Episode 12: Baltimore's Rising Tide in Biotech. A Discussion with Matt Tremblay, CEO of Blackbird Labs

Welcome to Health Tech Talks. I'm Laura Gomez, a venture capital investor at HealthWorks. And I am Wynne Dobbs, an internal medicine resident physician at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Each episode, we bring you the latest innovations at the intersection of healthcare, business, technology, and the people behind them.

Matt Tremblay is the Chief Executive Officer of Blackbird Laboratories, a non-profit technology development platform and managing director of Wolfpoint, an early-stage biotech investment fund. Blackbird and Wolfpoint aim to catalyze the creation of new medicines and enabling healthcare technologies in Baltimore. Prior to leading Blackbird, Matt was the Chief Operating Officer of the drug discovery organization, Caliber, where he led a team of biologists in the discovery of new therapeutic agents for metabolic, cardiovascular, and autoimmune diseases.

Welcome to Health Tech Talks, Matt. Great. Thanks for having me. We are very thrilled to be speaking with a fellow Baltimorean.

We would love to start the podcast off on a positive note. What are you most looking forward to this year? this year. I would say there's a lot of things going on.

More generally, as I contemplate the life science sector, I think I'm really looking forward to just a reemergence from what has been a little bit of a cooled off period in the last 18 months. And I think it's a healthy time. I think it was an adjustment from a previous really frothy time. And I think this is a time when people reflect on what's really important, what you need to be focusing on as a community.

So I kind of look forward to that emergence from a period that has caused a lot of reflection for a lot of people, including us as a new organization. We would love to also hear a little bit more about what brought you here over to Baltimore from the San Diego area. Can you tell us more about your background and how you got to lead Blackbird Labs here in Baltimore? I'm a chemist by training.

I grew up on the East Coast and made my way out to San Diego over 15 years ago to apply my chemistry learnings to drug discovery. So I found a passion very early for small molecule drug discovery that led me down a path of applying that in metabolic disease, immunology, and then ultimately became involved in more business and operating roles when we created a thing called Caliber, which was a alternatively financed institute focused on drug discovery, focused really on bridging the gap between academic science and industry.

So that led me down, not only expanding my interest into large molecules and cell therapy, so out of just the small molecule therapeutic space, but then also into thinking about different business models that sort of went with the grain of the industry, but were enabling to academic scientists in particular and entrepreneurs and really innovative science as to how to get that into the mainstream of venture investing and then ultimately sort of big pharmaceutical companies that bring drugs to market.

So I was doing that for about 15 years. We put a handful of molecules from the Scripps Research Institute into clinical trials as part of building up Caliber and brought in funding to do that and created kind of an evergreen model for funding research and translating that. I was contacted by the Bishotti family office. So Steve and Rene Bishotti are the owners of the Baltimore Ravens, among other businesses.

And they have a real dedication to Baltimore as a city, to the economic growth of Baltimore. And they do that both through their investing and through their philanthropic lives. And Blackbird is really kind of a manifestation of both of those working in the synchrony to try to elevate the technology ecosystem in Baltimore, in particular, the life sciences technology ecosystem. I was very fascinated by not only the concept of applying the model we had built in San Diego to Baltimore, which has incredible history and investment in basic science through Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, Weber Institute, proximity to the NIH and FDA, et cetera.

So really strong raw materials that comes along with not just the innovation, but also the trainee set of PhDs and MDs that you guys know. So really excited by that. And then I think the commitment of folks that were here to put their resources and their talent to work on this problem really drew me in. And so long story short, I relocated in June of 2023 with my family, brought my three little kids with us.

I brought two of my colleagues with me who also relocated their families. And so we formed kind of the basis of Blackbird, which we'll talk more about. That is a fascinating background. And on that note, can you tell us generally what the partnership between Blackbird Labs, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the Institute for Brain Development entails?

One thing I'll say is what we wanted to do is create different tools for technologies at different stages in the spirit of trying to sort of lift up the ecosystem at various points. So one important thing that we put in place was a nonprofit funding mechanism, which is primarily directed toward partnerships with universities. I'll expand on that in a second. That's called Blackbird Laboratories.

And then we also put in place an investment function, which is directed at companies that are already existing, that have already spun out from the universities or that have arisen from other entrepreneurs getting together. We call that Blackbird BioVentures. So they're kind of mutually branded as a way to have this feel like one integrated way to support the ecosystem but they actually very distinct tools And what we didn want to do is have only the ability to make grants or only the ability to make investments We wanted to be able to nurture technologies as they developed at different points in their life cycle.

