Funding Tips And Moving From R&D To Commercial With Madrigal Pharmaceuticals' Mardi Dier

Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, Chief Editor at Life Science Leader, and today I'm speaking with Marty Deere, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, a company that received approval for Resdifera in March of 2024. The first drug approved for patients with MASH, formerly known as NASH, and Madrigal's first approved product. That approval came about a month after Marty joined the company, and I'm excited to speak with her today about her current and prior experiences in the life sciences industry, working with investors, raising capital, and driving growth as CFO and Chief Business Officer, as well as how to transition an R&D organization into a full-scale commercial enterprise. And finally, we'll end with her plans for the future. Marty, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Ben. Yeah, I'm really excited to touch all those topics, and thank you for the invite. Yes, absolutely. I want to start, as we do, with a little bit on your background. I think you started off in-house in the life sciences industries as VP of Investor Relations at Chiron. And I wonder, you know, how, you know, maybe what your interest was in investor relations initially and, you know, what that first job was like. Yeah, well, actually, that was part two of my career. The first part of my career was in public accounting and then almost a decade in investment banking. So I had, yeah, it had been a lot of years of my career so far, but so I came out of undergrad with a biology degree, not really knowing which way I was going to go, so I decided I'd learn about business, and that's what landed me at KPMG at the time, a big four accounting firm. So anyway, I got the ABCs of business, went to business school and then into investment banking for the next decade, where I kind of re-circled back to working with life sciences companies as an investment banker. Then I transitioned into investor relations, and that made, you know, the story make a little bit more sense, which is I just spent almost a decade really working on Wall Street, understanding company growth, capital formation, but most importantly, working with analysts and investors on the buy side. So going into Chiron Corporation, for those listeners who remember Chiron, Chiron and Genentech were basically started at the same time in the Bay Area. Really high flyer at the time, I would say Genentech got the better of us, but Chiron at the time was a big biotech, very few of them in existence had over 3,000 employees and billions in revenues, multiple business units across the world, et cetera. So coming in to take my investment banking experience and coming in to do investor relations into industry was a huge transition for me, but also in many ways felt natural. Like being on the other side of the table and talking to investors and analysts was a little bit humbling, but also I kind of know what they're looking for, right? So you could speak their language and, you know, really try to harness the story of a growing biotech company trying to get bigger and, you know, trying to drive value for shareholders. So super exciting. Yeah, and so I guess, give me a sense of how big of a crowd that is and, you know, were you encountering people, you know, at Chiron that you had previously met? I mean, there are a million different investment vehicles nowadays, but I mean, and, you know, you talked about being able to speak the language, which I suspect is really a really important skill in managing and handling investors. But do you, do you still find, I mean, even now that you're running into some of the same like big players in that space? That is very funny. You asked that question. You know, biotech was smaller back then. This was early 2000s. Still, you know, huge industry. Don't get me wrong. But there weren't as many companies, there weren't as many investors, there weren't as many funds, there weren't as many investment bank and analysts. Some of my closest professional friends are from that era, honestly. Really? And some of the investors, some of the big investors are still on Wall Street. Of course, we've had a lot of turnover over over 20 years or 19 years. But yeah, forming those relationships and actually it was kind of a theme I wanted throughout talking today is relationships matter still. You know, you have always the transactional side of whatever you're doing in business, but the relationships and picking up the phone or getting feedback or knowing how to talk to someone across the table. The metaphoric table these days is super important. So yes, I formed really deep relationships. You know, we had 20, 25 cell site analysts covering us and then all the big and all the big firms were investors at that time. So yeah, it was formative for me for sure. And then after Chiron, you worked at Portola Pharmaceuticals beginning in 2006. So pretty early in the company's history. I want to say they launched in 2004, but correct me if I'm wrong about that, but you helped take the company public and you were there through the 2020 acquisition by Alexion for over a billion dollars. Can you talk a little bit about your experience at Portola and maybe first, you know, what what you learned from the IPO process, you know, during an economic downturn in 2007, 2008. Well, yeah, this is I mean, we could talk all day about my 14 years at Portola. It was in a word amazing, but there were a lot of twists and turns along the way. And so in 2006, yes, in 2006, Chiron was sold to Novartis. So they had already owned about 50% of the company and they came in and took the out with the remaining remaining piece of the company. So that was that was great. So Chiron is no more. So I was looking