Michael Paul, CEO of MaraBio - Finding 'Ability' in Disability

On today's episode of Imperfect Leaders, we're talking about what it means to lead with your heart, your mind and your soul in one of the most emotionally charged spaces in medicine. Helping parents get clearer answers about their child's future when everything feels uncertain, especially when there's a chance that child could have a severe form of autism. You can only imagine how big of a deal that is for any family. Michael Paul, today's guest, has spent his entire career building companies that turn complex science into something deeply human.

Real information and real options for families that meet it most at the exact moment they're vulnerable, scared, and looking for someone they could trust. In this conversation, we'll dig into how Michael thinks about the science, but also how he's working to build a culture of psychological safety inside Mara Bio for both, both his teams and the parents they serve. So I hope you'll enjoy today's conversation with my new friend, Michael Ball, the CEO of a very cool company called Mara Bio.

So, Michael, welcome to the show. We are so happy to have you with us today. Jeff, I couldn't be more excited to be here and listening to your previous shows. I just feel honored by the cast of people you've had and that you would view us as having an interesting story.

Well, you definitely have an interesting story. We have a big agenda, so let's just dive right in. Autism, it's in the news an awful lot lately. I'm now hearing some kind of crazy stats, like 1 in 30 new babies will have autism.

So this situation is impacting a lot of people, and not just the newborns, but hundreds of thousands of parents that are busy, scared, confused, loving parents. So let's start with the basics. What is autism? And, you know, I keep hearing experts say that we really don't understand what causes it.

But I feel like you guys do know what causes it, at least, you know, in a very significant chunk of people with a severe form of autism. So Mara Bio is a company. So Mara stands for maternal autoantibody related Autism. And it is a remarkable discovery made by Dr.

Judy Van de Water maybe 20 years ago, 15 to 20 years ago in University of California, Davis, and the Mind Institute, a wonderful institute dedicated to caring for families and individuals with neurological disorders. What she found, Jeff, was really cool. She found that about up to 20% of women who have a child diagnosed with autism tested positive in her blood for certain antibodies. And we all know what, we all kind of understand what antibodies are, right?

Antibodies protect us from viruses. They protect us from infections, but oftentimes because your immune system is very powerful, your body can produce antibodies that can cause harm to itself. Those conditions are called autoimmune conditions, of. Which people know would correlate with lupus.

With multiple sclerosis, with psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis. Right. Now, another fascinating thing happens when a woman, every woman, is pregnant with a child, that around day 100 of development of that pregnancy, the mom shares her antibodies with the developing fetus.

And the hypothesis for that is because that provides the baby with what's called passive immunity. And so when the child was born, it really hasn't seen anything born. And so it helps before the baby develops its own immune system. Okay.

If, unfortunately, the mother has these more. Pathogenic or harmful antibodies, they will also be shared with the fetus. So there's a number of, not just this MARA form of autism that we're going to talk about today, but a number of maternal fetal autoimmune conditions, conditions in which red blood cells are attacked. There's a condition called hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, for which there are new treatments coming out to prevent that transfer of those antibodies from the mom to the baby, thereby protecting that child during that critical time of development.

Okay, so what Judy found, going back to the story, Judy found that about. Up to 20% of moms who have. A child with autism actually tested positive for one or more of about eight antibodies that she has further defined as interacting with specific proteins in the developing fetal brain. And the statistic, the statistics are very compelling that if the mother tests positive for certain combinations of these antibodies, then the risk that her child will be diagnosed with autism could be as high as 99%.

And she has further taken this into different models. Let's say has actually taken blood from a mom who had test positive for these antibodies, transfused a primate, a monkey, and looked at the offspring. And that offspring showed very characteristic behaviors. Of a child with autism.

What are those behaviors? Well, repetitive behaviors, antisocial behaviors. These are validated in animal models. You need a validated set of measures to determine whether something is actually causing something or not.

Koch's postulate is you take something that caused disease, you put it into something else and does the same thing. So that's kind of the proven scientific basis for this. So the mother's antibody permeates through the placenta and gets into the child's brain as it's developing, which then has this negative effect on the development of the brain function, which then causes the autism is that basically for a non scientist, what's going on? Yes.

And so the child will be born and, you know, autism, unfortunately, because I think there's a lot of new things coming online. I'll give you a couple of examples, like eye tracking or some great, great work by another company called Cognoa Linus Bio that we can talk about that looks at a hair sample to help identify children who may be diagnosed with autism much sooner than they're currently being diagnosed. Right. You know, Chris Mayo was on your show.