So that's sort of the Blackbird ecosystem tool is these two different streams of capital, is the way I like to call it. To answer your question about the university, so that's Blackbird Laboratories. We put in place master agreements with the major universities, with University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, Weber Institute, with their focus on neuropsychiatric diseases is really important to us. And we may expand that to others, but that's the three that we've worked with initially.

Those agreements, what they allow us to do is, in my mind, is really be a science first organization, which is how I like to think of us. Nine of our 10 employees are PhDs. We have several MDs in our kind of orbit that help us with projects. We're very focused on the science and helping to enable the science.

So the master agreements that form our partnerships with the universities take a lot of the time out of identifying interest in projects that needs resources and input to actually being able to convey those resources and input. But we reduce that time down to a matter of weeks by having already put in place the various legal agreements and other things that allow that to happen. So we have, for example, the ability to speak with any faculty member at Johns Hopkins, talk about their work.

As long as there's mutual awareness, we can talk confidentially about that work. if we design a research plan that would enable taking that work to the next stage and putting it in front of investors, we can write down that research plan, add it to the appendix of the agreement, and in a matter of weeks, we're working on it and funding it. I think that's something that philosophically I'm very focused on sort of streamlining those processes, but it also makes Blackburn, I think, a really attractive partner for folks because they don't have to wait a year and there's some process that's, you know, tends to be unknown for the faculty member what's happening.

And so the goal there is to just sort of remove obstacles to taking the technology forward. That makes a lot of sense. You had mentioned a couple other things. You said that you were in San Diego for the last 15 years.

And based on the report I saw recently, it's the third leading biotech cub in the country. Also Boston, San Francisco, clearly being the first two. I think they've established a reputation as being leading hubs for a reason. What do you think are some of the things that Baltimore has to offer that these main tech hubs don't have?

And then what are things that we can continue to learn from these other cities? Yeah, these are some of the million dollar questions. I'll acknowledge up front that I don't know if I'm sure the answer is. I think part of what we're doing is an experiment to to figure out some of those answers.

But I think from my, I can use myself as sort of an end of one experiment. I mean, when you're in an ecosystem like San Diego, and I would imagine this is even more exaggerated if you're in Boston or San Francisco, as you said, you really have to differentiate yourself in order to be successful. And I think that goes especially for talent recruitment. Talented individuals there have a lot of options.

And I think what I've heard from colleagues that are there is like it's really difficult to retain people and you know certainly you know and keep your costs in line because people are constantly getting recruited from one one company to another so i think we have on the talent side of things we have an interesting opportunity where we have a very rich talent pool which i think is evident from i'll pick on john hopkins but i think this goes for other places too some of the world's best trainees phds and mds And you can figure that out easily by looking at the jobs from early career to late career at all of these major ecosystems are populated by Hopkins alumni.

Just as an aside, a lot of the way that we've gotten traction with people there is their connection back to Hopkins. And so I think that we have the ability to tap into that pool without initially you can become a victim of your success, but without initially having this huge recruitment dynamic. So I think a more stable talent pool, particularly early to mid-career talent pool, is a really interesting resource. I think if you couple that with lower cost of living, less urban crowding, and all of the horror stories you hear about, traffic and all this, which may sound trite compared to some of these huge medical problems we're solving, but this is what everyone has to deal with every day, right?

And so we've had good luck actually recruiting. We've recruited a total of three people that are in the Boston suburbs that are actually very happy to work hybrid for us. And they would much rather fly down here a few times a month than have to drive 15 miles. That takes two hours every day to get into Boston.

So not trying to pick on Boston, but I think like there's also a sense of just people are talented. Post-pandemic, we realize that work can be distributed. why not allow people to have a greater quality of life and a lower cost of living and spread out into places so long as those places have certain basic elements like a good early career talent pool good access to infrastructure which i think we clearly have on the academic side in baltimore through the johns hopkins and university of maryland labs and that's where we that's part of why our our model is built on sponsoring research within the university as a starting point i can jump maybe in the next segment here we can talk about what's needed when we have to build on top of that infrastructure to build out the biotech ecosystem but i think in terms of you know what we have that other ecosystems don't i think it's just probably a cyclical thing and sort of a saturation point where we have the ability i think to grow significantly and contribute on the national stage without some of these saturation limits of both that affect people quality of life and effects improvements and stuff like that In previous podcasts you have mentioned a set of raw materials key ingredients needed for a successful biotech ecosystem and the role of Blackbird helping Maryland and the city of Baltimore complete these.

