Business Management in Healthcare: A Conversation with Marc Montserrat, Chief Business Officer of Deepcell
Marc Montserrat is the Chief Business Officer at Deepcell. He has built and led global teams in marketing, sales, product life cycle management, product strategy, program management and business development. Before joining Deepcell, Marc was VP of Commercial Development at Omniome, where he built and led the business development, marketing and service & support teams. Previously, he was International Business Leader for NIPT at Roche Diagnostics, where he helped scale the business from a startup at Ariosa Diagnostics to the sale and integration within Roche. Marc graduated with honors from the Wharton School with an MBA and from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya with a master’s degree in industrial engineering
Asher Joy (BT): So I wanted to start off with your educational background in industrial engineering. What sparked your interest in the business world, particularly in life sciences?
Marc Montserrat (MM): I completed a masters in industrial engineering which was 3.5 years in Spain and then a year in Italy, in Milan, and then half a year during which I completed my thesis for the master's degree in Germany. I went into industry as an industrial engineer for roughly five years. But it was clear by the end of that period, that I was venturing into management positions where I didn't have a technical role anymore as I was climbing sort of the hierarchy, if you will, first managing technical teams, but then managing teams that were outside of my technical expertise. That prompted me to apply to the University of Pennsylvania and complete an MBA there at Wharton. I focused on management because that was my passion. I realized quickly when I started working that I was more passionate about the people aspect and the strategy aspect than only the technical aspects. I wanted to reinforce that with education.
In terms of “why health care”, it was really sort of a deep personal drive. When I was 24, I was misdiagnosed with a brain tumor, which was a great thing because it really defined how I thought about what I wanted to do in life, but also by extension, professionally.I took from that, that life is short and I wanted to have an impact and whatever I wanted to do for work had to have an impact in the world. But I was already on course to become an industrial engineer. I finished that and then I went into the manufacturing world but I always was left unsatisfied. So when I had the opportunity to go into pharma, I jumped on that because to me it was the opportunity to join the business aspect and the commercial aspect with doing something good that had a positive impact. It was a great feeling to work very hard, but at the same time, be surrounded by people that were really passionate about the mission and convinced that our work was having a positive impact.
BT: So you had this realization about your passion for management style while you were in Europe or was this after moving to the U.S.?
MM: I was based in Barcelona. My responsibilities were effectively pan-Europe, a little bit of Latin America, but mostly Europe. And when we looked with my then partner, now wife, we wanted to leave Spain for grad school, because we were really hooked by the experience in Italy and Germany. She's from Venezuela, so we were very international to start with, and the U.S. was a great place with some of the best schools and a place where we had not yet lived.
BT: One of the biggest influences, when it comes to undergraduates here, especially, is the idea of having a mentor who guides you through this sort of process. Did you have anyone in particular who you would refer to as a mentor who helped you as you transitioned from industrial to pharma and moved to the U.S.?
MM: Mentorship is essential. I was very lucky to have a few very good managers who were super supportive of what I wanted to do both when I was leaving the industrial / technical world and when I landed in pharma. And those were, to me, two mentors, one in pharma really supported the fact that I wanted to leave and I wanted to go do an MBA and I wanted to go to the US. And in fact, when he learned I wanted to leave the company to do an MBA he not only was supportive but he connected me with the the Chief Operating Officer of the company, who came to me and said, “Hey, if you're looking to go and do an MBA and you're passionate about pharma, you need to look at Wharton because they have a great health care program”. At the time, I hadn't considered it and that really helped me. It really changed the trajectory of how I was thinking about things and just feeling the support of top management was fantastic, right? I think having mentors throughout your career is essential. It's super important and I've continued to benefit from it both personally and professionally.
BT: Now transitioning a little bit from your educational background to what you actually do now, could you explain what Deepcell is and how it's using AI in cell classification and isolation?
MM: We're analyzing cells by taking images of cells and then using AI to enable researchers to find cells very efficiently and understand cell biology better. We do this without touching the cells and therefore changing the cell in any way. This enables scientists to achieve new discoveries through the application of AI to cell imaging. So that's in a nutshell what we're doing. We enable researchers to find the target cells more efficiently, quicker and better, to deepen their understanding of cell biology and to achieve new discoveries. Now, how do we do that? We're using a lot of really high tech: we use microfluidics to flow single cells in a single line in front of a camera. The camera takes images very rapidly -- think thousands of frames per second. And then these images are analyzed by a deep neural network, which is an architecture for artificial intelligence. And the deep neural network, what it does is it's able very quickly in milliseconds to classify the cells just by analyzing the cell images. And that has a ton of advantages. On one hand, we know that the way a cell looks is very informative, but currently, if you want to do that, you need to have a human looking down a microscope. And that's not scalable, it's qualitative and subjective. What we're bringing to that is super high throughput and an analysis that’s objective and quantitative, and we drive mathematical representations of the cell images. The other advantage is that you don't need to touch or modify the cell in any way. You know, by the end of the process, the cell is still in the same state as you had it in the beginning of the process, which is very different from other methods
BT: What new innovation does Deepcell bring to the table in this field which other traditional cell isolation techniques don’t?
MM: So what folks do today can be broken down into a couple of methods. One is if they want to look at how a cell looks, they will typically stain a cell with chemical stains and/or tag the cell with fluorescent markers, which, if you excite them with a laser, will light up. And that means a couple of things. If you stain the cell, it typically means that it's very low throughput because you need to have a human looking at the cell. On the other hand, if you use fluorescence, you can go very quickly. You can put it in a machine to analyze the fluorescence --but you've modified the cell. You've added something to the cell that makes it light up, essentially, or makes the target that you were interested in light up. And that's great for many applications, but what we want to bring is to merge, both the high throughput analysis that fluorescence analysis can give you, but without really perturbing the cell as well as the morphology information (the way the cell looks) from looking down a microscope. We want to automate that and to have it again, high throughput and not rely on the expert criteria of a small number of highly trained professionals,
To give you a sense of numbers; we can look at millions of cells in a particular run of the instrument. And if you can imagine a human having to classify and look at millions of cells, you know, it's out of scope of what we can do, right? So we're bringing cell morphology to the 21st century, if you will.