One of the things, if we only knew sooner. Right. We could have started something earlier. And, you know, right now, I think the average age of children are like either between four or six years old.

It can be done much sooner. So if you think about our situation, you could test a mother prior to a pregnancy or right at the time of the child's birth to know whether the mom has these antibodies and therefore what the trajectory might be of that particular child of being diagnosed with autism. Sure. So the parents could line up all sorts of different kinds of interventions and the right kind of behavioral therapy and other things to get a head start on this whole thing, which can take forever.

But if you can tell that there's a higher percentage that the mother is, you know, has these antibodies that's going to potentially create autism, can you stop it from happening? What excites me about Mara Bio is we can identify these antibodies in the mom prior to pregnancy, and now they're, you know, right. Now there is a way today to prevent a child from being exposed to the mother's antibodies. It's gestational surrogacy.

Okay. That is something that people do. Now, that's not a treatment for everybody. Right.

But because, and this is important, Jeff, these antibodies are inherited by the baby. Right through the mom's blood, but it's. Not through the mother's or the father's germline DNA. So you can avoid it.

That's the key distinguishing feature. These are antibodies, and people are developing ways to neutralize antibodies. So we are trying to develop what is more of a precision immunology platform, a very accurate test, and then a treatment that you could bring to help either ameliorate the effects of these antibodies on the developing fetus or potentially prevent the antibodies from interfering with brain development thereby. And that's why we're focused on this.

Particular subtype, trying to reduce the prevalence by reducing the incidence of the Mara subtype of autism. What is the psychological impact of knowing, of getting that diagnosis that, yes, mom you are a carrier of this, of the mara. It's a great question. And again, since I'm, I can't speak directly to somebody's psychological issues, I'll give you a couple of examples.

Preconception carrier screening is something that's done. Today for a number of different conditions, right. Genetic conditions that you really can't do anything about. There's a number of parent mediated interventions that parents can do.

VJ Florio has a wonderful VR system. My background was also in the pharmaceutical industry. Rarely ever is there a treatment with. No negative side effects.

There'd be no negative side effects of parent mediated interventions when that child is three, six, nine months old. Right. And I think early the data show or the data prove that earlier intervention provides better outcomes. And there are children that can have been shown to have sustainable IQ gains, can live independently getting early intensive behavioral intervention.

As you know that this is a treatment that is mandated in most states to be covered by insurance appropriately. So thanks to the wonderful advocacy groups of a lot of people like Autism. Speaks and it's provided a lot of families with now ability where they didn't have before to intervene early. And so as you mentioned earlier, diagnosis is everything.

Why would you do a cancer screening test for cell free DNA before you had any symptoms? Because you want to get there before the symptoms exist, right? You want to try to do what you can to benefit yourself and your children. Well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, ethics as well.

What are some of the main ethical concerns that you need to get in front of as CEO of Mara Bio? I mean, how can you kind of shape the narrative and get in front of all these things? Like I think it's, it's a great question. And.

We currently don't offer the test during pregnancy until we believe there will be an effective treatment that the parents can choose. Right. So we offer the test prior to, let's say one mom with a child diagnosed with autism prior to a subsequent pregnancy or a mom who has a child, let's say a younger sibling that might be the older sibling might be in an ABA clinic, Applied Behavioral Analysis clinic, but maybe they're worried about their one year old who's not symptomatic yet she should be tested because she would know that that child should be, you know, getting treatment as soon as possible or the mom.

And this is a family that has a child who shows signs and symptoms for autism and developmental delay. Every pediatrician is recommended to perform a number of developmental delay screening test. One is called mchat the modified checklist for autism and toddlers, ages and stages. And now you're seeing other type of technologies.

Great stuff coming out of companies like early tech. Karen Pierce's work down at the UC San Diego center for Autism, center for Excellence in Eye Tracking, Linus Bio being able to take a strand of hair pre symptomatically and identify risk or not, of that child having autism. So back to the point about ethics. We think that it is our job as a company to provide the families with the most accurate and clinically relevant information as possible.

We cannot make decisions for them. Okay. As a company, we are currently offering it preconception testing, not prenatal, because that would be during pregnancy and then postnatal. Our goal as a company is to try to reduce the incidence of this form of autism.

So ultimately we will need to bring to the market or work with partners that could do a couple things. One is bind the cells that make the antibodies and prevent them from being formed in the first place. Right. Pretty cool, right?

Very. We've already talked about surrogacy, which is available today. Again, but that's maybe a higher cost. But all these drugs have high cost.

