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A RopesTalk podcast series brought to you by the Women’s Forum at Ropes & Gray, featuring conversations with extraordinary women who have had successful careers and interesting lives, and are also making a positive impact in their workplaces and in their communities.
Christine Moundas: Welcome and thank you for joining us on our latest installment of Women @ RopesTalk, a podcast series brought to you by the Women’s Forum at Ropes & Gray. I’m Christine Moundas, a health care and data partner at Ropes & Gray and co-lead of the firm’s digital health initiative. On this episode, I’m joined by my co-host of this series, Megan Baca, who’s in our IP transactions and licensing group and who co-leads the firm’s digital health initiative with me. Hi, Megan—hard to believe that it’s been four years with over two dozen episodes of Women @ RopesTalk in the books, and this is the first time we, as co-hosts, are on the same episode together, so I’m extra excited for this one. First, do you want to reintroduce yourself and provide an overview of your practice?
Megan Baca: Sure, I’d love to—thanks, Christine. And, yes, it’s hard to believe it’s been four years and so many wonderful guests along the way. I am Megan Baca, the managing partner of our Silicon Valley office here at Ropes & Gray. I co-lead our IP transactions and licensing practice. My own practice focuses on life sciences, technology, and AI-related licensing and collaboration transactions, and with you, Christine, I lead our digital health initiative. I’m really excited to join you here.
Christine Moundas: Great. For this episode, can you tell me a bit about who you will be interviewing and how you know each other?
Megan Baca: I’m really excited to interview Laura Berner today. She is the chief operating officer at TRex Bio here in the Bay Area. TRex is a preclinical-stage biotech company that’s venture backed, and what they do is really cutting-edge computational biology tools. They focus on human tissues and have a strong expertise in immunobiology, and they’re really focusing on developing therapeutics for inflammatory disease. I’m really excited to have her on the podcast because her work at TRex dovetails really nicely with the kind of work I love to do here at Ropes & Gray.
Christine Moundas: What would you say is most notable about Laura’s career?
Megan Baca: Laura has a really interesting career path that we’ll hear more about on the episode. The thing that is so interesting about it is that she started as a lawyer and was at Ropes & Gray. She went in-house at Genentech, which became part of Roche during her tenure there, which is obviously a large, global pharmaceutical company. But her next turn was to Myovant Sciences, which is a public biotech company. And her latest turn is to a venture-backed, small biotech company. So, she’s seen the whole range of companies, and not only that, but along the way, she switched from a legal role into a business development and partnering role when she was at Roche. Then, she took that position to Myovant, and it was in business development there. And now, has been the chief business officer and the chief operating officer of TRex. She not only offers the well-rounded expertise from various life sciences company perspectives, from very small to very large, also public and private, but also, both the legal perspective as well as business development, partnering, fundraising—she’s seen so many different aspects of corporate transactions that companies in the life sciences space experience.
Christine Moundas: Fantastic. With that, I’ll turn it over to you and Laura.
Megan Baca: Welcome, Laura—I’m so glad that you could join us on our podcast today. Let’s dive in—I’d love to hear about you. You have such an interesting career path with lots of interesting twists and turns. So, I’d like to start by going way back to college. I understand you majored in bio at Bryn Mawr. I majored in computer science, so I always like to ask the question of folks like us who definitely took a turn in their education path and go into a law school. Tell us what inspired you to go to law school after starting off in sciences.
Laura Berner: I studied biology in college because I really loved science, and those were just the classes that I wanted to take the most, but I didn’t so much have a career in mind. I knew I didn’t want to go to med school, but I didn’t really have a view on what a career in science could look like. It was really in my last year at Bryn Mawr when I was weighing the idea of a PhD, a master’s, or continuing my education in some way, I was struggling to pick a particular field of study. I was talking it over with my senior advisor at the time and he said something to the effect of, “PhD studies are extremely intense, and you should really only do this if there’s something about which you’re really, really passionate.” I just couldn’t narrow that down, so instead, I took some time off. I spent two years doing something entirely different, but I always knew I wanted to go back to school. Somewhere along the way someone said to me, “There’s a lot you can do with a law degree.” I honestly didn’t know that much about the legal profession, but I really liked that idea that I could go back to school and study something, and it would give me lots of options. I’m not actually sure that that’s the advice I give these days to someone weighing law school over other disciplines, but that’s how I got there.
Megan Baca: After finishing law school, what were you thinking about? I know you came to a big firm because you came to Ropes & Gray—you’re a proud alum of the firm. What led you to big law? Tell me a little bit about your experience at Ropes and what legal areas you focused on first.
