The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast

Episode 22 with Brett Abrahams

Brett Abrahams, Executive VP of R&D at Magnolia Neurosciences, discusses his work on chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy and other brain disorders.

On The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast, we sit down with scientists to discuss interesting topics across biomedical research and to explore what made them who they are today.

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Brett is the Vice-President of Research & Development at Magnolia Neurosciences, which is developing therapies for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy and other neurological disorders.  Previously he was head of pre-clinical biology at Ovid Therapeutics.

Transcript of Episode 22: Brett Abrahams

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 Brett Abrahams. Brett is the Executive Vice president of R&D at Magnolia Neurosciences. Before that, he was head of preclinical biology at Ovid Therapeutics and assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a visiting assistant professor at UCLA. He did his postdoc with Dan Geschwind at UCLA and his PhD at the University of British Columbia.

Brett Abrahams: [00:00:25] Thanks for having me on.

Grant Belgard: [00:00:26] Yeah, thanks for coming on. Can you tell us about what you’re doing at Magnolia?

Brett Abrahams: [00:00:30] Sure. So something that’s really not as well appreciated around chemotherapy is that there is often an upwards of 50% of individuals who have cancer and then go on to have chemotherapy, experience different kinds of neurodegenerative disorders. So whether that is chemo induced peripheral neuropathy or CIPN or chemo induced cognitive deficits, sometimes called brain fog, these are big problems. And sometimes the discomfort with the peripheral neuropathy actually has people ceasing chemotherapy or not dosing as high as they would otherwise. And so it’s not only an unfortunate side effect, it actually can really interfere with the prescribed treatment regimen and give rise to all kinds of problems there. So the way Magnolia thinks about this is that CIPN, chemo induced peripheral neuropathy, and that’s the last time I’ll say that. But so CIPN is this very unique form of neurodegeneration where you know exactly when the onset of disease will begin. And that’s of course very different to a situation like Alzheimer’s disease or Huntington’s disease or something like this, where pathogenesis will be happening over years. So any kind of preventative strategy would be very difficult from a clinical trial perspective to institute. And so the hope is that through developing medicines that would be useful in preventing and or treating CIPN, that this actually would be a bridge towards other kinds of neurodegeneration.

Brett Abrahams: [00:02:08] Yeah. So that’s what we’re doing at Magnolia. And maybe I’ll just give you a little bit of backstory just for context. So the company is coming on to three years old. It’ll be three years old in September, and it was founded out of MD Anderson. Jim Ray and Phil Jones are the founders of the company. And then Accelerator Life Sciences looked at what they were doing, got really excited about it, and put together a Series A with an investor syndicate. And so $30 million Series A with investors including AbbVie and ARCH and Lily and J&J, also Pfizer and Gucci and others. And so it’s a really nice syndicate that’s supporting our work and moving things forward. But then we were lucky enough on top of that to receive $20 million non-dilutive grant from an organization called CPRIT. So that’s the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, which is funding everything oncology related and see as a major unmet need in the space, something that we’re hoping to change at Magnolia.

Grant Belgard: [00:03:15] So what’s the plan for clinical trials and how does this differ from typical clinical trials and neurodegeneration?

Brett Abrahams: [00:03:23] Sure. So we are a pre-clinical company currently, but we’re doing our very best to get to the clinic. Hopefully that’ll be sooner rather than later. But I think in a typical oncology trial, you would typically start in cancer patients. There would be a standard of care and you would be looking at your new therapeutic over top of that. Typically at this point in some either genetically defined or histologically defined cancer subtype. I think that’s an interesting contrast to where we’re at in terms of neurodegenerative and neuro disorders of all types in that except for in the rare disease space, there’s really virtually no genetic markers to subtype on the basis of mechanism and have that precision medicine approach. That’s certainly true for CIPN right now. And our initial work will be in healthy volunteers to demonstrate safety, and that stands in contrast to what’s typically done in oncology.

Grant Belgard: [00:04:23] How has COVID impacted Magnolia?

