Secret Weapon

We all have a secret weapon on our team: someone whose accomplishments and impact far exceed the credit they’ve received. Whether it’s an executive, a junior employee, an advocate, or a unique talent in your organization or ecosystem. The Secret Weapon award gives us the opportunity to put a spotlight on these unsung heroes and provide them with the recognition they deserve.

Watch the Meet the Finalists webcast

The finalists for the 2020 Secret Weapon award are:

AVROBIO – Drs. Kim Warren and Azadeh Golipour
AVROBIO’s goal is to bring gene therapies to the world using an entirely new way to manufacture them efficiently, consistently and at truly global scale. To do this, AVROBIO’s secret weapon is its dream team of Drs. Kim Warren and Azadeh Golipour, the two women leading its manufacturing efforts. Building off complementary experience in gene therapy manufacturing, they’ve delivered a proprietary automated process for drug product manufacturing already improving over past methods, suggesting a smart new future for lentiviral gene therapy manufacturing.Many gene therapy companies have responded to manufacturing challenges by going big, pouring hundreds of millions into huge bricks-and-mortar facilities. But AVROBIO, guided by Kim and Azadeh aimed to go small, nimble and smart, investing in a blank slate: an automated, closed manufacturing system built as portable, self-contained units the size of a dishwasher. Kim and Azadeh led an all-out optimization effort that took nearly three years, touching every facet of AVROBIO’s manufacturing platform. They have optimized proprietary algorithms, designed and implemented improvements, carefully adjusting each variable until they were satisfied with the results. The firm now manufactures drug products on three continents and in two global clinical trials.

Halozyme Therapeutics – Renee Tannenbaum
Strategic partnerships with pharmaceutical companies are the backbone of Halozyme Therapeutics’s success and Renee Tannenbaum, vice president of Global Partnering, plays a crucial role in making these partnerships possible. Renee has proven to be invaluable in not only leading strategically significant introductions but managing mutually beneficial alliances and creating long-standing relationships.Through Renee’s drive to build upon partnerships, Halozyme has been able to revolutionize the drug delivery space with its ENHANZE technology, reducing standard infusion times to minutes and improving patient experiences. She has developed and implemented a process to facilitate strong collaborations with biopharmaceutical partners based on five behavioral principles to achieve the highest levels of success. Known as ECCOTEX – Experienced, Committed, Collaborative, Transparent and Trustworthy, and Execution Oriented – these principles describe how Halozyme employees approach business to create meaningful partnerships.One of Renee’s most notable partnerships is with Roche, which has been working with Halozyme for 13 years.

Kymera Therapeutics – Kirti Sharma
Companies are rapidly advancing to the clinic with new protein degrader therapies, but Kymera Therapeutics is thinking ahead to next generation protein degraders with the potential to address a broad range of previously undruggable disease targets. Kirti Sharma, director of proteomics at Kymera, is a key member of the team having trained under the most cited German scientist Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute, where she developed a mouse brain atlas. She has been instrumental in advancing a new proteomic atlas central to Kymera’s Pegasus drug discovery platform: A tool mapping new E3 ligases and ligands with the potential to unlock a majority of the uncharted proteome and degrade disease-causing proteins with incredible selectivity and specificity.Her work on the Kymera proteomic atlas will help the field move beyond antibody focused mapping to reliably understand the presence and function of E3 ligases in both healthy and diseased cells and tissue, providing important new applications for next generation protein degrader therapies.

Lyndra Therapeutics - Tyler Grant
Tyler Grant, director of Engineering, has been with Lyndra Therapeutics since the beginning, working to develop the first ultra-long-acting oral dosage form that can last for seven days or more. After joining as a senior product development engineer in 2015, Tyler worked to bring Lyndra’s dosage form from concept to innovative platform to clinical studies.Tyler was crucial in solving one of the largest challenges the company faced in its early stages: creating an artificial stomach model to test its long-acting dosage form. Existing stomach models designed to test immediate release dosage forms can make testing in preclinical models a slow, complicated process. Lyndra needed a faster and better alternative, so Tyler and his team designed a first-of-its-kind simulated gastric model that can replicate complex gastrointestinal motility patterns. The model enabled Lyndra to accelerate mechanical testing and improve product development cycle times. Currently, the company can collect 30 days’ worth of data in just one day of testing thanks to Tyler’s work.