In Conversation w/ Sharon Willis, Co-Founder, VP Sales & Customer Relations, Integral Molecular

BioBuzz's CEO, Chris Frew, sat down with Sharon Willis, Co-Founder and VP of Sales & Customer Relations at Integral Molecular, at the Philly Builds Bio 3rd Annual Symposium for Life Science Innovation and Development. Willis shares her journey from co-founding a research start-up to leading a globally trusted biotech solutions provider and her dedication to mentoring the next generation of scientists.

Chris Frew [00:00:05]:
Welcome. My name is Chris Frew, CEO of BioBuzz Networks. We're here today in Philadelphia at the third annual Philly Built Bio Life Science Symposium, where over 100 attendees and dozens of speakers have gathered to talk about innovation in life sciences and especially everything that's exciting that's happening in Philadelphia. I'm very honored today to be joined by Sharon Willis. Sharon, thanks for joining me.

Sharon Willis [00:00:28]:
Thank you.

Chris Frew [00:00:29]:
Do you mind taking a second to just introduce yourself and your organization?

Sharon Willis [00:00:33]:
Sure. My name is Sharon Willis. I'm one of the co founders of Integral Molecular. We are a biotechnology company, born and raised in Philadelphia, and we work on technologies to discover and characterize biotherapeutics for ourselves. We have our own pipeline and then we also do that for partners and biotherapeutics that are important for cancer, autoimmune disorders, pain, metabolic disease. That's the type of work that we do at intramolecular.

Chris Frew [00:01:11]:
Terrific. So you mentioned you're born in Philadelphia, you're a Philadelphia company. Can you tell us about your journey and kind of your origin story here and growing in Philadelphia?

Sharon Willis [00:01:20]:
Sure. So I'm a Jersey girl. I was raised in South Jersey, went to college in Pennsylvania, and then went down to North Carolina and Chapel Hill to get actually a PhD in chemistry in the biological division. So I was always very interested in proteins and protein, protein interactions. And like many biology majors, I thought I wanted to go to medical school. And then I got a PhD, but I always wanted to do something medically relevant. So I came to the University of Pennsylvania and actually did a postdoc in virology, figuring out how herpes simplex virus infects cells. This was in the early 90s. The same kind of work was going on across campus in the medical school where there is a lab figuring the same kinds of things out for hiv. It was really the dawn of HIV research before there were any drugs or anything for that terrible virus. We worked very closely together. One of my other co founders, Ben Durance, finished his PhD working on the HIV work. Then he went and he got his MBA at Wharton and then wanted to start a company around the work that we were doing with these viruses. And so we submitted to the Wharton business plan competition, we submitted two companies. One came in first place, one came in fourth place. That was our first validation that what we were thinking really had legs. We applied for some SBIR funding from the nih. The grants got funded. All of a sudden we had money and great ideas. It just so happened the science center was opening its first incubator lab. We landed in the science center incubator space. Two scientists, two desks, a bench in the incubator, really turning these academic projects into products and services that we could sell to the broader life science community. And so we grew in that incubator space for a few years then. And I don't know if you're familiar with Philadelphia, but all the buildings started going up to house all these great companies that are coming out of the universities. So we, we built out our own space and graduated to be a real company, not an incubator company anymore. That space held us until about a year and a half ago when we built out an entire floor. 1U City Square, still in University City, in the science Center. And so that's where we are now. We have over 100 employees. We're building out another half floor in 1U City Square. We'll expand there through the next couple of years. And with plans to double our workforce, our products and services are doing really well. We really serve the life science community across a number of different applications. And it's great, it's great to be in biotech in Philadelphia.

Chris Frew [00:04:30]:
What an exciting story. I can tell you. I'm just listening to you now and a couple of things come to mind. One is, can you imagine if you and Ben started today with as many other resources that are.

Sharon Willis [00:04:41]:
Right. I know, right?

Chris Frew [00:04:43]:
You guys did it like scrappy. It was like epitome of startup biotech.

Sharon Willis [00:04:49]:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. It's a very different world now.

Chris Frew [00:04:53]:
Yeah, it really is. Tell us a little bit of your experience and impression upon how much has developed and what this ecosystem has really become over the past couple decades.

Sharon Willis [00:05:05]:
Yeah, it really is amazing what it has become. When we first started, we were one of very few companies and now we have so many amazing companies even in our building. Century Therapeutics, the RNA Institute from the University of Pennsylvania, like Drew Weissman, the recent Nobel prize winner for RNA vaccines, is in our building. We see him in the elevator. And so it just. This whole collaborative environment has been built with a lot of the work that the science center has done, you know, with Quorum and the different Venture Cafe and the, you know, really bringing together of community. More recently, the Keystone Life Science collaborative that launched really to bring this community together. Because instead of just integral molecular spinning out one year and maybe another comping another year, companies are, especially with the boom in cell and gene therapy that was really born here in Philadelphia, these companies are spinning out monthly, weekly. There's always new companies. So just to be part of that growth and see it happen in the day to day, you don't really realize it, but when you actually have a chance to sit down and reflect, it's truly amazing what has happened over the last 20 years in this city and what we can do to keep that going and to, you know, keep it expanding even more.