Okay. So this is not trying to find low cost. This is trying to provide high value therapeutic plasma could be available during pregnancy. Today it's safe.

And then ultimately, there are drugs that have now been shown to be safe and making their way through phase three clinical trials that actually bind to the receptor on the placenta that carries the antibody from the mom to the baby. That's cool. Those are being used for these maternal fetal autoimmune conditions. And a great colleague of ours, Tony Manning, who was a chief science officer, Momenta Pharmaceutical, developed this drug that Johnson and Johnson is now taking forward.

They have it approved in certain conditions, but bringing it forward for these maternal fetal autoimmune conditions, that could be then another potential therapy that could be preventative. It all makes sense. I mean, let's talk about your own leadership journey. What is your background and how did your journey prepare you to lead Mara Bio?

So my background is from the science side, so I had an undergraduate in biology, but I was working at Harvard Medical School, and I saw the advent, if you will, or the early stages of the biotech industry. And I thought, man, that's pretty cool. I want to work in that industry. Was that Amgen or what was there?

No, well, that was out on the west Coast. But you had Biogen. Biogen, okay. And you had some of these other early players.

Genentech at the time was In San Francisco. Uh, so I had some advice from an advisor that you should try to learn the language of where you're going to work. And so I got my doctorate, my PhD in biochemistry, molecular biobiology from the University of Utah. So I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, got my doctorate, but it was always to get into the business end of science.

So I started working for technology during graduate school, started to work for the technology transfer office at the University of Utah. That led to a first job at a wonderful company out of the University of Utah called NPS Pharmaceuticals. Actually, speaking of Amgen, that company put Amgen's first, I think, and only small molecule on the market that's still a billion dollar drug for them today. And then went into more the entrepreneurial side, working with some of the researchers at University of Utah, Department of Genetics, Huntsman Cancer Institute.

And if you think about where Utah has some strength, you might have heard of Myriad Genetics. They have a breast cancer test that. I mentioned earlier, the BRCA test. Many people associate Myriad with that.

That was developed because Utah has this. Unique population genetic database that we were. Able to work with also. And I founded a company with some colleagues in 2006, 2007, focused on genetic.

Testing for autism and developmental disorders. So we built that company. Was it, what was that called? Lineagen.

It was called Lineagen, yep. And we built that from startup to product development to commercialization through strategic exit in 2020. And along the way, learned a lot. Of, you know, what's required to kind of build a company.

And, you know, how do you, how. Do you develop a great board of directors and a good team? And so my background really was from. The science, but always to get into the business end of science and run a company, people kind of ask me.

Why I do this. Okay, you don't have a child in the autism space. Why? Why do you do this?

And Jeff, just to be ball in the roll, if you will, because a lot of times there's a great book called the five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni. And one of those is CEO should. Not be tempted by invulnerability over trust. Right?

And for me, getting into this, faith is important to me. Can always do better in that regard, of course, but we probably all probably can. But I think God has a plan. For my life and I think this is part of the plan.

I'm not sure who said this. Maybe the quote was attributed to Albert Einstein. But what is a problem that needs to be solved. Something that I know.

Something about and I'M afraid it's not going to get done unless I do it. And that's why I got involved in this area. And I think the hardest thing that a company ever has to do is figure out why it exists. We talk about what do you do, how do you do it, what's your.

Business model, but it's really, why do. You exist as a company? Because that. And I'll get into how I think.

This helps with culture is we exist. As Mara Bio so that the most severe effects of autism don't exist. Okay? When you have that clarity of vision, it creates a collective purpose.

And the things that I have learned along the way credit great mentors like Steve Prescott, who unfortunately has passed away. Previous executive, the Hunter Cancer Institute. David Kabakoff, who was a chairman, one of my early direct. One of my directors, was one of the first women partners of a Wall street investment banking firm.

Mary Tanner, one of my board members, is still an investor, was the first CFO of Genentech. So people who have this experience, Fred. Middleton had this experience and it's really about. In biotech, Jeff, you meet a lot of really smart people, okay?

You meet MDs, PhDs, MD. PhDs, MBAs. What I think differentiates us and what I've tried to learn along the ways. How do you be a healthy organization?

A lot of people call that culture, but it's really about how do you instill trust between each other? And to trust one another, you have to get to know people. You have to get familiar with what are their hopes and dreams and their fears. What do you want to accomplish in your life?

