Alexion Pharmaceuticals

And Eric, you know, when you kinda brought up that thematic discussion, I was trying to think about other companies I've covered, right, who had these special drug franchises that went from these mega high multiple stocks to ones where competition became this existential bear case.

L- Alexion kinda came up to my mind first, but yeah, maybe I'll leave it to you to lead the conversation on that and others can chime in and I can maybe come back at some point.

Well just first, maybe a specific question on Sionna versus Vertex.

Is, is Sionna's setback, you think more, uh, of a, of a Sionna specific or idiosyncratic issue or does it really speak to the big moat that Vertex has and that moat is impenetrable in your view?

Well, interesting point that you raised, Josh, that, uh, sticking to one's knitting might be part of building this mode.

Interestingly, uh, Insight's actually kind of coming back to MPNs and probably is now double dow-double down on that area of medicine that created Jakafi.

Then Paul brought up Alexion earlier.

Um, I mean, we all want moats.

So I've always looked at driving new testing, building new tests, building new systems.

Recently migrated over to Alexion, which became AstraZeneca.

My role there was to speed up the diagnosis for patients that have rare disorders.

And it was really eye-opening.

Continued to grow my career up through at Cepheid as an example.

On the commercial side, I was the GM for Asia Pacific.

And so... started that program pushing basically the PCR across the greater Asia hemisphere there so managed to do that work and then I've been the head of diagnostics at AstraZeneca as an example to AstraZeneca Alexion as well.

What was it like going on to that side of the industry onto the therapeutic side but still obviously in a diagnostics capacity and was that your first exposure to rare disease as well?

And she was one of the attendees.

And when you're amongst one of her colleagues that she used to work with at Alexion, who's an MD, that's probably going to win the Nobel Prize in Science because he's working on and has figured out a lot of the genetic components to cancer.

And they're they're working really, really intently on creating human monoclonal antibodies and to specifically target specific genes in a specific diagnosis.

Right.

We have been on a little summer hiatus and so we are kicking things off with a really great topic.

Today I'm joined by Leal Tidwell, who is a PhD and a senior medical science liaison with Alexion working in rare neurology.

Leal has one of those careers that's really taken a few interesting turns along the way.

She started out in academia and earned her PhD in neurobiology and anatomy from Wake Forest and completed postdoctoral training at Georgetown before moving into intellectual property and technology transfer through some roles with NIH and the US government, nonprofit and academic organizations.

which ultimately led her into the medical affairs industry and into MSL type roles in orthobiologics and medical devices.

And from there, she spent time in the CRO world learning more about clinical trial management and then joined ALK where she spent six years in allergy immunotherapy and took on everything from multiple territories and clinical operations to global cross-functional work and subject matter expertise.

Most recently, Leal came full circle in a way and returned to her roots in neurobiology when she joined Alexion in rare neurology, where she is now.

Along the way, she's also been navigating a whole other full-time role, which we're going to be talking about more today, and that is being a mom while building a career that involves travel, flexibility, and a whole lot of logistics.

How did they get in touch with you or how did all this become about? So I'm not

sure how I landed on Alexion's radar.

But I'm very grateful that I did.

But they reached out and they said, Deanna, we, you know, you've been an advocate.

the box which i stand on because you can have all the things happen in the world to you but if the person next to you just doesn't get it or you don't recognize that they get it that breakdown communication is huge and that is why the film was just so important

where can a listener find this i mean what what's the name of it and and where can they go to find this episode

The episode for Rare Connections GMG is on the Alexion YouTube page.

It's also on their website.