for a job and I really wanted to kind of package my experiences with accounting investment banking and investor relations at a big biotech at the time and become a CFO. And Portola was a venture backed high flyer company at the time founded by Charles home scene, David Phillips in the cardiovascular space. We had a factored 10 a inhibitor called the tricks of an and it was in the early stages. It had just completed it just in license the technology and it was just completed a phase one study going into phase two. So still early in the tenure, but the idea was bring in somebody who has familiarity with the streets. So you get a theme there with Wall Street investors and analysts and take the company public. So I got there late, late 2006 really 2007. We had done I believe we had done a series B already that's correct. And then it was are we ready to go public. And 2007 as everyone remembers I'm sure was sort of the beginning of markets aren't so stable. We didn't know exactly what the fallout was going to be but markets were so stable. So maybe we should pivot and raise money privately until we have a better view of what was going to go on and the public markets, which we did and we were successful. We raised a big series C at the time was big rounds have gotten bigger in the last 10 years, but at the time it was quite big with $35 million. And we waited and we wanted to wait out the markets. What we didn't know was that the financial crisis was happening in 2007 became 2013 very difficult time for capital formation and particularly from biotech, which was really on the, you know, the far end of the risk spectrum and people were not taking risk at that time. So super challenging to think about, Hey, how are we going to raise enough money for this company? We're about to enter really big studies. These are cardiovascular basically outcome studies, very large studies that we needed to fundraise around and tackle these markets. So, I mean, it's really kind of a long story. We did do another financing. Somehow we were able to do it find great investors. We did go into the some of the sovereign wealth investors at the time, but had a great syndicate raised another private round during that, I think it was 2009 at solid valuations. And it was in 2013. We really started preparing for an IPO. We got to open the market, right? The market, there have been no biotech IPOs up until that time. There was a big almost six year gap that companies were not being formed. Talk about innovation getting stifled during that period. But we and Ironwood, I believe at the time were the first to come out biotech companies to do an IPO post the financial crisis. And ours was in May or June May of 2013. And you just had to have realistic expectations, right? We still were able to do an up round. We got great investor interest, you know, and the rest was kind of history. We've really had a very successful tenure at Portola building value for the next seven years before we were sold to Alexion. But the actual mechanics of the IPO was, you know, you get on a plane, you go city to city. This is pre COVID. Everything was in person. You did our long meetings. You tell your story, tell your story, tell your story. We had raised money privately, so we had a good set of investors already who were going to come in. But it's very important to bring in new investors as well. And we really just, for lack of a better word, pounded the pavement and we got that deal done. There are a lot of companies, small companies sitting on the sidelines right now looking for that window to do an IPO. And I don't know how close of a corollary there is to that six year period that you've been referencing. But were there any specific cues that you were kind of looking at or that you would look at today if you were in a similar position to say, "All right, now it's time." And you referenced the fact that you and Ironwood were one of the first couple of companies out of the gate, which must have been a little scary. But what, I guess, helped you decide to go ahead and do it and thinking about today and those companies that are sitting on the sidelines. What would you suggest that those leaders, that those companies look to or think about before they take the plunge? Yeah, really good question. If there was a specific answer, I may not be here talking to you. It'd be on a billboard, yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit more of a feel, but a little bit more than that. I mean, obviously, going back to those relationships you form, you're keeping your ear to the ground on what's happening in the marketplace. You're working, at this point, you've selected your investment banks. You've probably had multi-year relationships with investment banks giving you the information. Like, how are the markets? If an investment bank is honest with you, there is times when it's just like, "We can't do it. This is not the right time to do it." There's sort of, you need for capital. There's patience. We waited seven years. That was really a dry spell. I mean, that's a really long time. And there's just, if there's a will, there's a way. You kind of put that all together and decide, "Okay, we're going to go. We're going to take a chance." It's an educated guess because you know where your investors stand, right? You keep talking to them. You can't pre-sell a deal. You can't say, "Hey, would you participate in our IPO? That's not the way it works." But you have to understand they're interested or interested in your next milestone. We think there's a lot of value in the company. You control what you can control from the company standpoint. And we haven't really talked about that. But, you know, when you're coming out of a sort of a dark space like we have in post-COVID in terms of IPOs and what we did