And to establish trust, you got to get to know people. So, for instance, one thing we do at the company is I'll ask everybody, if you were on a desert island and you had your last meal, what would it be? And I tell people, hey, mine's I'm a simple guy. Mine's hot dog and beer, okay?

But now they know something about me, right? And they'll say, well, you know, mine's chocolate ice cream or something. So we're out to dinner and say, I'm going to buy you chocolate ice cream because you like chocolate ice cream, right? Yeah.

So the little things, to get to know people, to build trust. Why is trust important? Because you have to have effective debates as a healthy organization. Why is that important?

Because you gotta get to a commitment. You can't have simply build a company based on consensus, okay? Everybody's gotta agree to something. You can't run a company that way.

You gotta have Effective debate. So you can hear everybody, because everybody's putting their lives on the line here for a startup company, right? So they want to be heard and I want to hear their points of view because my point of view is not always going to be correct. And so if you hear everybody's point of view and they know that they're heard, then you can come to a commitment about what you need to do at a company.

You get alignment on that and you communicate it. And then so you don't leave the room saying, I'm going to do something else. I don't want to have the. How do you get alignment around it?

So what happens if everybody's voicing their point of view because you've created this condition of psychological safety and trust and everybody's expressing their point of view? What happens if all the points of view are different? How do you get that alignment? Somebody.

You may not, but somebody has to make the decision at the end of the day. And what we do is we designate owners, somebody who holds the string. Okay? If it's a clinical decision, I don't hold that string.

My chief medical officer holds that string, okay? If it's a commercial issue, my head commercial guy holds that string. And then let me give you two additional condoms. Once you get to that commitment, then you can hold each other accountable to do certain things.

And a lot of times accountability is hard for people because they take it personally. Right? And it's not about taking it personally. It's about, did we do what we said we were going to do?

And then finally, once you can hold each other accountable, then you focus on collective results as an organization. Not personal results, but collective results. Now, a board might have an opinion that this particular initiative should be pursued by the company. I'm certainly going to listen to that because they probably have more experience than I do.

Right. But it's also a debate. It's the same similar debate with them. Does it feel weird or different since they're your board, they're the governing function, they're oftentimes your investor and capital supplier.

I mean, does it feel different? Or maybe it feels different in a good way. Like what is it like to have that kind of good, honest debate with people on your board? It is different because they're my boss.

Where it's really critical is that you have to over communicate. All right? And especially you've always heard communicate bad news early, right? You communicate any news.

And that's what it really takes is. And a lot of times the board members in an early Stage company, they know a plan is not necessarily going to withstand every contact with the enemy. They've been through it before. Right.

So they already have this understanding that, okay, we're going to have to adjust as we go along here, right? Yeah, totally. But is it hard to be accountable and have a time frame and work with investors that rightfully so have problems profitability and scaling expectations and growth expectations of a company? When you're talking about scientific discovery, right?

Like, these things don't happen as quickly or as predictably as any CEO or any company or any patient would like. So how do you balance some of that tension? It. It's almost makes it critically important who your first investor is.

Okay, give me why. Why? Because they have to go through transitional stages in the company. That can be difficult.

Example, going from research stage to commercial stage is a very difficult transition. Research to product development to commercial all have unique stages. There's a Harvard Business Review article called the Sales Learning Curve. And I read that article and it was like, okay, well, this company hired the salespeople too soon or this company called on the wrong physician first.

And I'm reading that article, I'm like, well, shoot, okay, we did that, we did that, we did that. Well, if we did it, that means a lot of other. If I'm reading it at Harvard Business Review, that means a lot of other people did it. Right?

So it's important that these individuals have gone through these different stages. And so then first investor, like you want to make sure syncs up with where you are in your corporate life. Cycle and it can change. Your series C investor is going to be different.

Right? And I'll give you an example. Our series C investor in our last company only came in at revenue stage. Okay.

Now, my Series A came in at the highest scientific risk of the company. But, you know, you could argue that the commercial risk might even be greater for the company than the scientific risk. Right? So you really have.

It's really that risk adjusted kind of profile of your investors and your chairman and your previous investors. And I'm blessed right now. I'll tell you, Jeff, because you have a great. We have a great group of investors.

Initially, parents who have children diagnosed with autism wanting to find a cause of their child's autism got us off the ground. We closed a 20.7 million Series A round. We had a 19.

1 million initial round led by a great investor out of New York called Mac Capital. My chairman is also an investor who was a previous CEO and chairman of Becton Dickinson. So I Get to learn from all of this, right? And they've seen this before and they can bring these different perspectives.

