sites to talk to them about their projects. But I don’t really want to talk to them about their projects as it relates to funding. We already gave them the funding. They have the money and they know the money’s coming. It’s about how cool the science is. And I want to kind of catch that, the excitement. And you can say it’s the young people that are going to give you the excitement. That’s not always true. These guys have been at this for 50 years that still jump out of bed and get super excited about this cool new idea. So it’s just looking at that.

John Connolly: And then from the standpoint of my own personal excitement, it’s also talking to all of those people who are ultra focused on their own projects and then knitting together those ideas. You know, like, all right, that was cool at Dana Farber, but you know, these guys at UCSF have this other thing. Maybe we should get them to talk and kind of work together. These are observations that are coming at the problem from two different angles. And so that I think is being there, talking to the people. This is what keeps you aligned.

Grant Belgard: For people who have worked across different environments, academia, industry, nonprofits, what mindset shift helps them to adapt quickly?

John Connolly: I think in academia, it’s this sort of mini monarchy that you get in your own lab. You can shift anytime you want. You know, somebody once told me, this was years ago when I was thinking about moving to a company when I was at Baylor. They said this guy named Don Capra. So shout out to Don, passed away, but he started so many great things. He’s an amazing, amazing guy. But had the good fortune to have lunch with Don. I was just asking for his advice on this company. And he said, look, academia, there’s almost no better job in the world. As long as you’re publishing papers, getting things out there, and publishing good papers every few years, getting grants in, you can study anything you want. You can wake up in the morning and suddenly decide to study turtles. And that’s what we’re gonna do. And as long as it keeps going, is there’s no job in this world that has that kind of freedom.

John Connolly: And it allows you to truly explore deep ideas. There’s huge value in that. I think from, I talked about this earlier, when it comes to the lessons from companies are very much teamwork lessons. You know what I mean? I couldn’t have done a global pivotal phase three trial in multiple countries alone. It’s ridiculous. But we could do that at Tessa with 1,500 shipping lanes and centralized cell therapy manufacturing because the expertise that we built together and the trust we had in each other. So I think that’s another one. In the nonprofit space, I think that the lessons there are that concept of mission. So as much as the lab and the company, those are very what’s going on today. You know what I mean? You’re always focused on today. Like what’s going on, we’re kind of putting fires out or keeping things moving.

John Connolly: And you’re enjoying the growth that you had when you look back on where we were and where we are now. But in PICI and I’m sure in other nonprofits, it’s really about where we wanna get to. This vision of this mission and how close are we? It’s right around the corner. And that belief is really quite essential at being effective in a nonprofit. So yeah, I think that’s kind of the take is that that’s what the nonprofit really taught me is that to have this longer term vision and to talk about mission and to constantly check back on everything on whether it’s getting us one step closer to that mission.

Grant Belgard: What does good taste look like in choosing problems?

John Connolly: Oh, wow. That’s a cool question. I think when it has to do with cancer immunotherapy, I can tell you it has to do with like, how close is this to actually curing someone? There is something else though, you know what I mean? And for me, it is that a little bit of that contrarian nature, which is, how unique is this idea? You know what I mean? Like, is it, and sometimes those ideas are, everyone’s doing this. So on that 1% chance that everyone is wrong, let’s take a deep look the other way. Like that let’s assume the sun doesn’t come up in the West. Yeah, I mean the East, it’s coming up in the West tomorrow and that’s just it. And what would that mean? How can we explore these kinds of ideas? So, and it’s absurd and the vast majority of time it doesn’t work, but it gets you to think a little bit of a different way. So for me, ideas that are audacious, I think have value.

John Connolly: And then the ones that, and when you kind of lead your way through or the ultimate kind of end point where you’re gonna get to with those ideas, if it’s leading to real effective impact in the clinic, like if this is right, then we’ve got something totally different here. Then going back and checking the data, not your data, but all the data, everything that’s out there in the field, diving deep saying, well, I can’t be right because this is going another way. So for me, it’s not following along with what everyone else is doing. Those ideas are not that exciting. Because my assumption is there are smart people that are working 24/7 on this and they’re gonna get to where that ultimate path is gonna be. But if you’re going in a different direction, you’re thinking differently, you take a big swing, that I think is an exciting idea.

Grant Belgard: How do you recommend building credibility across disciplines, especially for computational people working with wet lab and clinical teams?