in the financial crisis, opportunistic financings are far and few between. They're really more catalyst-driven. So the other, you know, decision, part of your rubric and making that decision is, "Hey, we're in front of or right after key data," then we think can drive value and get new investors' interest. That's what the company can control. Then you're keeping as a CFO or CEO or folks in charge of the IPO process. They're talking to all the outside vendors, like, "Is it possible? We want this to be possible. Okay, let's get ready. Let's try." And, you know, we did an exercise multiple times over the years getting ready for an IPO. It's like, "Okay, we'll get to this point. We'll spend this amount of money, you know, and then we'll have a decision point." We gated everything until we said, "Okay, we're doing it. Flip the switch, file that S1, and let's get on the road." So, I mean, there's a lot in that answer. But at the time, there was a little bit of lock arms, too. Like, we knew our catalyst was coming up, but let's lock arms and get public. We need the liquidity. We want the capital to raise after the IPO, et cetera, et cetera. So, it just made a lot of time, and it worked. And I guess I would say, lastly, having reasonable expectations, the IPO is not the finish line. Right. Right. It's the starting line. You know, you've been slaving for years already, and at this point, it had been almost 10 years at the company with a board that supported us through that period of time, and new investors coming in. But you had to have reasonable expectations. Like, the market's not wide open. It's not crazy, you know, 2020-2021 type valuations. So, you just had to manage expectations through the whole process. Well, fast-forwarding to the acquisition by Alexion, what could you say about getting -- I mean, helping to enable that acquisition to happen? I think this was almost a billion and a half dollars that Alexion paid for Portola. You know, how do you think about that in terms of, you know, setting up the business to be ready for a deal like that? What could you say there? Well, I mean, there's the biotech adage, of course, which biotech companies are bought and not sold. Right. So, you never prepare. You're not sitting around waiting for someone to call. Yeah. You can't. You can't. You know, maybe once in a while, the lucky, you know, luck happens, and if that's what you want, then it works. And, you know, it's a little bittersweet because we had just launched our second product, which was a reversal agent for the Factor 10 inhibitors called a DEXO, a product we'd really liked and had gotten approved both in the U.S. and Europe. So, we had a lot of work that had been done through my 10-year at Portola to get two drugs approved and on the market. But this goes back to maybe another discussion that we may have, which is how do you launch a drug? Yeah. How do you launch a drug in U.S. and Europe, and how do you do that successfully? We were a research organization who became a commercial organization, and maybe we got caught in the short-the-launch thesis, which many hedge funds have, which many investors have, which means it's an unnatural transition, generally, for a company to go from a very successful research organization to all of a sudden be able to have all the experience to sell the drug. It's a huge shift. It's a huge shift. And if you're not doing it perfectly, which is a tough standard, investors can come in and short the launch, which is exactly where Portola was at the time. So, the value, we had actually lost quite a bit of value as we are trying to launch in DEXA into the marketplace. Launches are hard, and they're not always linear, and there is no margin for error from the investor community. They, you know, instead of saying, "Wow, there's going to be so much value for this product, but it's going to take two or three years to really gain ground," they kind of grade you on how you do in those first couple of quarters. And, you know, we were graded, I think we were graded kind of harshly, and at that time, I think Alexion, it's a cool product, no doubt, and Alexion came in and took advantage of that. It also was the start of COVID, so there was a lot of things going on at once, but for the board and the management team at that time, it did make sense to sell. So, to answer your question, we didn't ready for sale at all. We wanted to grow this product on our own in the US and Europe, but, you know, when somebody comes calling, you have a fiduciary responsibility to take that into consideration, in which we did. Well, you got a little taste of that commercialization struggle, you know, and the trickiness of a launch at Portola. You're reprising that a little bit with Madrigal, and we'll talk about that in just a second, but before we do, after Portola, you went to Ultragenix as CFO, a unique ultra rare company. You were there for a couple of years, you were CFO and CBO, I believe, at Celerin. At Celerin, yeah. At Celerin, right. What were the, what could you say about those experiences, maybe how they differed? Oh, yes, opposite ends of the biotech experience. So, I did, so after Portola was sold, took a little break, just trying to think about what's next. I had joined some board, so I also did board work, which is really fun and exciting, and was looking for my next role. And I knew what I wanted, a little more critical mass in a company, like I wanted to see, again, I sort of have this itch, it's like, how does a commercial launch work? Like, how does it successfully work? And Ultragenix is one of the bigger biotechs in the Bay Area that has commercial products. They are in the rare disease space, which I thought was actually very cool. And I wanted to learn about it. And they have a CEO, Amelkakis, who's a kind of a