Chris Frew [00:06:38]:
It does take leaders to reinvest in the city and stay in the city and to continue to reinvest in the ecosystem. The workforce is a key part of that investment and I know that's very important to Integral Molecular and to even how you've grown as a city company. Can you, can you talk about that and how you, you are investing in the workforce?

Sharon Willis [00:07:00]:
Sure, yeah, that's, that's a great question and very something I'm very passionate about. So we, we started, I think in our either second or third year of being a company. We had our first co-op student from Drexel University. What an amazing program. Drexel does such a great job of really training their graduates to be ready to enter the workforce. So that's, that's always been something that, that we have supported and we have hired a ton of Drexel graduates. One of my favorite stories to tell is we hired a recent Drexel graduate about 15 years ago. She's now a director in the company. So, you know, to be able to get that really great talent and help them grow their careers and stay at Integral or not stay at Integral, you know, I realize not anyone really. People don't spend that much time at one company anymore. But really it's our job to train that next generation. Then we were introduced to the training programs at the Wistar Institute through Bill Warner, who really started that biotechnician training program at Wistar. And we had our first. It's a summer program where they do some classroom and basic lab training with the students. These are generally community college students who may go on or not go on to get a four year degree, but they get this hands on training in the lab. And then over the summer they do two internships, one with industry and one with academia to really get them that hands on lab experience. And that program has just grown phenomenally as well. We started participating in that and having two interns every summer, many of which we've hired and are absolutely fantastic employees. And now Wistar has partnered with the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative to offer this type of training to the broader Philadelphia community. So Philadelphia residents who may or may not have a two year degree or a four year degree, perhaps just a GED or high school diploma. But they want to get into this biotech boom, which they should. This is happening in their city. We need to make this accessible to all residents of Philadelphia so that the whole city benefits from this. And so we're in our first time with this. It's called all phl. I think that's what it's called. Anyway, it's. But we, we just two weeks ago started with a cohort of six externs who have been through this training program. So they did. And an intensive 10 weeks of classroom training and then really two boot camp weeks in the lab. And now they're with us for three months learning what we do at Integral, all the basic lab techniques that we do. And the goal is to offer them jobs in January at the end of the three month internship. And that's a way that we're going to fill our funnel and fill our pipeline of employees because like I said earlier, we need to double our workforce in the next two to three years. And we have to come at this in many different ways because unlike when we started, there's a lot more companies around now, so there's a lot more competition for those employees. And we're all relying on the same resources, the fabulous universities in Philadelphia and also these workforce training programs. So how do we get more of this? And that's something that we're really helping to work with is how do we take these programs that are now servicing maybe hundreds of people every year and how do we expand that? So maybe they offer this to thousands of people every year and there's the jobs between the hospitals, the biotechs, you know, the Mercks, the Pfizers, the GSKs. The jobs are there. We just need to get the people trained.

Chris Frew [00:11:02]:
Sharon, could you, if you were talking to a company that's considering to get involved in all these programs because I know it is work to. It is about this, but, but you have a track record of doing it even as a smaller company to a larger company today. What advice would you give or what could you tell a company that is considering how to approach it?

Sharon Willis [00:11:25]:
Yeah, the first thing I would say it is, it is work. You know, you have to come up with training programs. You have to have employees who want to do this because certainly I can say integromolecular wants to do this, but I'm not the person in the lab doing the training. Right. So you have to get that buy in from your employees, which thankfully at our company has not been challenging. But I think it really is, the more you give, the more you get. And I think you definitely get more than you give. So you need to go in with that attitude, that flexibility, and that willingness to really support what needs to be done to get new employees on board. And then I would also say there's lots of support. So this is our first turn or our first time with getting these externs, but we've been working very closely with Iovance in the Navy yard, and they were the first company to really get on board with this program and have externs, and they've had tremendous success, and they have been so helpful to us. We've had multiple meetings. They've shared their. Their training materials, their timelines with us. So I would say it is. It is work, but there's a roadmap. There's a roadmap that you can start with and follow and then adapt it to work for your company.

Chris Frew [00:12:52]:
It sounds like a collaborative ecosystem to support you along the way.

Sharon Willis [00:12:56]:
Absolutely. It's exactly what it is.

Chris Frew [00:12:58]:
Well, Sharon, thank you for your leadership in not only showing companies that they can launch and grow successfully here in Philadelphia, but also that you can give back and grow the workforce at the same time.

Sharon Willis [00:13:11]:
Yep, Absolutely.

Chris Frew [00:13:12]:
I enjoyed the conversation.

Sharon Willis [00:13:13]:
Me too. Thank you very much.

Chris Frew [00:13:15]:
My pleasure. My name is Chris Frew, CEO of BioBuzz Networks. We're recording today live at Philly Builds Bio+ third annual symposium. Thank you for joining me.