John Connolly: Yeah, sure. So I mean, this team idea is essential right, but it’s also from the computational side, and this is actually even from the wet lab side, the credibility comes with the kind of end result, of course, and the track record is the end result. But to get there, and I think you know this even better than I, Grant, is you’ve gotta have an understanding. So you’ve gotta get in there and understand the biological question that you’re trying to solve, that’s all. Even if you’ve never done this before, you say, all right guys, walk me through this, let’s talk, teach me.

John Connolly: And so constantly learning, constantly engaging the wet lab scientists and learning what are the key, why is this an important question, not just what it is, to the same degree to be able to communicate, your solution to that has to be explained to the wet lab scientists as well so that they understand where this one’s coming from. It’s like, okay. And then you can really start working together, mostly because they’re gonna ask you what you think is a stupid question, but then you’re like, all right, hold on a second. There might be something there. And to the same degree, you’re gonna have this wealth of experience working with so many wet lab scientists that you’re gonna bring excellent questions to the table there too. But ultimately that credibility comes from the relationships you’re forging with these people, but also the outcome from that collaboration.

Grant Belgard: If someone wants to move towards scientific leadership, what experiences should they actively seek out?

John Connolly: So I think there’s a, I mentioned there’s a big difference in sort of this leadership role, but I think versus say your own, just a PI in the lab, there’s just so many different kinds of leadership. So one is just, is be a good leader, right? So focus on yourself. That’s the biggest thing, honestly. This idea of, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but finding good people that are extremely talented, that are engaged, they’re energized, that share your enthusiasm for what you’re doing, that are better than you at certain areas, absolutely hire those people. And then, as I said, recognize and build. So to be a good leader, just work on yourself. That’s a huge thing. And once that happens, you’ll begin to create incredibly effective teams. And those teams will, the product of that output is really gonna kind of launch you in the right direction.

John Connolly: I think that also translates whether you’re running a small lab somewhere or you’re moving up to a dean of a medical school or you’re head of a pharmaceutical company or even just a division head within a pharmaceutical company that you’re being good leader is, people select good leaders to become good leaders. So that’s kind of how it works. And a lot of that is just focusing on your own behavior, expectations, and sort of, there’s another aspect of this, is it sounds a little Pollyanna to say that, but I think honestly, you also have to kind of filter out the noise. All the organizations I said have issues and problems and real world stresses. You just got to learn to filter that stuff out, focus on what that ultimate goal is. And this is why having a mission and about what you want to do is really important.

John Connolly: Whatever barriers come up in front of you, you’re just keeping your eye on the mission and just weaving your way around those barriers, eye on completely all the time and doing that with your team. That’s really best advice. And that’s from smallish leadership role to head of the NIH.

Grant Belgard: John, this has been fantastic. Thanks for walking us through how you think about strategy, data, and translation, and for sharing the career lessons you’ve gained along the way. For listeners who want to follow your work, where’s the best place for them to do that?

John Connolly: It’s definitely the Parker Institute website, but we also have a really active social media. So please follow everyone on Parker ICI, our Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, on Twitter, on X, on LinkedIn. There’s a good comms team. So they’re always putting out great output from the network. So, and keep an eye on the immunotherapy space too.

Grant Belgard: And is there anything you’d like to leave the audience with as a final thought?

John Connolly: There is one thing I think, I mentioned this idea of believing in the mission. You know what, I think there’s certain times in the history of science when you kind of look back on things where science doesn’t just work progressively to help society. You know what I mean? It’s not like you see like these sort of increases in lifespan over years and years and years. The way science works is inventions, people, the adoption of new procedures and technologies launch the field forward. There was a time where you were pre-antibiotics, pre-vaccines, pre-germ theory of disease, where half of kids died before the age of 11, half. And this was terrible and everybody hated it. And they felt just as bad now as then as they do now. But you couldn’t imagine a world where that didn’t happen. Well, we live in a world now where we’re living with cancer and everyone’s dying of cancer.

John Connolly: Everyone has this touch to their lives and their families and it’s a huge, huge, huge, huge impact on society. Well, we’re entering a world soon with the advances that are happening where it would be look like, it looks like childhood mortality. You’ll look back and say, how was it possible that we lived in a world where everyone died of cancer? It’s like, this just makes no sense to me. And that comes with funding this research and pushing it forward, but it is just around the corner. It truly, truly is.

Grant Belgard: John, thanks.

John Connolly: Thank you, Grant. Appreciate you.