stalwart in the biotech industry and is absolutely such a wonderful, charismatic, interesting person and just so passionate about rare disease. It just seemed to make a lot of sense for me and where I was in my career. And it was great, you know, going to Ultragenix, I'm sorry, it was only two years, but it was two great years. There's a lot of value created there. And they have a lead product, which is sold in many countries all over the world, Latin America, US, Canada, Europe, for it's what's called a rare disease called bone disease called XLH. And actually it was a really good product. And they were, we had a great commercial team and able to sell it. And in addition to the commercial organization, there's just some cool research that was going on on the rare disease side that was kind of fun to learn about and exciting. And so Ultragenix is great, remains great. I still am in touch with Emil, but I did get a phone call a couple years in from an old friend who had started a cellar in and he just said, come help us. You don't want to miss this one. Super exciting. And so I did, I jumped ship. It's like, I have one more startup in me, right? It takes a lot of energy to do a startup. It's like, have one more in me. And, you know, Celeron, it was a brief stint, but a really powerful stint. We got there, basically no infrastructure, acquired a company and some technology, and then decided we are going to go public based on some phase two way data in the immunology space. And we just kind of hit the market, right? We did a huge IPO, over $600 million IPO, one of the largest clinical stages, stage IPOs. Wow. I'm still a lot to be proud of. It was great. And then I left shortly thereafter for a lot of reasons, but it made sense both for me and the company. But at the time, that very quick few months at a cellar, we accomplished a lot, and it was very, very exciting and fun. But left to Celeron, so to answer your next question, I still had this itch. Like, how do you really launch? I kind of have biotech in my blood. How do you really launch a product in the U.S. and elsewhere successfully? How do you not get the short the launch happen to you? How do you drive value? It's got to be done. It can't just be far back. And you know, most people call me crazy because it's like it doesn't happen. Like, you know, you just, it's a hard lift. But our chairman of our board is someone who I've known from past investments. He's a very large investor in biotech, introduced me to Bill Sybil, our CEO at Magical. And even though the job is on the East Coast in Boston, it's just, he's experienced. He's, you could tell, just so talented. He understood the space or the opportunity of the space, not to say he was a MASH expert. He wasn't, but he understood the opportunity. And, you know, he'd been his track record speaks for itself in terms of launching drugs. So I kind of hitched my wagon to Magical and jumped in kind of like holding my nose like, okay, what am I in for? And, you know, we can, we can go into that and the success. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was, I think you joined in February of 2024. Magical was on the precipice of his first FDA approval, which we now know has was approved. I assume you really had to hit the ground running when you, when you joined the company a month away from, from an approval. And I wonder what you could say just about kind of how you got your legs under you. Are they under me? It appears so. Yeah, I'm standing actually. Oh yeah. So, oh man, what, what an amazing, how many months has it been, 20 months and counting for everybody, the whole, the whole company. So I joined February 2024, that's right. And I was, I think employee in the 400 range, but we had gone from like 200 to 400 just a month before by putting the sales force in place really late. Meaning usually you do that, you know, 12 to 18 months before you're going to get approval if you're going at risk. But Magical was a died in the wool R&D company, driven by our founder, Becky Tao, that brought Resdiffra through, and her team through the FDA. And to be the first drug out of, I think there were 23, 26 failures in that. Yeah, there's a big graveyard at the time. Yeah, I remember covering it. Yeah. And the whole company was focused on Resdiffra and getting it approved. And they did. I mean, unbelievable. And it was, you know, only the September of 23. So just a few months before approval that they brought in been bill simple. Like, oh wow, we got, we got to commercialize this company. Right. We got to bring in the experience. And, and we're going to launch in April. I mean, that's only for seven months from when he joined. And there were probably a hundred people here when he joined. So luckily, you know, his background and his experience allowed him to recruit people he knew in the industry who have commercial experience. Carol Huntsman, our chief commercial officer. And a number of people have touched Bill throughout his career. And he was able, unbelievably, they were able to get a commercial and medical organization up to speed for commercial launch in the number of months. All the while, all the while, you know, working with the FDA, keeping the R&D going, making sure we get to approval that we can make the drug and actually launch it. So from the G&A side, from my side, CFO side, et cetera, again, the company was only set up in right sides to get the drug approved. Nothing was really contemplated or planned of, oh my gosh, what happens once you go commercial? And I assume the clock really, like, you know, you talked about the short investors going back to your previous experience. I assume the clock, once that approval is announced, there's a clock that starts ticking. Right? Yes. Oh, yeah. Can they do it? Yeah. Who's Bill Sybil? The