Brett Abrahams: [00:04:25] That’s an interesting question. So we’re a virtual company and organized that by design. So with the idea that not having to invest in infrastructure allows us to spend those R&D dollars in other ways. So from a organizational perspective, we’ve been doing this for years this way and have people in multiple different states work with different partners all across the globe. And so it’s really status quo from that perspective. I think for many companies, particularly those that were initiating phase one trials, it’s been a very difficult time for them. We weren’t in that position. But hope that as things hopefully improve over the coming months and year, that when we do get to the clinic, that those safety studies will run smoothly. The other thing, the amount of biotech investment and activity over the last year, things were crazy in 2019 and it was like, this can’t get any busier or hotter. I don’t know what to call it. But think 2020 actually did become busier and people are even more tuned into biotech. And so access to expertise, access to different research organizations for assays and different studies has become much harder. So we needed to plan more and it’s very clearly been reflected in cost of services. Different organizations have responded to the demand with an increase in costs, which of course makes total sense.

Grant Belgard: [00:06:08] Have you seen big impacts on turnaround time?

Brett Abrahams: [00:06:11] I think that once a contract has been secured and you have access to the service provider that you want, I think that things turn around typically in a pretty standard fashion. It’s more the case at least in our experience, that the two and three month lead time you need to initiate a study is now six or plus months to get access in some cases.

Grant Belgard: [00:06:39] It’s really interesting. I hear about supply chain problems from a lot of people. A number of companies have difficulties getting Ten-X reagent kits and so on for outsourced pre-clinical studies. There are so many things that that go into it. It’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t be impacted by the supply chain problems.

Brett Abrahams: [00:06:57] Yeah, it’s amazing really. Even having pipette tips or gloves for use in the lab. It is a wonder that all this stuff keeps moving forward in the face of all of the difficulties this last year.

Grant Belgard: [00:07:11] And has COVID had any impact on where people at Magnolia choose to live?

Brett Abrahams: [00:07:18] So I’m typically in Manhattan and love it there and spent the first three months of the pandemic in Manhattan. So I guess March to June and then my wife was ready to murder me in our small New York City apartment. And so we went to Pennsylvania, out in the Poconos for some time. We were there, I guess June through December, and now we’re out in Texas. So it’ll be interesting to see the effect. Everyone talks about remote work now and what does that mean for various industries. And it’ll be interesting to see if that persists and the flexibility that some people have if that stays around or not. And on the flip side, I love New York. And so I really hope that the city can respond to some of these challenges over the last year that it’s faced.

Grant Belgard: [00:08:12] And did you expect post-COVID that Magnolia will go back to the few employees there are? Go back to being in person?

Brett Abrahams: [00:08:19] Yeah. So I think we have never shown up all in one place on any regular basis. So we’ve got people in Seattle and in Houston and Long Island and North Carolina. We used to be quite accustomed to getting on a plane and having board meetings in one of those places and meeting between that. Who knows where we’ll be in a year. Does that still make sense? Just the economics of it. Is that a good use of resources and I think there’s certainly value being together in a room with people. The remote does have its limitations, but it’s just not clear what the right balance is I think at this point for me anyways.

Grant Belgard: [00:09:06] So before Magnolia, you were at a company called Ovid. Can you tell us about that?

Brett Abrahams: [00:09:10] Sure. Yeah. So Ovid Therapeutics, also neuroscience focused. But as opposed to looking at neurodegeneration, it was all neurodevelopmental in contrast to the large, very common indications that Magnolia’s is pursuing. Ovid is very much orphan neurology. And so we would look at genetically defined neurodevelopmental disorders. The lead program was work in Angelman Syndrome, and there’s also a lot of work in Dravet, a rare form of epilepsy. And it was a fantastic experience there that really dovetailed from my academic work, the lab, my training, and then my independent lab at Albert Einstein was really focused on identifying genes that give rise to neurological disorders. And then as opposed to treating clinical entities to try and apply the genetic insights to go in a mechanistically appropriate fashion. And so that was the premise of Ovid as well, of going and using genetics to devise treatment approaches and develop those as medicines. And so I was in very early at Ovid, which was just incredibly exciting and got to see multiple programs advance, including the partnership that they had with Takeda that ultimately just resulted in transaction of that asset TAK-935 for Dravet syndrome and other epileptic encephalopathies transaction to reclaim full rights to the drug to develop further. But tremendous opportunity to go from academia where had this very defined niche research interest and then move pretty seamlessly into a company developing therapeutics for broadly speaking, that same population of individuals.

Grant Belgard: [00:11:13] Can you tell us about that transition?

