You Might Also Like: Clinical Trialblazers

**Alberto Grignolo** (0:02)
Welcome to Clinical Trialblazers, a podcast by Paracel Biotech, where we dive deep into the journeys of industry leaders who are shaping clinical research and biotech innovation. I am your host, Alberto Grignolo. Today on Clinical Trialblazers, my guest is Dr. Briggs Morrison, a physician scientist turned biotech CEO, who has spent his career at the intersection of clinical development, strategy, and innovation. Briggs is currently the CEO of Crossbow Therapeutics, where he is leading the development of next-generation precision immunotherapies to treat cancer. What makes Briggs' journey especially compelling is his breadth of experience. Following a fellowship in oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Briggs began in clinical development roles at Merck and Pfizer. He proceeded to take on increasingly senior leadership positions, ultimately serving as Chief Medical Officer and Head of Global Medicines Development at AstraZeneca, where he oversaw large, complex portfolios on a global scale. From there, he transitioned into biotech, becoming CEO of Syndax Pharmaceuticals and now CEO at Crossbow.
His perspective spans the full arc, from early clinical development decisions to the realities of building and financing a biotech company. Briggs, a very warm welcome to you. Good to see you again. Good to see you, Alberto.
You've had a very impressive career trajectory from clinical medicine to leadership roles at major pharmaceutical companies, to CEO roles at Syndax and Crossbow, in addition to several bold roles that you now have. What inspired you to transition from working within large organizations to leading smaller ones?

**Briggs Morrison** (1:41)
It's an interesting story. When I first left academia, I actually was initially interested in the small company world. A very good friend of mine was founding a privately held biotech in Boston. At the time, my wife, we were newly married, had three little kids.
She wasn't quite so comfortable with that level of risk of working for a privately held biotech company. She said, look, if you want to do drug development, that's great. Why don't we go to a company that's been around for a few years? I went to Merck, which had been around for 100 years, and it was actually the perfect place for me to start my career. The reason I went to small companies is later in life, our kids were all out of the house and it was my wife and I, and she said, look, I know you had always wanted to do sort of a small company startup kind of thing, and we're at a stage in our life where I'm more comfortable with that risk.
So that's what allowed me to work with my MPM colleagues to go to Syndax. And then once I was in the small company environment, I really enjoyed it and moved on to Crossbow.

**Alberto Grignolo** (2:43)
How did your experiences in Big Pharma shape your vision for Syndax and now Crossbow?

**Briggs Morrison** (2:48)
So look, I think everybody in our industry, whether big companies or small companies, we all really have the same mission. And that is to invent and develop medicines that are going to benefit patients. And what I found in the large companies was that the real driving force for progress is the project team. People come from various disciplines and they all come together and they work on a molecule to drive that molecule through to hopefully regulatory approval, post-marketing studies, launch, etc. But it's that project team that really drives. And then around that project team, you have governance and you have functions and you have all the other things that large companies have. And I tend to think of these small companies as being a project team. We don't have the governance and the structures and the matrix and all the other things that we have, but we do have the exact same mission.
And it's a small group of people focused on driving that one or two projects. So I think the main thing that shaped my vision for Syndax and Crossbow is we have to have that all in it together project team focus on we're advancing this one program or two programs, sometimes three programs, and that's what we're about.

**Alberto Grignolo** (4:04)
Were there any specific challenges or gaps that you observed in large pharma that motivated you to create different kinds of solutions to benefit patients in biotech?

**Briggs Morrison** (4:13)
I think the gap is really in the patient population you're willing to serve. I do think that small companies are more willing to go after smaller patient populations, and the two programs that we did at Syndax were definitely smaller patient populations. You may be familiar, there's some data. I recently saw that more than half of the FDA approved therapies over the past decade come from small companies, despite having a lot less resources than big companies. I ran into a recent book called Inside the Box.