investors asked, you know, he's not a biotech person. He wasn't a biotech person. He certainly is now a biopharma, I would say. But who is he? Like, what's his experience? Has he run a company before? Who's the commercial team? What happened to Becky? Who's the CFO? What team are they putting together? I mean, so many questions you could see. That's just on the team side. But they also were putting all sorts of short theses out there about what is, what's the label going to look like? You know, is this really a market? Are the GLP-1s going to, like, take the whole mesh market away? Like, really, what are they doing? Is there any value here? And, you know, so we obviously, we got to the March 14 timeframe. Not only did we get approval, we got a, you know, a best case label. And, you know, and launched within weeks. Honestly, it was like in mid-April sometime that we launched the drug. And I would say then that objectively, which I'm not, but objectively, it's been an exceptional launch. I mean, really most excellent. So back to your question about how to get your legs under you. And then we have, we have a relentless spirit here at Madrigal. Like everybody on the executive team and surrounding the executive team have years and years of experience. They may have known each, a lot of them knew each other, but not everybody knows each other. But they all know what to do. They're pros, right? So they're coming in here and it's just like, we all know we got to get our job done. And we got to work really well together. I've never been with a team, honestly, that works so well together. They're making decisions and they're hard decisions and running and getting things done and wanting to do well. We really, across the board, have an exceptional team at Madrigal. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that transition from, you know, as you described it, dyed in the wool, R&D shop, turning into a commercial company from a leadership perspective. You know, what's in that playbook, you know, what, what goes into, I mean, thinking like culturally, not to mention just on a kind of task level. Yeah, both, both, both. So like I said, the company was, was fit for purpose to get this drug approved. But things like corporate culture or corporate core values or things when you get bigger and you have critical mass, you know, that wasn't the priority. And I'm not being critical. It's just, it's just factual. That's, that's what they, they did what they needed to do to get this drug approved. And it was monumental, huge lift. You know, we're a leader in this space for sure, for the MASH space. So we really had to, we had to do all of it. But in some ways, from a culture standpoint, we almost have a blank slate. Because you're kind of going from a hundred people a few months ago to five, six, seven, eight hundred people. So you have the chance to direct that culture. And we worked with our exceptional head of communications and put together our core values, which are very simple, easy to use. Everybody understands them. And, you know, we, we use them when we interview, we use them when we put slides together. And it's just a little bit of, wow, we're here because we're mission driven and we're really focused on the patient. You know, we collaborate, we have to collaborate. The minute you have silos, you're dead, you have to collaborate cross-functionally. You have to have an owner mindset, meaning we're running so fast. But know what, you can't wait really for someone to tell you what to do. Like have an owner mindset, like pitch in, come in, and, and help, and then innovate. You know, like innovate where you can because our competitiveness in this space is super important. So being first mover, take advantage of it. Getting the drug to patients, we have over 23,000 patients on drug now is vital. How can we innovate in a highly regulated industry to make sure we can do things faster and better? So those are core values, super easy, and it's really what's driven us over the last 20 months. What, what are some, and I guess I'm, I'm thinking about, you know, Madrigal's commercial strategy. I think you're selling direct in the U.S. and Europe. I'm not sure what you're doing beyond those markets, but could you give me a sense of, you know, maybe in your view, what were some of the keys to, to having a successful launch to being as, you know, as successful with the launch so far as you have been? Yeah, it's pretty, it's important. And this was really governed by, you know, the commercial team and Bill really understanding how best to launch into this market, meaning this is a specialty product. So we are targeting, we're not targeting everybody. We're not going to primary care positions and selling direct and having an enormous sales force. We are focused on the 315,000 patients that have been diagnosed with moderate to severe mash that fit within our target physician group. And so that is our focus and our story. And then we price the drug appropriately for exceptional value supported by ICER reports in other ways. And when you marry the specialty population with, with the value of the drug and then the size of our sales force, it's kind of a recipe for driving a lot of revenue, getting the drug to patients, which is so important, the ones that need it and are diagnosed and really driving value for the organization. So, you know, just exceptionally smart to say, state disciplined on exactly how you're going to sell the drug, how you're going to get the most drug to patients efficiently and, and, and increase your penetration both on breadth and depth every quarter. That's our goal. And that's what we've done. So in the US, yeah, we sell through our specialty pharmacies as a specialty model that's working during the same in the EU. So that in the