VoT winners’ interviews: Ryan Mayers
We’re continuing our series highlighting some of the inspiring winners of the 2024 Voices of Tomorrow competition!
Ryan Mayers, our fourth feature, was part of the entrepreneurship track and took the time to reflect on his experience in this interview.
We hope his journey resonates with you as much as it did with us!
Journey and Motivation
1. What inspired you to join the Voices of Tomorrow competition, and why did you choose your track (consulting, entrepreneurship, or venture capital)?
I participated in GapSummit and VoT 2022 and was a GBR ambassador in 2023, so I already knew the quality and general format of events that GBR puts on. I initially was recommending other friends to apply, but when I saw that VoT 2024 was going to be open to GapSummit alumni and offer a life sciences consulting track – something I hadn’t much experience with yet – I decided to try again myself!
2. How did the competition’s masterclasses, webinars, and mentors shape your
approach?
The masterclasses and our mentor helped broaden the considerations we made while working on the case. In past competitions I have participated in, the focus was more entrepreneurship – “I” was launching a product without any existing company structure or portfolio, and usually into a US or non-specified global market. The VoT case, however, focused on the acquisition of a small biotech by big pharma, and the launch of the acquired company’s lead compound in the EU market. Masterclasses on M&A, medical affairs, and the biotech landscape in the Asia-Pacific market all helped me think more broadly about how operating in a non-US market, or with an existing drug portfolio, changes the way a new product might be launched.
Teamwork and Problem-Solving
3. How did your team collaborate and navigate challenges during the competition?
Quite well! Early on we had two teammates who had to drop out, but the three of us who were left worked very well together right from the start and were able to bounce back quickly. We all had similar goals and backgrounds as technical specialists that let us communicate and plan effectively, and complementary “business-side” skills. For example, I got to work early on answering questions about the epidemiological and treatment landscape for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and identifying which drugs had previously been approved in the US, EU, and Japan and what their mechanisms of actions were. One of my teammates, Katarina Nemec, then used much of this information to identify what comparative prices for these drugs looked like in the EU and how our launch strategy might compare with these competitors. My other teammate, Urte Puodziunaite, then took information from both Katarina and I’s work and used it to prepare CCA and DCF financial models that were key to setting up our final strategy and recommendation!
4. Can you share a specific moment where mentorship or teamwork made a
significant impact on your project?
Absolutely! Near the end of the competition, we were still trying to narrow down our pricing strategy for the EU market because we had realized that the wholesale – not just consumer – pricing would be much cheaper than the US, but the official EU drug pricing database wasn’t accessible to us and I was having trouble finding good sources online. It was our mentor Malvika’s suggestion to look at German-specific drug pricing legislation that led us to realize a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work, and my teammate Katarina then realized she could find individual pricing for her home country of Slovenia. Once we found that, it was increasingly more straightforward to find prices in individual companies and use our existing work to estimate the prices we couldn’t find and predict a target price for MORF-057!
Track-Specific Insights
5. Entrepreneurship Track: What was your approach to evaluating startups and making
investment decisions?
We focused on therapeutic area first! We spent a lot of time understanding what drugs were approved for IBD already, what their mechanism of action was, which drugs were used how often in each line of therapy and how patients progress through different lines of treatment, and how these compared to MORF-057 and Eli Lilly’s own portfolio. Because so much of the data was global or US and the case was focused on an EU launch, we also needed to make sure that we understood what aspects of IBD epidemiology, drug pricing regulation, and competitive market landscape could be simplified to a global perspective vs which elements needed an EU or even country-specific approach. This gave us a lot of valuable insight, including that existing IBD therapies are criticized as overpriced – a key consideration in our model and recommendations that I think differentiated us from other teams. We also spent a lot of time debating what comparators were best for our financial, pricing, and market access models – e.g. large pharma companies in this space like Takeda were poor financial comparators to Morphic, so we used similarly-sized companies from other therapeutic areas instead.
Professional Background and Growth
6. What elements of your academic or professional background helped you excel in
the competition?
A mix of my background as an academic scientist and past coursework on new drug commercialization and regulation. Using my technical background, I was able to do a PubMed literature search to quickly get an overview of the clinical IBD landscape – epidemiology, lines of therapy, what physician-scientists were arguing in the literature were key gaps in the field and advances that needed to be made. From my past coursework on regulatory science, I was then able to know exactly where to look to find out which drugs had been approved in the EU, US, and Japan already, before dipping back into my basic immunology knowledge to understand how we could group them by their mechanism of action. Finally, I could rely on information I learned in a course on new drug commercialization to build a basic model incorporating this information to estimate a future market size and penetration for MORF-057, and to help my teammate estimate its odds of getting approved based on its current clinical development stage.
7. Which skills gained through VoT do you consider most valuable for your future
endeavors?
An overall stronger understanding of what different careers in biotech do! I didn’t have a very good grasp of what life sciences consultants did going in, so working on a hands-on case was great for building that knowledge. Similarly, the masterclass on medical affairs expanded my understanding of those roles, which I previously had thought were just medical-science liaisons.
8. How has participating in this competition influenced your career aspirations or
long-term goals?
It’s made me realize that some roles are much less siloed off than I originally thought. As an example, I was struck by how many of the consultants who spoke to us – including my team’s own mentor during the competition – switched back and forth between roles at consulting firms and strategy roles and small biotech. I don’t think that this is the path I’ll go down for now, but it’s certainly an alternative I could consider in the future!
Future Aspirations and Leadership
9. Where do you see yourself in five years, and how has this experience shaped
your vision for your role in biotech or healthcare?
Perhaps surprisingly, still in a technical role! I’m very passionate about my work on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease and ALS, and I think understanding disease progression remains a key challenge in developing effective therapies for those conditions. That isn’t to say that VoT and similar programs haven’t influenced my thoughts about my career, though. Better understanding how the biotech ecosystem interacts – from basic academic discovery through commercial launch, and all the clinical, regulatory, and developmental challenges in between – gives me a better sense of what career opportunities I might pursue if I change my mind, and how I could position my scientific discoveries to make an impact.
10. Do you plan to stay engaged with the GBR network or support future VoT
participants?
Definitely! GBR’s events and community, including the VoT competitions, have been wonderful learning and networking opportunities for me. I’ve always found being engaged with GBR a great way to make new friends, learn new skills, and renew my passion for biotech.
Reflections and Advice
11. What was the most memorable or transformative moment of the competition?
Learning from my teammates, mentor, and the masterclasses! There isn’t one specific moment per se – though I particularly liked the masterclass on consulting in the Asia-Pacific region – so much as the overall learning experience.
12. What advice would you give to future participants to make the most of this
opportunity?
Go in with a learning-first mindset! We agreed early on that our main goal was to learn as much as we could and submit work we could be proud of, not necessarily to win. I have always found that sharing this philosophy with my teammates leads to a better experience – more fun, less team friction, and more take-home lessons – that ultimately does much more to improve our final product than focusing on the competition itself would.