Laura Berner: Like many of us, who were finishing law school, I was very focused on geography—I knew I wanted to come back to the Boston area. I now live in the Bay Area, but I’m from New England originally. I was really interested in getting broad experience, like figuring out how to be a lawyer, and I wanted to be in Boston. And I felt very fortunate to get an offer from Ropes to summer there and then to be an associate, because, of course, it’s such a great firm. I went really as a corporate generalist and then very quickly focused on life sciences and IP transactions, which, of course, felt like a great fit for me—it allowed me to stay science-adjacent, and that’s where I focused at Ropes.
Megan Baca: Your next move, interestingly, going in-house was to Harvard, where you became associate counsel. So, tell us about your decision to leave big law and then your time at Harvard.
Laura Berner: At the time, Harvard had this cool associate rotational opportunity where you could join their general counsel’s office for two years and practice broadly across the general counsel’s office. In addition, I think things have changed these days, but at the time, the tech transfer office at Harvard was supported by the general counsel’s office, so I had the opportunity to go into the general counsel’s office and really do a lot of tech transfer and other sort of general corporate and compliance matters. I think these days, many of those tech transfer offices are much more self-contained and have dedicated staff counsel. But, for me, it was a perfect fit to the IP transactions that I was interested in doing, and gave me great exposure also to practicing in-house, which is where I had started to realize I wanted to go.
Megan Baca: A theme I’m picking up on is that you like variety in what you do, which plays out in your next career move, where you really pivoted into biotech—although maybe you worked with biotech from Harvard, I’d love to know—you were at Genentech. So, tell us what drew you there, and about your role at Genentech.
Laura Berner: That’s right. My interest was always—from the time I was an undergrad—cool science. I liked being around cool science. I definitely had the opportunity to work with pharma and biotech at Ropes, and also at Harvard, so pharma and biotech had always seemed like an obvious fit for me. But to be honest, I found the role at Genentech when I was back in the Bay Area visiting friends. It was probably the middle of a miserable Boston winter, and I decided I was open to moving back to the Bay Area. Genentech was the big name in biotech at the time, and I just went on their careers site and found a role that just was a perfect fit and submitted my resume to a posting on their career site. Two weeks later, I got a call, and it actually moved very quickly. And so, I went into Genentech in their transactional law group, which supported primarily business development, doing licensing, collaboration agreements, acquisitions, and other strategic transactions, but also supporting manufacturing collaborations and just generally doing a lot of contract work for the research operations.
Megan Baca: Your next career move, you made a move from legal to business development, which I find really interesting. We have a lot of alums that are from the life sciences group at Ropes & Gray who eventually make that transition, either sooner or later, and end up doing the business development side of the transactions that they previously supported on the legal side, so it’s a really interesting transition. You did that at Roche and then moved to Myovant. So, I’m really interested in hearing what skills were helpful to you as a lawyer? What did you have to let go of from your legal training to move into that role, and just how did it go generally?
Laura Berner: As you said, Megan, as a transactional attorney, we work very closely with the business development teams. So, I actually had the opportunity when I was in the Genentech legal group—after Roche bought out Genentech—to spend a year in Switzerland as part of the Roche legal department and supporting their business development team. At the time, that group was organized with what we used to call a “want, find, get, manage” structure. The “get” piece of that continuum included a function called the “negotiators,” who really worked across therapeutic areas, and their main function was structuring, valuing, and negotiating the deals. I, of course, as the lawyer, worked very closely with that team across the year. When it was time for me to go back to the U.S., I said to the head of that group, “You have my dream job. It’s all the fun parts about doing a deal, but I wouldn’t have to write the contract. So, if you’re ever hiring, please give me a call.” A few months later, when I was back in the U.S., he did, and that’s how I made that initial transition into the business side. Of course, I had been doing deals for years, so in some ways, I was well-equipped for that role.
The funny thing as a lawyer is you usually step into a transaction once it really has started to form—the team is starting to think about how to make something happen, and they’re thinking about terms, structure, or something of that nature. It turns out that on the business side, more often than not, the deals you’re working on fall through—the timing doesn’t work, the money doesn’t work, or something doesn’t bring it to fruition. So, you spend a lot of time landscaping on the business side and building relationships. As a transactional attorney, I think the benefit that I had is I had this great, robust, and varied deal sheet that gave me a unique strength. But I definitely had a lot to learn—I think it was harder than I anticipated to take off my legal hat. The last thing a deal team wants is two lawyers on a deal, so there was a big learning curve for me around identifying and prioritizing really the business-side issues, and also letting go of identifying the legal issues, and letting someone else run that piece of the deal.
Megan Baca: You mentioned coming back to the U.S., so you were abroad a couple different times, is that right?
Laura Berner: That’s right, yes. I spent a year in Switzerland as part of the legal group, and then when I moved on to the business side, I joined the Roche business development team. I was based in South San Francisco at the Genentech campus, but I spent another year in Basel, in Switzerland, as part of our rotational exercise with the business development team there.
