Biotech Chief Gujrathi Holds Up a Mirror for Different Ladies
In virtually each room she’s been in all through her profession, Sheila Gujrathi was the one one. The one girl. The one individual of shade. Now, having risen via biopharma, together with a visit via medical faculty, a stint as a CEO and now a seat on the board, Gujrathi is decided to carry a mirror up so different girls behind her can see themselves mirrored again.
That’s the main target of her new ebook, The Mirror Impact, which comes out subsequent month. Gujrathi advised BioSpace that she hopes it’ll present the kind of management guide she by no means had arising in biotech to the following era of girls in biopharma.
A Birthright
Gujrathi’s path to the biotech C-suite started effectively earlier than she was even born. Each her dad and mom labored in drugs, which helped their household climb out of poverty in India within the Sixties. It allowed them to immigrate to the U.S. to assist handle a doctor scarcity in that point. Her mom specifically “saved her entire household,” she remembers.
“Very explicitly I used to be advised that I used to be going to be a doctor,” Gujrathi says with fun in a latest interview with BioSpace. “I sort of grew up with this heavy burden and, simply sort of understanding how a lot my mom shouldered as a matriarch of her household.”
Gujrathi did as her dad and mom advised her, learning drugs at Northwestern College adopted by Brigham and Ladies’s Hospital in Boston, after which on to Harvard Medical Faculty for her residency. She did a fellowship in allergy immunology on the College of California, San Francisco and Stanford College. It was in California the place she found a ardour for translational immunology analysis, notably on atopic ailments.
However in any case that training, she realized that maybe the day-to-day apply of drugs and analysis wasn’t for her. “I sort of acknowledged, in myself, that I don’t like doing the identical factor day by day. I actually like selection, and I used to be simply discovering myself not as enthusiastic about going into work,” she mentioned.
She networked and kicked across the concept of enterprise faculty for a masters in public well being. However she additionally heard about administration consulting, a spot the place like-minded colleagues with comparable frustrations about drugs had discovered a house. She additionally had met many individuals in California who had been within the biotech world. She started to see a brand new path.
“I used to be terrified to make that transfer, and my household was very sad, and my attendings had been very sad with me. They had been telling me that I used to be sort of ruining my life,” Gujrathi mentioned.
Nonetheless, she joined McKinsey, the place she labored with massive pharmas on the East Coast based mostly from the agency’s New Jersey workplace. She by no means acquired that enterprise diploma, however the three years she spent at McKinsey had been “like an MBA on steroids,” Gujrathi mentioned.
The expertise additionally helped her zero in on drug growth as a profession path, and she or he discovered her solution to Genentech—the very first biotech.
“It was an incredible expertise, as a result of I acquired to put on so many various hats,” Gujrathi mentioned. She turned a “doctor government” inside a lean group that was quickly rising. She left Genentech across the time it acquired purchased by Roche in 2009 and accepted a place at Bristol Myers Squibb.
All advised, Gujrathi spent a couple of decade in massive biopharma corporations. At one level she was pursued to be head of R&D at a prime 10 pharma firm, she recalled, however she finally declined as she wished to be obtainable for her kids, who had been in highschool. It was time to go small. Gujrathi moved again to California in 2011 and pursued alternatives in biotech.
Completely different Instructions
In 2016, Gujrathi co-founded Gossamer Bio, serving because the CEO for 4 years. She discovered the corporate’s lead asset, seralutinib, which is now in Section III testing for pulmonary arterial hypertension and about to enter late-stage trials for pulmonary hypertension related to interstitial lung illness.
Her time as chief government at Gossamer was brief, however Gujrathi mentioned it supplied plenty of fodder for her future management ebook.
“Modifications occur in management at instances. Corporations go in numerous instructions. You simply have to know what you’re getting concerned with and likewise how the tradition is evolving,” Gujrathi mentioned.
Now, Gujrathi is a serial board member, with seats at Janux Therapeutics, Lila Biologics and Ventyx Biosciences. This has allowed her to develop past her immunology coaching to do work in uncommon ailments, neurological ailments, oncology and extra. She’s additionally the co-founder of the influential Biotech Sisterhood, which has constructed an enormous community of biotech C-suite leaders.
Trying again on her profession, Gujrathi remembers few mentors alongside the way in which and nobody who seemed like her. Significantly when she was CEO at Gossamer.
“I sort of approached issues like I needed to struggle and wrestle and show myself,” she remembers. “I felt sort of very alone as I used to be going via these ranks.”
So Gujrathi sought her personal community, reaching out to fellow girls on the prime of corporations. With a community of achieved girls behind her, Gujrathi lastly felt like she didn’t need to stroll right into a room and show herself. This casual group of girls ultimately turned the Biotech Sisterhood, and helped inform a TED Discuss she delivered final fall.
“We tapped into that unmet want that we noticed,” Gujrathi mentioned. The Biotech Sisterhood has been a runaway success, increasing past what they ever supposed. Now there are sister teams popping up for an entire host of C-suite roles in biotech.
Writing It All Down
In The Mirror Impact, Gujrathi takes her expertise climbing the biotech ladder and expands it right into a management lesson for anybody.
“That is for anybody who doesn’t really feel like they belong. Past girls, it’s only for anybody,” Gujrathi mentioned. Anybody with an “interior glass ceiling,” she provides.
Together with her management rules written down, Gujrathi’s subsequent steps are already in movement. In addition to a ebook tour to assist The Mirror Impact, she’s again within the CEO chair, operating a biotech in stealth and she or he not too long ago dropped her first child off in school.
“I at all times say biotech is just not for the faint of coronary heart. What we do is extremely troublesome. I’m at all times amazed when the drug will get accredited,” Gujrathi mentioned. “That’s why we even need to be stronger and assist one another extra, as a result of we’re all in it collectively, and we’re all making an attempt to do one thing for the larger good.”
She continued: “We may help one another extra with compassion and assist, in order that we are able to proceed to point out up as our greatest selves and do what’s proper for sufferers and their households.”