EU, a number of the big countries will be selling direct. If everything makes sense in those countries, access is always a little bit more challenging in Europe. And then we'll also find countries where it makes sense for us to sell. And maybe we partner either with a distributor partnership model and or, you know, and out licensing in other countries. So that's still unfolding as we decide where our opportunity is. But in the, in the main markets and what the launch today has been a specialty specialty medicine launch. You mentioned referencing ISA reports. That's the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. And I'm just curious, like in your role as as CFO, are you having input like on the price on setting the price? Does that fall within your purview? Well, we have a pricing committee that, you know, it's not certainly not me, but I'm part of a committee that we discuss and set price wherever we are. That's important. It has to be committee driven. It has to be data driven. ISA is just one element that helps because it really shows it's a third party independent research organization that gives a range of where the clinical benefit, where the value of the product is. And we fall within that value. It's been a great story. And it just, you know, price and medicine, pricing medicine is a very tricky, of course, and we understand the environment now as well. Having third party value validation is, is really helpful. But honestly, you know, again, back to the strategy that has not, you know, so far been an issue, right? We've had a very successful. Excellent. Madrigal is a commercial company now, but that doesn't mean you aren't still doing development work. What would you say about Madrigal's current pipeline right now? So our strategy is really simple. Drive top line, that's where it's different right now, and build pipeline. Right. We know to reach the most patients and continue to drive value. We're very focused on mash right now that it can't just be a single product. We really see risk differ as the foundational therapy for mash. And so on top of that, how can we even treat patients better? Is it more of a selective subset of patients or is it adding a GLP one where you have some weight loss where we've actually shown that they even have just 5% weight loss. That risk differ actually works better in reducing liver fat and reversing liver stiffness. So there's a lot of different strategies that are going to play out here. And if you think of sort of analogous industries, whether it's rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis, when the first drugs came out that are still very successful, you've since then have seen 20 years of growth, right? And a lot of different products come in, a lot of different combinations, but yet the still the pie is still continuing to grow. And we think very much this is going to happen in the mash market too. We are at the very beginning. We're only 10%, 8%, 9% penetrated into our 315,000. You know that we believe that top of the funnel is going to continue to grow as more patients are diagnosed and the awareness of mash continues. So we'll take risk differ as that foundational therapy. We have IPL to 2045 and then we're building a pipeline to see how can we make maybe combinations, you know, so risk differ plus an oral GLP one, which we've been in license. How will that look? Are there other indications that risk differ can be good for like we have our F4, which is compensated, a psoriasis study ongoing. So really important going back all the way to the catalyst to drive value like clinical catalyst really important to have those catalysts to help drive value of the organization, but also the data to continue to get risk differ and whatever form or any combination or additional assets to patients. Right. And we've talked about how difficult it can be to launch a drug successfully. It's also exceedingly difficult to develop a drug all the way through to approval. And I wonder if there's anything else, Marty, you might say about balancing commercial excellence with replenishing the pipeline, you know, keeping the development engine running from a financial perspective. Oh, yes, from a financial perspective, and we haven't talked a lot about that about deal making, you know, in biotech, biopharma, cash is king, right? Now, we have the luxury that we're getting to a point where, you know, we're getting a lot of revenue on the top line, but, you know, we're just getting there. So how do you manage that, you know? Yeah, like what percentage do you pump right back into R&D? Yeah, well, right now, we're kind of in this sweet spot, meaning we want to build pipeline. It's super important. We message that we're investing in. We've done one deal already. We talked about additional BD strategies. So this is the time to come back into R&D. Our big phase three studies, why they're still ongoing to an extent, but the big bulk of the spend from as different, we've already, you know, are in the past. So now we want to refill that copper. So it's really two things, which is messaging to the street. It's building out the right team for the next level of growth on the R&D team. You know, we're not going to just have one product. We may have, you know, a number of products that they need to bring forward and then having the right capital in the bank. All the while, marrying R&D with the rest of the organization culturally, so we have become one company, not commercial and R&D, but how do you operate as one company? I think we're doing a pretty good job, but we're at that sweet spot of forming all that right as we speak. From the street perspective, this is, like I said, this is the time to do it because people are only looking at our top line really for now. I mean, obviously they want to manage