🧬 From Vendor to Trusted Advisor: A New B2B Playbook in Biotech | Jason C. Foster Re-Release (2/2)
"The best thing about starting your own business is you get to design the business that you always wanted to work for." We’re revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, where Jason C. Foster takes us through his remarkable journey of building an international pharmaceutical company across Europe and his transition to founding Ori Biotech, a pioneering cell therapy manufacturing technology company. Jason shares how he moved from Richmond, Virginia to London in 2010 with a pregnant wife and toddler to build what would become Indivior, scaling the business from just a handful of employees to over 1,100 people across 37 countries before listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2014. Jason offers candid insights into the cultural challenges of doing business across Northern and Southern Europe, the complexities of navigating different regulatory environments, and the critical importance of building mission-driven culture over purely financial incentives. He discusses how discovering cell therapy's potential to cure cancer—yet seeing patients unable to access these treatments due to cost and manufacturing limitations—compelled him to co-found Ori Biotech in 2018. Jason explains how the company is revolutionizing personalized medicine by creating scalable, affordable manufacturing platforms for cell therapies, with their Iro platform launching in 2024 and expecting to treat first patients in clinical trials in 2025.
The Biotech Startups Podcast · Excedr
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Show Notes
- Building across borders: Navigating cultural differences, employment laws, and business norms while scaling a pharmaceutical company from 3 employees to 1,100+ across 37 countries in Europe and beyond
- Culture as competitive advantage: Why culture eats strategy for breakfast, lessons from Netflix's No Rules Rules, and designing companies around autonomy, mastery, and purpose rather than financial incentives
- The cell therapy revolution: Understanding personalized living medicines that turn human immune cells into cancer cures, and why 35,000+ patients have been treated but accessibility remains limited
- Commercial viability from day one: Why researchers must elevate cost and scalability alongside safety and efficacy in early development, or risk creating therapies that never reach patients
- From vendor to trusted advisor: Building Ori Biotech's ecosystem approach with servant leadership, focusing on long-term partnerships over short-term profit maximization