Brett Abrahams: [00:11:15] Yeah, it was terrific. I think I loved my time in academia, treasure it. But for me, I think what really has me jump out of bed in the morning is the ability to be doing something pretty different on a regular basis. And so there was this conflict in my mind, in my academic life, this tension between needing to go deep and having that ability to pursue multiple things at once and move nimbly. An industry in that respect is a really fun fit, particularly in Magnolia where a typical day will have me moving from medicinal chemistry to biology to toxicology to intellectual property management.

Grant Belgard: [00:12:04] To bioinformatics.

Brett Abrahams: [00:12:06] To Bioinformatics, yeah absolutely and having that breadth of experience and being able to bounce around between it is really fun. As well as, of course, the direct interaction with the investors and the fundraising element of things, which I think is not absent from academia of course, right. You have to work very hard to bring in funding, but it’s just a different process, I would say a less social process in academia in some ways that I prefer.

Grant Belgard: [00:12:42] And what surprised you the most? What misconception did you have as a professor?

Brett Abrahams: [00:12:48] I can’t say that I was surprised by too much. At its best, people working to develop drugs are super smart and doing really good science. And with enormous resources and a great deal of passion, which is really very similar to the ideal situation in academia. And those experiences in each of those situations are fantastic and is expected. You’ve got the range of abilities across people at all places. So it has been a very nice thing. I think that maybe a surprise and something that is worth thinking about for folks who are trying to think about their future career path is I think that there are more paths in science than one could possibly imagine. And so I certainly remember particularly as I was finishing up my PhD, really struggling to see anything outside of the next path in the academic ladder. And I think that’s a shame. I think institutions are doing better now at trying to make people aware of what you can do. If you’re passionate about science and have a PhD or an advanced degree. But it’s just there is so many different paths forward for you. And so it would be great for people to explore them and I think more difficult in COVUD, but certainly in the pre-COVID time, the events around town were common in and around the big universities, being able to interact with venture people who were just starting biotechs or communication firms that run a whole gamut of different things for different organizations. It’s really just endless, all the kinds of different functions within pharma, Wall Street. It’s a long list. And so it’s a shame that people don’t have greater exposure to some of those options.

Grant Belgard: [00:14:59] What experiences do you think most prepared you for the things you’re doing now?

Brett Abrahams: [00:15:05] I think science can sometimes be like surfing, right?

Grant Belgard: [00:15:15] You definitely lived in LA for a while.

Brett Abrahams: [00:15:19] Terrible surfer. The worst. But it is similar. You have to jump in and work with what comes your way and try and make something of it. And so I really like that dynamic movement. I mean that probably sounds a little ridiculous, but the chaos of different people with their different expectations and requirements so you have physicians that are looking for new ways to treat their patients. You have business people who are seeking a return on their investment. The public market sometimes hungry for news that will send your stock skyrocketing and crashing, plus the actual data and striking a balance between all of those elements together with safety. Of course you’re developing drugs. You want them to be safe. You want them to be beneficial to the population, regulatory concerns. It’s just a really interesting blend of competing pressures. I often think it is amazing that any single drug exists. It’s mind boggling to me. And the fact that a year and a half into COVID that we actually have multiple vaccines, multiple therapeutics, all of them with like really impressive benefits. It is just mind boggling and think, wow, how lucky are we that in the face of all this complexity that these new medicines are emerging and it’s a real gift.

Grant Belgard: [00:16:57] Yeah, I think the progress on the vaccine front certainly far outstripped almost everyone’s expectations. It makes me wonder how much faster can we move on other things? Here obviously there was a great global societal impetus to get this as quickly as possible. But of course, things like Alzheimer’s are also a pretty big deal. Are there practices in the industry that you think could be changed to move things along faster?

Brett Abrahams: [00:17:29] Yes. So I think there are a lot of exciting things in the works. So in terms of therapeutic modalities, all of the genetic approaches that are emerging now have enormous potential. I think not only for the rare single gene disorders, but also for non genetically defined diseases. If you can identify a central mediator of pathogenesis that is not necessarily tied to a result of a genetic mutation, but maybe a consequence of any number of different genetic and or environmental contributors. You can target that in the same way as you would a single gene disorder. So the technology certainly needs work in terms of delivery and manufacturing capabilities. But I think the future is there. And you couple that with AI that is not just on the drug discovery front, but in terms of the ability to screen, work up high throughput assays, interpret the data. It’s a really exciting time. And something I think that people don’t talk about because it’s like the air we’re all breathing. But what I don’t know is the Internet 30 years old, because I remember being in college and staring at web pages that just had the name of a company and their mailing address. Those were the websites like that, Coke and GM and different places had. And so the fact that we can even do this podcast across the country from one another and exchange ideas globally in a moment with almost no infrastructure, that’s a pretty incredibly transformative technology.