And that capital in an early stage company has to necessarily be patient, but the team has to be accountable to that. What about euro? What about the CEO? I mean, does the CEO need to scale too as you go through those three distinct stages, you know, from discovery all the way to commercialization and beyond.

I'm thankful that my investors let me do it the first time because a lot of times you'll see at a stage of a company, a life cycle. You know, there are different horse, there are different horses for different courses and there will be stages in a company's life cycle in which we need to be self aware. I'm not doing the best job for the company. This should be a discussion and that's a dialogue with the board and unfortunately my investors, if we had the situation, I was able to go through those stages and take the company from startup to commercialization to exit.

As a founding CEO and I've come on at Mara, not as a founding CEO. We had a wonderful founding CEO, wonderful principal investigator, but I came on really to help the company transition to product development. On the diagnostic side, why? The previous CEO, Jim Woody, who's now our chief science officer, has a history, a litany of gold plated therapeutic experience, having brought remicade to the market and a pediatric immunologist.

So it's a, it's like ying and yang. We get to do this together. That's perfect. And you know, I could tell just from listening to how important the, the corporate culture of Mara Bio is and core values, you know, just really driving your mission.

If you have your eye, you know, on an incredible superstar externally that you want to bring into Mara Bio, how important is that prospect's core values? I mean, I asked this to a couple of people. I mean, would you hire that person if they were some superstar that really brought immense potential value to your company and your research, but they didn't quite fit your core values or culture? I'll tell you that we have made that decision before and that is the decision that you should always be willing to make.

All right. For a couple reasons. One is inculcating this organizational health into the hiring process is hard, but you have to do it. Why?

Because if something Jeff doesn't fit, it doesn't fit and it doesn't make, it's not going to work. Right. And it's a fit both ways. The company has to fit the person, the person has to fit the company and you got to get that as right as you can at the start.

You can never get it 100% right. But one thing we did in my previous company, we'll continue to do this in Mara bio, is it's important to develop authentic values, right? You can, you can pick a value statement of integrity, blah blah, blah, and actually you'll read this on the Internet. Some of your shows wanted to happen to be Enron, right?

It's not very specific, right? Yeah, right. Enron. One of Enron's core values was integrity.

It didn't really pan out too well for them. And so it's important to be authentic about this and engage everybody. So we actually split the company into five different companies and I made a founder who might have been with me three years and a startup and they came up with their own and then we put them together and I'll give you an example of one where the grit in integrity, right. And it talked about hard work, but it did talk about integrity.

Right. The ability in disability. We recognize everybody's unique ability. Right.

So I think as you carry that through, it's important to engage the entire company to come up with authentic values that if somebody doesn't fit those, there's going to be a lot of places to go work. And that's great. We wish everybody the best, but we really have to protect those set of core authentic values. And so I love the ability in disability.

And certainly your target market is a growing, potentially massive neurodiverse community. Do you actively recruit neurodiverse talent for jobs in merit bio? We haven't yet, but that would be part of the plan. And the only reason why we haven't yet is we've held off scaling the company employee wise until we got a product on the market.

And so we've been in a very focused development area and now as we start to expand, we will start to look in in those areas. 1 ex I'll give you one specific example. It would be great to have somebody in neurodiverse community who has the ability to communicate with other people in this community in ways that we can't. Right.

In the last company we, we did hire individuals kind of along the neurodiversity spectrum. But Amara bio, it would be our intent. We're just not there yet. What kind of challenges do you think that you may have when you bring in more neurodiverse talent into your company?

It's the same as neurotypical talent. I don't look at it any different. Right. Are you doing the Right thing for your employees.

Are your employees satisfied? It was interesting listening to another one of your podcasts where you said you had two choices. You get to do two things good, right? One of them's gotta be the company, but the other one should be your family life.

Right? And so what we have to do is really have to align with what the company is providing to these individuals that give them value, help them feel worthy, help them feel that they're contributing to a mission, a collective purpose. But that, in my view, is equally important. Nerd, whatever terms you want to use.

Neurodiverse, neurotypical. It's important to the person. I love that. And I think that's such a fair and reasonable way to look at it, because everyone is going to have their pros and their cons.

They're going to have their. Their challenges. And if you really are the kind of CEO that's creating psychological safety where people can speak up and debate issues, you want different ways of thinking, you want to bring diverse ideas into the flow, and you want to come to a consensus and make a tough decision at the end of the day and make sure everyone's aligned around that and moving forward, Right? So, like, I love the way you frame it.