The other technique that you can use is molecular approaches in which you basically destroy the cell and you analyze the DNA, RNA, or your proteins. But that's destructive to the cell. What we want to bring is analytics without destroying the cell, which still allows you to get that cell and do these assays through these destructive assays, which are very informative. But again, we want to bring a layer of analysis before you even do that to complement that and to improve it.
BT: In terms of your particular role, you said you're more into management, so how would you describe your past roles -- like being a VP of commercial development and an international business leader at Roche Diagnostics -- how has that enabled you to be a successful chief business officer here at an early stage startup?
MM: Before Roche, my career started as a project manager in Siemens, which is a huge company… back then it had 450,000 employees. And what I gained there is a really good understanding of processes and how to do things by the book. Being a project manager and the youngest on the team, I learned the ability to work with experts in the field without being an expert in their domain. Additionally, I was able to bring a process and a very engineering sort of mentality (because that was my training) to the job and at the same time see the business at a macro level -- understand every part of the business and be able to fit the pieces together. And then I became a project manager, also in pharma. So going from Siemens in the industrial area to pharma I used that experience to learn a new domain, which was completely foreign to me, right? And that enabled me to be successful, to work with experts, to really honor and respect their expertise. I was in very close contact with the commercial units there in pharmaceuticals. And I learned the ropes from them, from marketing and sales, because I needed to make them successful. I used that then to really lead sales at Roche when I had that opportunity, first focusing on Europe.
Because I could bring my European experience, when I went to the US I could say, “Look, I know Europe very well. I know marketing. I know sales. Give me a chance to demonstrate that”. So then I went into that role and was successful in sales first. And then they gave me a marketing position at Roche that allowed me to prove that I could support sales of a hundred million, scaling it from a small base. I learned how to build a team quickly, and then I supported hundreds of people selling the product through the organization. And then I went into smaller startups where I could use that broad business understanding to be the first commercial hire.
And that's what essentially I've done for the last past roles, which is to be the first commercial hire and show that I can understand the business. Then I hire under me people that are much more experienced than I am at their particular role. For example,somebody that's been 15 to 20 years in marketing as my head of marketing. But at the same time, I understand the project management part and hire somebody that has 15-20 years experience in that part for example. I’m able to be a cross-functional manager in that sense, by pulling from my past experience, hiring great people for the team, learning on the job, to again use that experience in the next opportunity.
BT: How has COVID impacted your role as Chief Business Officer as well as the ability to conduct research in this space?
MM: It has definitely been a wrench in the works. But I think companies that have been able to adapt to COVID actually will be stronger after COVID and in a couple of particular areas, which have been particularly challenging. One is in growing the company: managing the company and attracting and retaining great talent. I think COVID has accelerated a trend that was already present in the workforce of wanting to have more flexibility, and drive their passion in their professional work, but also make it compatible with the rest of their life, right? And companies that have figured out hybrid models, I think, will thrive also going forward in attracting top talent and retaining top talent. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Before COVID, to me, it was unthinkable to hire somebody without meeting them in person. Now, that's completely out of the window. We will hire people over Zoom and engage them remotely if they are the right talent without batting an eye. So having a hybrid model is a competitive advantage. The other part of the question was how to conduct business, for example conducting research. That's also been a great challenge. Before COVID, establishing a collaboration with an academic center or selling a product was, I think, unthinkable for the most part without meeting face to face. And I think now we've found much more efficient ways of being hybrid, of conducting a lot of the business remotely, but then also investing when it's appropriate in face to face because then it becomes really meaningful. So I think finding a way of being productive remotely but creatively in person, is the way forward. And I think companies that figure that out will have a competitive advantage.
BT: That does make sense. And I do think that the flexibility that has arisen since we have been going through this pandemic is something that will definitely be implemented going forward. So my next question is more of a “fun one”: When you wake up every day to go to work, whether it's remote or in-person, what is the one thing that excites you the most?
MM: To me, what excites me the most is the ability to disrupt and to improve a whole field in life sciences, and to think about the new discoveries that we enable with this technology. Working with such cutting edge technology -- it's just fun. It's fascinating, right? So discovering the limits of A.I., discovering the limits of microfluidics, discovering the limits of biology as we understand it, I find it all super stimulating and fun. And then having a chance of really making a difference is just phenomenal, right?
BT: Lastly, if you could tell your past-self one piece of advice, what would it be?
MM: I think about this quite a lot. Believe in yourself more and drive towards making a positive impact that is aligned with your passions. Determine what you are good at, what you enjoy and what gives you meaning and then go for it.I’ll give you an example: when I was 16/17, I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. I didn't pursue it for the silly reason that in my city they didn't have a college that taught that and I didn’t want to move. And now I've moved seven times in the last 14 years across several countries! So, you know, how silly was I? And if I had a mentor at the time, who could help me realize my raw skills, what I was passionate about and what was meaningful for me, and then give me the confidence to work for it...that would have sent me in a different chart. And now I'm sort of living more by this.. You know, most people that are going to read Business Today are probably very fortunate -- by and large they're going to be fine. There is a lot in recognizing that,being grateful for it, and realizing that that means that you can take certain calculated risks. There's a lot of people out there that cannot because they’re not that fortunate. They cannot take risks. But we are and we should, I think, take some risks to work on something which we are passionate about,and drive towards having a positive impact on the world.