Grant Belgard: [00:19:24] I totally agree. I mean, I really wonder how far we are from mainstream biotech companies, making payments in cryptocurrency and things like this. It’d be interesting if we can revisit this episode in 30 years and just see because I have no idea what things will look like.

Brett Abrahams: [00:19:40] I remember. In my academic life, I would have a lot of interaction with families because I was looking at these rare genetic disorders that were not Mendelian, but you would have a deletion or a duplication of a different chromosome region, and that would increase your risk for a variety of outcomes by eight fold. And genetic counselors, it’s not the typical scenario that they’re faced with where it’s a probabilistic risk. And so you have the parent who’s a carrier coming in and being counseled that maybe they should terminate the pregnancy as a consequence of their offspring having inherited this. What was very interesting is they would come to me and say we’ve heard about CRISPR, is that something on the horizon that might be able to help our children? This is probably like seven years ago. And I said, absolutely not. Like this is just tremendously powerful laboratory tool. But medicines will not emerge from this in our lifetime. How dumb does that sound today?

Grant Belgard: [00:20:52] Yeah, what is it, one or two CRISPR babies in China?

Brett Abrahams: [00:20:56] Right. That didn’t go down the way people might have wanted it to. They were certainly short sighted to move forward without a broad consensus of how to do it.

Grant Belgard: [00:21:07] Well, it certainly didn’t end well for the researcher either.

Brett Abrahams: [00:21:10] No, it didn’t. But the ex-vivo correction of some really pathogenic genetic variants like that, that’s incredible. There’s a lot to wrestle with around how to employ the technology, but it’s going to happen. It’s going to get used. And that’s really exciting because I think having spoken to so many parents with children who just have these really, really devastating disorders, it’s easy to forget how difficult some people’s lives are because of these really challenging disorders. You don’t appreciate your health until it’s challenged.

Grant Belgard: [00:21:50] What are you most excited about in biotech?

Brett Abrahams: [00:21:53] I made this contrast between where oncology is today and where neuroscience is today. And every year we are further and further away from that psychiatry or neurology as a black box. There will be a time, and it’s perhaps already here, where the notion of schizophrenia or autism as a clinical entity are as naive as cancer, as an individual entity. And you will go in and biological markers will dictate how you’re treated, will predict your response rate to different interventions. I mean that’s really, really amazing if you contrast it with electroshock for depression. That was common practice 50, 60 years ago, probably still used in some places today. And if you go back a hundred years in the United States, straitjacket and imprisonment, those were your treatments for severe psychiatric conditions.

Grant Belgard: [00:22:59] There’s a medical museum in Copenhagen that has a room focused on psychiatry with straitjackets, electroshock machines, padded boxes for people with epilepsy.

Brett Abrahams: [00:23:10] It’s terrible. But you take all of these technological innovations on the drug discovery, drug development side, and you marry that with what’s happening in genetics, genomics and the resulting ability to parse out the underlying biology and I think it’s a hard road because of course the brain isn’t accessible in the same way as many tumors are. And that of course adds a lot of complexity, a lot of challenges. But we’re moving fast, incredibly fast in all kinds of good directions.

Grant Belgard: [00:23:46] What’s the mainstream view in neuroscience that you think is mistaken?

Brett Abrahams: [00:23:51] I think something that most folks working in neuro would agree is that animal models are lacking in a number of ways. Non predictive oftentimes don’t address key species differences that are critically important for the disorder. And yet I think there’s this attachment to want to see benefit in these animal models for different therapeutic approaches and think that that’s a real problem, something that needs to be addressed. I think an interesting story. I was speaking to someone who was doing some would say very pioneering work using iPSCs to try and get past these issues of the lack of utility of animal models, typically mouse models. And they laid out very clearly all of the ways that these iPSCs would overcome and identify new targets that would never be identified with traditional models. And so then the question posed was that’s great, what happens after you’ve got your hypothesis? You’re developing your therapeutic, what do you do if you see benefit in that cell based disease model? And the answer was, well, you go and you test it in a mouse. To me that really captures thinking within the neuroscience community, particularly within industry. There’s both the recognition that these models are not serving us, but an absolute requirement that there’s benefit. It is sad for me to think about how many programs have died because an animal didn’t run through a maze more quickly and how many programs actually progressed because there was some benefit in one of these models that is known to be non predictive and think in the same way that big ideas in academic circles really gather steam and attract resources and interests at the expense of more marginal ideas. The same is absolutely true in industry. So if you start to set up these constraints that really define a path forward, the availability to do things differently is really diminished. And I think that the clearest example of that is the amyloid hypothesis in Alzheimer’s disease.