I'll tell you an example. The first person we ever tested on the genetic testing side, wonderful woman. Her name is Sherry Grande. And it's okay to share her name because we've talked about it before.

Her son Elijah. I was on the autism spectrum and we went out, I sent the whole company out there to do the, to do the blood draw, right? It's like five people in the company at the time. And she looked at me, she's like, why the hell are you doing that?

Don't you know that we, you know, parents of children on the spectrum, it is, it is traumatic to get a blood draw from a child, right? We have our. No. And so it's like, thank you.

Right? You have to learn from this community. And so what did we do? We're the first company to launch a buccal swab to collect the DNA instead of a blood draw, right?

And the great thing about Mara Bayou is we never have to take a sample from a child. Right? Now, this is from the mother, right? This is.

So you're able to, you know, really be still a very family focused, family friendly business to help make sure that we can do this almost from the comfort of the mother's home. We can send a phlebotomist to collect blood. We have a website where you can go on, we're going to bring on a telemedicine company to be able to order the test. So we really want to make this easy for the families because we know how hard everything else is.

So if you look ahead three to five years, what impact do you hope Mara Bio will have had on autism and healthcare and parenthood and families and even on humanity? The bottom line for me is to bend a curve on the prevalence of autism, reduce the incidence of Mars, specifically worldwide, so that Potentially up to 20% of individuals are no longer affected with this subtype of autism. As the name of this podcast implies, imperfect leaders. There is no such thing as a perfect leader.

I have not found one yet. What are you still working on to become an even better CEO? Yeah. First is better communication.

Always. And I think you can never over communicate. Another is learning and adapting, which is. There's a.

There's a book called Strength to Strength and what that the concepts really are. Look, you do certain things better when you're younger than when you're older. Like generating information when you're younger versus synthesizing information when you're older. And so learning how to better leverage my strengths at different stages of my career to help the team is something that I always need to learn about.

And the final, the final one is, you know, dogged persistence. Okay. Chris talked about this being a marathon. Chris mail.

Yeah, Chris Mayo. And. And I've always. It is a marathon.

I've always said a startup is almost more like a paper route than it is a marathon. What do you mean? Because it's seven days a week, you deliver the papers every day. Right.

Sundays, when everybody is supposed to have a day of rest. The papers are the heaviest. Now today, in the digital age, that doesn't happen anymore. But back when I was 13 years old with the paper route, I was.

Going to say, you're really showing our age. Yeah. Right. And so set up a philosophy called the Four Agreements from the Toltec Group down in Mexico.

And the four agreements really are number one. We can all do this. Be impeccable to your word. Okay.

Impeccable is be without sin. You say you're going to do it, do it because that's the way you build trust. Okay? The second is don't make assumptions.

Because if you make assumptions, you're going to make it your reality. If you make it your reality, you want to act on it. Okay. The third is don't take it personally because it's usually what the other person is going through.

Listen to the other person. Right? And the final one, I think is what I always have to work better on is always give it your best effort. And that best effort changes every day depending on your own personal situation.

I'm tired. I don't feel well. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect every day. Nobody's perfect.

It's always give it to your best effort. Right. So those are the things that I got to continue to work on as a leader. And then again, I look at myself as walking beside people, not in front of them, building a cohesive team, having people envision your same collective purpose, and really that you know this means a lot to them.

That's beautifully said. And I just know from talking to so many people and now hearing you directly that you are such a great CEO and this company, Morobio, is really lucky to have you. So I just want to thank you personally for sharing your story and insights today. It's.

It's really inspiring to hear how science and business and personal passion can all come together to make a real difference for families facing some tough questions in life. So conversations like this remind us that there's so much that can come out of hardcore science and research and thinking different and a whole lot of empathy and. What. What did you say?

Grit and ability. Dogged persistence. Dogged persistence. So I appreciate the work that you and your team are doing.

I know our listeners will too. So wishing you and Mara Bio the very best as you keep pushing forward. Thank you so much, Michael, for being with us today. Well, let me say thank you for the opportunity.

And let me also say thank you to the founders and the people of Marabio, for the trust and the investors, for the trust to do the right thing and I think prudent doing the right thing at the right time in the right way is something that we try to do. Mara bio based on sound science. And I think we all come out with this with an obligation and responsibility, not with any rights and entitlements. And that's really what we have to focus on to help these families that are sometimes in desperate situations that really need our help and the type of information we can provide.

So thanks for the opportunity to share the story. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone for listening and we hope you enjoyed the episode and we'll see you next week on another episode of Imperfect Leaders.