Megan Baca: Sounds really interesting. Then, you transitioned to Myovant—so, from big pharma to a much smaller, innovation-focused biotech company. Tell me about that decision.
Laura Berner: I think generally, I just got to a point where I felt like I could do my job in my sleep, and so, I’m always ready for the next challenge. I think there’s pros and cons on both sides of that spectrum. Certainly, at a smaller company, there’s a way you can feel like you have more influence and more exposure than you’re going to get at a big pharma, which is super rewarding. For example, when I joined Myovant, I joined to lead the business development team, but it turned out I also had the opportunity to drive the investor relations function. For me, that was really a tremendous learning opportunity, and one that I definitely wouldn’t have realized out of big pharma where everyone is much more specialized in their function.
Megan Baca: Makes sense. And along the way somewhere, you also picked up an MBA. Was that driven by the desire to move into business development, or was that after the fact?
Laura Berner: That was after the fact. I’m a big fan of online learning. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried these courses—I always recommend edX and Coursera as a resource generally for learning about topics you’re interested in. So, I found myself taking some courses, partly for fun, but really also to fill in some areas where I didn’t feel as confident or knowledgeable on the business side—and mainly, initially, around finance topics. This was around the time that those online degree programs were really just emerging—and now, they’ve really exploded. Organizations, like Gies at the University of Illinois, just really made that opportunity super accessible, so, it seemed like a no-brainer.
Megan Baca: Today, now you are the chief operating officer at TRex Bio, which is private and a data-powered drug discovery and computational bio company. You started there as a chief business officer, but tell us about your new role now as the chief operating officer.
Laura Berner: As chief operating officer, I have most all of the non-lab functions at TRex. So, that includes legal and business development, finance, project and alliance management, and I have IT and facilities—really most everything except HR. We are still preclinical, but we’re in IND-enabling with our lead program and preparing for Phase 1 early next year. We’re spending a lot of our time thinking about how to grow the organization as we shift into that more mature phase.
Megan Baca: What keeps you up at night? What kinds of things are on the mind of a chief operating officer of a company like yours?
Laura Berner: Timelines and funding are always our priority—like, where are we on our timelines and our fundraising? We have such a great group at TRex, and we’re always thinking about how to keep everyone motivated, engaged, and inspired. And I think, as I just highlighted, I’m also lately thinking about capability gaps. We’ve been so successful as an early discovery stage biotech, and now we’re shifting, so I’m always thinking about what we need to be successful in this next stage.
Megan Baca: For people who are listening who might be interested in a career like yours—a combination of big company, small company, data-driven company, public, private, and different roles as well between legal, BD, and COO—what advice do you have? When you look back on your career, I’m sure you’ve been given lots of advice—probably some good, some bad—what has resonated with you and what advice would you pass on to others?
Laura Berner: I’m a big fan of the saying that goes something like, “Don’t worry so much about making the right decision but focus instead on making the decision right.” There are so many forks in the road, and who knows what would happen—you go one way or the other—but making the best and finding something good about where you’re at is probably the most important. For me, the perfect job mix is one where there’s maybe 50% of the role that I can do in my sleep, maybe 25% that I kind of know but it’s still a little bit challenging, and then I like to have 25% of my role be just I have no idea what I’m doing. So, I think I always am looking for that 25%—like, what’s the thing that I haven’t done that’s going to give me some growth and keep me challenged?
Megan Baca: Yes, “the atmosphere of growth,” I think they say, “you seem to swim in it every day.” So, let’s do a quick lightning round: What does a perfect weekend look like for you?
Laura Berner: A perfect weekend is a hike with my husband and our dog, and dinner with friends.
Megan Baca: That’s awesome. What was the last, let’s say, book/movie/podcast that you enjoyed?
Laura Berner: I love podcasts. I always recommend the Ten Percent Happier podcast with Dan Harris. He and his guests always talk about meditation and mindfulness. But also, I listen to the weekly Biotech Hangout podcast to stay up on all the latest news in our industry.
Megan Baca: Wow, that’s a good variety of topics. Bay Area restaurants that you’ve loved recently?
Laura Berner: We just went to a new-ish place in Potrero Hill called La Connessa. It’s Italian food, great vibe, very good food—recommend it.
Megan Baca: Alright, it’s on my list. And lastly, of all the places you’ve traveled, what’s top on your wish list for a revisit?
Laura Berner: I’ve lived in Switzerland twice now, but we’re going back this summer to visit friends and go hiking. It’s such a beautiful country, I can’t wait to go back.
Megan Baca: That’s great. Thank you so much for joining us, Laura—I really appreciate it.
Christine Moundas: Megan and Laura, thank you both so much for that insightful discussion. And as always, thanks to our listeners. For more information about Ropes & Gray and our Women’s Forum, please visit www.ropesgray.com/women. You can also subscribe to this series wherever you typically listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Thanks again for listening.