In this episode Steve Gullans talks about the board’s role for life biotech startups and IPOs, Scientific Advisory Boards, how therapeutic drug companies are different and orphan drugs – and everything life science.   Thanks for listening! We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.   Links:   Steve Gullans Bio Metis Minds   Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes: Background -  Steve's network and expertise extend from academia to Wall Street. He has managed teams through successful financings, scale up of operations, clinical trials, deal negotiations, IPOs and M&As. He has also served as board director for more than a dozen companies, currently including Orionis Biosciences, Alexis Bio, iSpecimen, and Navigation Sciences. Steve began his career as a professor at Harvard Medical School, has co-authored over 130 scientific papers and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Heart Association.  Steve has also as CEO of a public biotech company and co-founder and Managing Director of Excel Ventures, a life sciences venture capital firm and he is currently the CEO of Metis Minds, a digital wellness company addressing ADHD. On Scientific Advisory Boards -  “Scientific advisory boards generally, as the name implies, involve scientists giving advice to a company, or it could be to an institution ... helping them with their innovations or with a large number of companies as they try to figure out how to maneuver their way through the technical challenges of the scientific process.” BioNtech had no plans to go into vaccines, but if you have the right community of people, you can actually pivot when you need to. But on top of that, it's really about giving sage advice and critical advice that often the board cannot provide. “Joe: One scientific advisory board that I'm very familiar with is the one that we have on St. Jude Children's Research Hospital … For some of the deep dives, they'll bring in outsiders, not members of the ongoing SAB, for very specific expertise, but I think it's fair to say that for the board, that three, four, five hours that we spend with them each year is some of the best time that we have all year.” Metis Minds – “I just decided to come out of retirement because I've been focusing the last few years in learning about the digital technologies that will allow us to retrain the human mind. “Metis Minds is was developed by a team in Boston in collaboration with others around the world. It's simply an EEG device that sits on the forehead of a child or it could be an adult, and it controls through Bluetooth a video game on an iPad or other pad. It looks identical to the games that my grandkids play today, like Subway Surfer. It's an adventure avatar game, and the speed at which the game operates is determined by how much you focus and concentrate. Eight human trials have shown it actually works.” Therapeutic Drug Companies – “an early stage biotech therapeutic drug company, it really needs a lot of capital. The path is well worn, and at the same time there is capital available, but you have to check certain boxes in order to access it.” “In general, you have a preclinical development period. It could be in academia, it could be in a private company, or you use the best available animal model to show the compound you have, whether it's a biologic, a small molecule, a peptide, it could be a natural product, it could be anything that shows benefits and safety in small animals.” “A fundamental difference in terms of operating therapeutic drug companies is you never have revenue.” “There are two hallmarks. If it gets a 90% failure rate, why would anybody invest? The answer is because you don't actually have to ever have a sale. By the time you finish phase two clinical trials, the pharma companies line up because they prefer to run the phase three trial themselves and they buy that company.” On T