Can you share again what are these raw materials and the role that Blackbird will be playing in these? Yeah, absolutely. The two raw materials I'd like to point to, they're both a result of the huge federal R&D investment, which is, you know, you can look at that data all different ways. And you mentioned when the top three ecosystems, it's interesting that those don't really align with the level of federal investment, which actually puts Maryland often years at the top, but certainly always in the top three.

And so I think what that leads to in terms of raw materials, on the one hand, inventions or intellectual property, however you want to say it, innovations that are actually the discoveries that are happening in the laboratories and faculty, a lot of times conceived and executed by senior trainees. And so I think there's a huge wealth of those. A lot of those are reaching the industry, but they're being out licensed to operators in different hubs. And I think also it's fair to say, with all due respect to the folks who were working at transferring those technologies to the ecosystem, I think there aren't enough channels.

And so you point to probably a sort of latent potential within the Baltimore universities relative to its federal investment that there's actually a lot more innovation there that could be sort of unlocked with more investment in that high risk, early stage translational research. So that's raw material one, the innovation, let's call it. And then I think, as we've just talked about, the talent pool of trainees, both PhDs and MDs and others, but those tend to be the ones that feed into these jobs.

And I think those are crucial. I think what's missing, which where Blackbird is trying to provide some help. So there's probably two other ingredients that are missing capital in the form of financial capital, but also other things like infrastructure, things like that, which we'll come to. But let's say mostly financial capital that is willing to take high risk.

So things that are pre-seed, seed funding. I think that is something that Blackbird's trying to not only provide, but also catalyze, bringing capital from other folks, because we can't obviously lift the entire ocean ourselves. But I think we can create that sort of rising tide and then show people that it's possible. And then similarly, sort of the know-how, which I think is sort of like, OK, the intuition around how to structure the innovations, the talent and the capital and bring those forward to create successful businesses and ultimately successful products that impact patients and impact the health care economy.

I think that's something that I would say humbly Blackbird is trying to help as a convener, a liaison between what's happening and assembling those other components and the outside world. And I think it's maybe easier for us, a lot of us have come from these other ecosystems to form synapses with California ecosystem, Boston ecosystem, and bring people in to help impart their knowledge, both in sort of advisory capacity, which we've done a lot of, and then also as senior level executives for some of these companies.

And you mentioned, Laura, the virtual model. It's actually perfect timing for us. I think what you want for these companies is you need early career talent on the ground, working in the lab, doing things. We're saying that that's one of the raw ingredients that we have here in Baltimore.

And then I think at the same time, the senior executive talent doesn't necessarily need to be on site. A lot of them are traveling a lot anyway. A lot of them prefer the flexibility of working remotely. It's not a stretch to say to an executive who spent two decades in Boston, why don't you be the CEO of this company that we're creating in Baltimore, take a 45 minute flight a couple of times a month, but otherwise continue to do your thing and not have to move and things like that.

So I think it's an interesting timing is in our favor to sort of arrange those elements in a productive way. Switching gears a little bit, I had one last question for you. There was an article in the banner recently that you were quoted in discussing two firms that came out of Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures. It was Haystack and Thrive.

Both were acquired for significant sums of money and one stayed in Baltimore and the other one ended up leaving. What are your key takeaways from this? And I know you can go a lot of different directions, but you decide what angle you want to give to this. so the reason that i ended up speaking with the banner was because i think there was sort of a trigger of kind of the negative news around okay thrive was acquired by exact sciences and now they're leaving and 58 jobs are being involved for you know which i'm certainly disappointed about but i think you know the take-home message there really is baltimore has the keep going back to this raw materials thing to have even created that company in the first place and to have it be in a sense a victim of its own success is amazing.

And that's the thing that we have to keep focused on, that we have that, which a lot of cities in the United States or elsewhere don't have the ability to even create a company like that and attract the attention and that acquisition event induces. And we should understand that when an acquirer that's not based in Baltimore acquires a company, the default over some period of time is that they would bring it back to their headquarters. And so that's actually an opportunity for us as a city, as a region, to try to entice that acquirer to keep that site open.

And, you know, that's a multifaceted approach that involves people like us, but also the government. And so I think that was a good example that actually has sparked a lot of discussions behind the scenes between private and government parties about how to do that next on how to capitalize on that opportunity And I think Paystack is a great example where I think the acquirer is you know headquartered closer by And I think it was more practical for them to keep that facility in Baltimore.