spend, but we have capitalized the company in a way that we've taken any sort of financial overhang off the table for now. We manage that really well. So now the questions from the street are more R&D or commercial focus, not about how are you going to capitalize the company and what's your next deal? And where's the dilution? So from that perspective, I think we're doing a pretty good job. Yeah, that's a good place to be in, no doubt. Magical and licensed. You mentioned GLP-1s, you and licensed the GLP-1 candidate from a Chinese company, CSPC Pharmaceutical Group Limited. That's going to be developed in combination. As you mentioned with your approved product, Resdifera, there have been a lot of deals with Chinese biotechs recently. It's a very hot area in the industry, lots of conversations about it. I'm wondering if there were any unique complexities that you had to overcome or will have to overcome to bring that drug into U.S. development? Yes, very good question. You always have to look at that and manage that. And when you're doing a deal with any of those companies, some of the things you look for, do they have a U.S. presence? Did they run the studies? This is a preclinical study, so it doesn't quite have a rigor. But have they done some of the work in the U.S.? We have looked at later stage assets as well. You do want to kick the tires on that because you don't want to uncover something that was done, an unfamiliar setting that makes no sense for what you're trying to do. In this case, CSPC is a very large company and had a lot of rigor. We had a lot of great meetings, easy back and forth in terms of the negotiations for the deal. This is a preclinical asset that we'll go in the clinic later this year. In this space, the GLP-1 space, everybody knows it's huge. You do have to tiptoe through the minefield of IP, intellectual property, of course. You would do that, training a U.S. company, whatever company to make sure that you have freedom to operate. I would say our IP work here at Magical is exceptional and top-notch. We did a lot of work there on the IP and really feel good about our relationship with CSPC. That said, it's preclinical. We'll transfer the work after early phase one over to the U.S. We'll take it from there. But any time you're combining, even though GLP-1s are no mechanism, but any time you're combining two drugs, it's biology, right? There's an element of what they're known. Yeah, absolutely. So that's why we want optionality and a lot of shots on goal because on paper, the academic exercise looks really good, but in reality, you've got to run the experiment and see if it works. So there's lots of data on both drugs, obviously, on the mechanism of GLP-1 and then a lot of data on resdifera. So we know what we know. So I'm not going in this blindly, but we think it could be a really cool opportunity. Great. Well, looking forward, Marty, what are your top priorities, I guess, through the end of this year and maybe for the first quarter of 2026? And you're coming up on earnings. So I really especially appreciate you being here today. Yeah, yeah. We're coming up on earnings. So we won't talk anything about specifics regarding earnings. Our top priority is to continue growth and resdifera, our top line. Really important. We think this is a major blockbuster opportunity for us, and we want to be smart, creative, agile in making sure we get this medicine in the most physicians' hands and then to the right patients, top, top priority for the rest of this year and next year. And then I think specifically is really laying out our catalyst to drive value from the R&D side. So really putting together all our efforts and just continued execution. We're still building out infrastructure and systems, which is exactly what we should be doing because we really want to build, you know, a world-class top-notch institution. And I think we're on our way. Things are going really well. What's your next clinical milestone or next kind of big thing in the clinical side? Yeah, well, so we have, I'm glad you asked, actually. I mentioned our F4C study. So this is what we call Maestro-Nash outcomes study. And it is looking at more severe MASH patients in that F4 relates to cirrhosis when you've tipped the scale from, you know, fatty liver, you know, progressing fatty liver disease and then you become cirrhotic. And you can have compensated cirrhotic and decompensated cirrhotic, not an area where you want to go because it's a little bit hard to return from there. But in this compensated cirrhotic population, there's a real opportunity for us to make a difference. And there's no medicine there with a label to treat these patients. And we had some early data that we showed last year at EZL and then we keep talking about that was fantastic. But the phase three is ongoing. So that's our next data set in 2027. And that's a big one. Okay, because resdifera is for non cirrhotic. Is that correct? Correct. It's for moderate to severe MASH, similar to F2 and F3 patients as they are graded in certain ways. This tips the scale into the cirrhosis side of things. Got it. All right. Well, Marty, thank you again so much. Right, you know, coming up on earnings for taking the time to be on the show. I really appreciate it. Yeah, Ben. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. Have a great day. We've been speaking with Marty Deere, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Magical Pharmaceuticals. I'm Ben Comer and you've just listened to the business of biotech. Find us and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and be sure to check out new weekly video casts of these conversations every Monday under the business of biotech tab at lifescienceleader.com. We'll see you next week and thanks as always for listening. [Music]