🧬 Quin Wills - Ochre Bio - Part 3 | University of Oxford’s Single Cell Consortium | The Pitfalls of Californian Entrepreneurships | Dinner Table Origins of Ochre Bio | The Laws that Guide Ochre Bio

The Biotech Startups Podcast

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Part 3 of 4.

My guest for this week’s episode is Quin Wills, CSO and Co-Founder of Ochre Bio, a pioneering biotechnology company developing RNA therapies for chronic liver diseases. Using a combination of genomic deep phenotyping, precision RNA medicine, and testing in live human donor livers, Ochre is developing therapies for liver health challenges ranging from increasing donor liver supply to reducing cirrhosis complications.

In addition to his work at Ochre, Quin is also a highly accomplished academic with a medical degree from Witwatersrand University and doctoral degrees from Cambridge and Oxford in computational biology, mathematics, and statistical genomics.

Along with his academic accomplishments, Quin also co-founded SimuGen and has worked at the University College London, the Mayo Clinic, and Novo Nordisk before he went on to co-found Ochre Bio. Quin's diverse experiences offer a wealth of insights that everyone can draw inspiration from.

Join us this week and hear about Quin’s:

• Working at the Mayo Clinic’s Single Cell Consortium at The University of Oxford
• The dynamics of collaboration between academia and industry, including lessons learned from his time at Novo Nordisk
• The founding principles and evolution of Ochre Bio
• Pivoting towards a bioinformatics approach

Please enjoy my conversation with Quin Wills.
Find Our Guest, Quin Wills, at these links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinwills/

https://www.ochre-bio.com/

Find Our Host, Jon Chee, at these links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee

https://www.excedr.com

Timestamps:

00:28 Intro

01:46 Dealing with a rapidly evolving company and Quin’s decision to move to America

02:58 Transitioning from the Mayo Clinic back to Oxford to work at their Single Cell Consortium

04:51 Learning when to make waves and when to ride the waves and the pitfalls of “Californian entrepreneurship”

08:10 Experience working at Novo Nordisk in collaboration with Oxford and building an innovation center that behaved like a biotech

11:35 Learning to focus more on the people element of building his department and other lessons learned from Novo Nordisk

12:57 How a chance dinner table conversation turned into Ochre Bio

14:36 Finding his co-founder and how they built Ochre from an idea to a company

17:11 The deceptively simple laws that Ochre Bio is built upon and why a good failure culture is so important to innovation

20:10 Outro

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Enriched Notes:

Topics Mentioned:

Ochre Bio https://www.ochre-bio.com/

Mayo Clinic https://www.mayoclinic.org/

Pharmacogenomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacogenomics

Oxford Single Cell Consortium https://www.imm.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-single-cell-biology-consortium

Novo Nordisk Research Center https://www.novonordisk.com/science-and-technology/research-and-technology-centres/oxford-research-centre.html

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology https://www.excedr.com/blog/what-is-bioinformatics-and-computational-biology

Single-Cell Genomics https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0960-x

Single-Cell Epigenomics https://www.excedr.com/blog/single-cell-epigenomics

Spinning Out of Academia https://www.excedr.com/resources/how-to-spin-out-of-academia-and-into-a-startup

Common Mistakes of First-Time Founders & Biotechs https://www.excedr.com/blog/common-business-mistakes
People Mentioned:

Chris Holmes https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/people/chris-holmes

Jack O’Meara https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackomeara/?originalSubdomain=uk

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