Grant Belgard: [00:26:29] Will never die.

Brett Abrahams: [00:26:31] Right. Incredible science gave rise to the hypothesis. Amazing. Beautiful. It demanded to be evaluated clinically. And I think though we’re at the point where the most elegant explanation for the clinical failures given that all of these studies in the clinic have been, well powered and well-designed, the simplest explanation is that amyloid based approaches are insufficient to give rise to clinical benefit. Essential that that was tested, but the degree to which it was invested in really undercut investment elsewhere. Even in pharma, where there are billions and billions of dollars to be had for R&D, you can’t spend any one of those dollars twice. It’s a shame.

Grant Belgard: [00:27:20] And the ROI on that R&D spending in pharma has been atrocious, right?

Brett Abrahams: [00:27:26] Yeah.

Grant Belgard: [00:27:26] And below the internal rate of return for a number of years now.

Brett Abrahams: [00:27:30] Right.

Grant Belgard: [00:27:31] So it can’t afford things like that.

Brett Abrahams: [00:27:34] No. And I mean, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but I think something that’s very attractive about work in industry and there’s some caveats to this, but if you’re in academia and you’re working on a specific signaling pathway, then that specific signaling pathway is very, very important regardless of what the universe thinks of that signaling pathway. It’s important because that’s your niche. That’s what you know, and that’s what you will do forever, more typically or often. And unless you’re in a more platform technology oriented space and I think something that I really like in my current role in the startup biotech venture world is that if you can test a hypothesis efficiently and show it to not merit additional investment, you move on. And I think life is pretty short. And so kind of grinding it out with things that don’t have promise is a trap that I think we can all fall into quickly. And so there are plenty of examples where things linger. People don’t like to kill stuff and it’s always hard to know when the end is right. But conceptually, I think in industry having these sort of go no go decisions to really try and maximize where your time is spent and maximize your ability to get medicines to patients is the right way to go.

Grant Belgard: [00:29:12] I guess related to that, with new technologies comes more degrees of freedom in terms of design and analysis and more rope to hang oneself. So one thing we’ve seen a number of times in literature is single cell studies, where the group may come in with a strong pre formed hypothesis and they find support for it in the tea leaves. Although when you look at it more objectively, it simply doesn’t fall out. Following on your comments about In-vivo validation, to me it seems if you can stratify patient progression genetic early by some haplotype or eQTL or something like this and you additionally have in vitro rescue and a nice iPSC system or something like this. The genetics gives you that kind of systems level like organismal validation. And yeah, I mean you don’t have as good a readout. You may only know when did this patient perish, but at the end of the day, that’s one of the things you care most about, is how do you put that off for longer. One thing we see a lot in the genetics space is a lot of work looking at risk, which is very, very important. And so there are a lot of case control data sets out there and so on. But we see a lot fewer well-powered studies looking at progression. And I mean, in my mind, in the drug development world, I mean, that’s really more what you care about because the patient has the disease. You’re trying to treat it. You’re not trying to stop them from getting it in the first place once they already have it.

Brett Abrahams: [00:30:54] Yeah. I think in a development context, progression is really hard, especially if it is slow. It’s like if your dynamic range is limited. Looking for a change over top of that is really hard to pick up. And I know that has been very difficult in say Huntington’s disease as well as the genetics are understood, trying to demonstrate that some intervention actually has a slowing of the disease progression is really hard, but was very clear in SMA, for example, where it’s much faster and much less variable, at least within certain populations.

Grant Belgard: [00:31:39] Although for purposes of target identification insofar as the variability may have a genetic basis, that can be helpful. But certainly I take your point for purposes of development. It’s a pain.