And I think, I don't want to speak to the specific stakeholders there, but I think the case was made more compellingly that based on the next leg of our journey as a company, we could build this very effectively in Baltimore. And so I think that's great. Batting 500 will win you the batting title. And in many other cases, that's a pretty good percentage.

So I think what we aim to do with Blackbird is try to, not that we're going to twist any arms, companies have to grow and evolve and respond to different cues, but try to really build that into the foundation and try to anchor companies here as they grow, make that more part of the fundamental thesis. I don't think that that was part of the fundamental thesis for either of those two companies. And so we're looking at the outcome of sort of the natural odds of things like that happening.

So with a little bit of bias toward anchoring companies here, I think we can improve on that 500 batting average. Well, and even a company that leaves, you know, they had, what, I think a $2 billion purchase price. I mean, like that's a success for any measure of any ecosystem. So, you know, I mean, the fact that it left means they can still be redone.

and that space is probably open for new people. So we are now shifting over to our lightning round and this is going to be a series of questions that help our listeners get to know you a little bit better. So let us know when you're ready. Get a little hydration.

Okay, I'm ready. You know, when we were doing a little bit of research on you, we saw that on your bio in the Blackbird's website that your interests are in megalithic structures. Do you have a favorite? Gobekli Tepe, which people may have to look up.

We may have to put the spelling in the show notes. Maybe more importantly, what I'll say about that briefly is I know it's a lightning round. What fascinates me about that is we look back and we see only the part of something that has actually survived the long stretch of time. And it causes us to infer, you know, what it was, what it was used for and all that.

And I kind of liken that to a lot of, and we just talked about a lot of it today. We're trying to figure out what makes a vibrant ecosystem. We can see parts of it, but some of those are very incidental. They're just the way they happen.

And so in my spare time, I can't do this all the time. I like listening to really serious people speculate about what happened at these megalithic structures, because I feel like that's a lot of what we're doing is speculating. How did these macroscopic economies really come together? And some of it's known, some of it is circumstantial.

So I find it an interesting use. That is incredibly interesting. I like how that ties together what you're doing right now. I'm actually going to have to ask for that spelling too, because I think I'm going to struggle to spell.

It's got some accent marks. And so, yeah, I'll type it up for you. That sounds great. Okay.

Next question. Baltimore was listed as one of the New York Times' 52 places to visit this year. Number 14, to be exact. As you have people and as you may be recruiting people to come move to Baltimore, do you have any specific recommendations of where to go in Charm City?

I'm extremely biased. I've already disclosed that we're funded by the owners of the Ravens. So when I bring people to town, I usually take them to a Ravens game. It's just amazing to see on game day when you walk around, just everyone from the city coming together under a common theme.

And I just find that so refreshing. And you could stop and talk to anyone on the street that day about something, and you know you could have a pleasant, earnest conversation with them. So I love that. I love the idea of trying to extend that to something like life sciences that actually that also impacts people's lives beyond just the sport of it.

Matt, I couldn't agree more. I have been in the U.S. for 10 years.

I was born and raised in Colombia, in Latin America. All we care about is football, but not U.S. football.

and seeing the Ravens play this season was the first time that I actually cared to learn the rules about football. So I can definitely relate to the feeling that you have in the city of Baltimore when the Ravens play. Awesome. All right.

Last question. Do you have a favorite neighborhood in Baltimore? That's a good one. I've become partial to maybe because I spend a lot of time there, Mount Washington area.

So I mentioned I relocated my three young kids. My seven-year-old swims on the Meadowbrook swim team. He's in the pool many hours a week, which means I'm sort of have to be wandering around Mount Washington, but not going too far. And so I like that area.

I mean, I think it's symbolic of a lot of what I like about Baltimore, sort of the old becoming new, A lot of really ingenious ways to repurpose old mill buildings into, you know, really habitable and aesthetically pleasing spaces. So I think where I am is Clipper Mill, which is kind of near Hamden, Woodbury area, and Mount Washington is close by. So I would say that's, but I've only lived here for nine months. So you guys got to give me some time to spread my wings a little bit.

Was that pun intended? Matt, thanks so much for taking the time. speak with us. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Great. Thank you, guys. It was wonderful. It was very fun.

Thanks for tuning in. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at Health Tech Talks, or email us at health tech talks at gmail.com. Our music is from Juan Arango and our logo by Daniela Rojas.

My views and opinions expressed on this podcast are my own and do not necessarily reflect the view of HealthWorks. I'm Laura Gomez. And I'm Wynne Dobbs. This was Health Tech Talks.

Till next time.