Brett Abrahams: [00:31:53] Yeah. On the target identification front, you’re absolutely right. Like identifying these modifiers that could alter progression and then in themselves be therapeutic targets. I think there’s enormous promise there.

Grant Belgard: [00:32:10] If only the datasets existed in greater number.

Brett Abrahams: [00:32:15] Right. No, but I mean it is amazing. If you just think of how many genomes plus associated clinical data are out there and the degree to which they’re accessible, it’s just amazing. I remember this sequencing plasmids in grad school and being really excited about like a 750 base pair read and I’m not a thousand years old.

Grant Belgard: [00:32:42] Technology moves fast.

Brett Abrahams: [00:32:43] It does. It does. I mean, guess grad school is 15 years ago, but it’s not that long. What do things look like in 15 years from now? I think it’s very clear that whole genome sequencing is going to find its way into clinical practice, sort of being bolder. What role does like epigenetic profiling across multiple tissue types? Does that inform either diagnostics or treatment benefit? I think something that I’m really excited about is taking patient materials so I think if we go back to the oncology example, the ability to access tumors and profile them and understand their biology on an individual to individual basis has opened up all kinds of possibilities. Harder to do that in neuroscience. We obviously don’t have access to the tissue that we’re interested in. And so iPSCs enormously valuable to create really elegant models of that tissue that are from individuals. But the problem there is it’s an enormous amount of work developing an iPSC line and multiple clones from each individual to have good reproducibility. It’s not that you’re going to run a trial, develop iPSC lines from all of the 1000 people that you enroll and do that across multiple points across the trial. But if you could take blood cells, have some very simple differentiation to assay something that was both biologically meaningful to the disease, but also individualized and use that kind of technology to recruit who those responders might be for your particular therapeutic. Determine within the context of your trial how people are progressing, get an early read perhaps in vitro, whether or not what you’re doing is actually a benefit. If you can figure out ahead of running a massive trial, who’s likely to respond? And then actually once you’re in, whether that’s happening. I think that’s really important. And so technology is in that space I think are real interest to me.

Grant Belgard: [00:35:14] And I know stem cell biologists. This is speculation, but I certainly have seen how rapidly the technology has progressed in so many other areas. Certainly today, the idea of creating iPSCs from 1000 trial participants is absurd. But will it be in ten years, 20 years? I mean will we have automated mechanized approaches that will be pretty good at this? I don’t know.

Brett Abrahams: [00:35:41] That’s absolutely possible. The one thing that technology cannot compress is time. You can’t compress gestation. In animal models, you just have to let the animals breed. If you need to dose animals for a safety study for six months, then you’re at six months. And I think the same true is in an iPSC context. If you want to look at mature neurons at least historically, then that’s a six month process. But there’s no reason that technology could not overcome that hurdle.

Grant Belgard: [00:36:18] When synthetic biology invades stem cell biology.

Brett Abrahams: [00:36:22] Well, I was just going to go back to this thing I said to to some of these families that, like CRISPR as a therapeutic is never going to happen in our lifetime. It’s no less reasonable to say that I’m going to take one cell type and turn it into another cell type than to say, I’m going to take one cell type of a particular maturation state and convert it into some altered maturation state without the time component built into that, which is crazy.

Grant Belgard: [00:36:53] Yeah. I mean there’s the maturation process, which of course we know maturation is programmed. There’s a line of thought that aging is similarly programmed. And so if you basically kick those programs into gear. But do you have any words of wisdom, I guess if you could talk to Brett 15 years ago, what would you tell him other than invest in Amazon or something like that?

Brett Abrahams: [00:37:20] Yeah. I think that work is full of all kinds of ups and downs of course. There’s no magic wand that is going to lead you down a path that is pure fun. But there is a lot of exciting stuff out there and a lot of really smart, interesting people that are coming at science from all kinds of different perspectives. If you’re hard working enough to have completed an advanced degree, then you owe it to yourself and your future self to really explore what it is you want to be doing for the 30, 50 years ahead of graduation. Because there are a lot of options and that’s a lot of time to be unhappy if you find yourself in the wrong one. And I guess to follow on that, what I would also say is that it is not a one way street. So if you do go down a path and you find that that path is not to your liking, then you should do yourself a favor and reinvent yourself because it’s possible and it’s fun.

Grant Belgard: [00:38:30] Great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was fun.

Brett Abrahams: [00:38:34] Really fun. Well, thanks for the invitation and this is great what you are doing.