Securing financing that allowed an exit from academia, leaving ecology and evolutionary biology for biomedical engineering and shifting from business development to entrepreneurship are among key turning points for three biopharma professionals.
The BioSpace 40 Under 40 cohort have a host of impressive accomplishments that have garnered attention among their peers and within the biopharma industry. To see what shaped their success, BioSpace asked three honorees to share the turning points in their careers.
Lex Johnson: making the leap from academia to industry
For Lex Johnson, chief platform officer of Dispatch Bio, the turning point was securing financing for the company he helped start while doing postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson recalled taking many Zoom calls with investors during a tough time for the biotech market following the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of that outreach did not lead to investment.
“You have 100 of these conversations, and 90 of them go nowhere, and then of the 10 that go somewhere, eight of those die on the vine two calls later,” Johnson told BioSpace. “And so, you get into this mode where ‘Yeah, this would be nice if it happened, but who knows if it’s even really real?’”
Johnson’s efforts paid off. He secured financing from the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), the first of two founding investors, and Dispatch Bio went on to launch in 2025 with $216 million in series A funding. That funding was critical not only for the company’s work to create a universal treatment for solid tumors but also for Johnson’s transition out of academia into industry.
“That meant going from being just someone with an idea to being someone who was responsible for making sure that we had a lease in place, making sure that we bought all the equipment that we needed, making sure that we hired the right people and that those people were structured in ways that were efficient so that we got the work done in the ways that we did,” he said. “And so, that was a huge change in the way that I had to do my work as well.”
Making such a transition can be challenging for young founders, Johnson noted.
“You have to see yourself as that source of authority if you want to be an effective leader, at least in my mind,” he said. “And you need to see yourself as a decision maker when decisions need to be made. Some of those decisions are really small, some of those decisions are really big, but at the end of the day, somebody needs to say, ‘This is the direction we’re going,’ and so I think that was also a big area of growth personally.”
Johnson described his journey out of academia to his current role leading teams focused on innovative targeting strategies, T cell signaling pathways and therapeutic delivery as amazing.
“It’s been incredible to be able to lead something that started as a kitchen table project, and then it morphed into five, 10 people in a lab, and now we’re 60, 70 people, and we’ve got a drug in the clinic,” he said. “I’d do it all over again.”
Amy Kauffman: switching fields, walking in patients’ shoes
Amy Kauffman, senior principal scientist in sterile product development at Bristol Myers Squibb, pointed to two turning points in her career. The first, she told BioSpace, was leaving ecology and evolutionary biology for biomedical engineering.
“I really loved how nature worked, and over time, I realized that I wanted to actually do more,” Kauffman said. “I really wanted to understand how problems work, how to solve them—and do things that’s going to make a bigger impact instead of just being the next Jack Hanna or David Attenborough.”
Kauffman moved into biomedical engineering in graduate school, which proved challenging. She noted that she had to play a lot of catch-up to be on the same level as her peers. She also had to work with mentors who weren’t always supportive of her move into engineering. That experience, Kauffman said, made her supportive of others who want to transition into fields such as chemical or mechanical engineering.
“I want to see more people like that because they bring a different perspective of what they know in their past, and they see things very differently than some of us who are so close to the lens that we miss small details,” she said.
Kauffman’s second turning point was learning she had celiac disease during her postdoctoral training.
“So, really, it was getting a closer look at what it’s like from a patient’s perspective when we’re developing things like delivery systems and what it’s actually like to sit in that chair, receive an infusion or even when you go in to get a standard vaccine, how much work does it take to go through it?” she said.
Kauffman, whose work at BMS focuses on long-acting injectables, said her personal experience with celiac—and other autoimmune conditions—made her appreciate even more that every step taken on the bench impacts a patient’s experience.
“Being able to kind of put that together, it really just kind of pushed me back into the drug delivery world of ‘OK, how do we do this better? How do we make sure that these scary diseases that require a lot of treatment are as easy as possible for people?’” she said.
Reflecting on whether one turning point stands out more than the other, Kauffman said they’re equally weighted.
“If it wasn’t for changing into my field, I don’t think I would be doing the type of research or discoveries that I’m doing now,” she said. “But I also don’t think those discoveries would be nearly as passionately explored if it hadn’t been through kind of the lens as a patient too.”
Christine Zhang: moving from finance to biotech, then entrepreneurship
Like Kauffman, Christine Zhang also identified two turning points. The executive director and Evanesco program lead at BridgeBio told BioSpace the first came at the start of her career. Initially, she worked as a healthcare private equity investor at TPG and as a biotech investment banker at Goldman Sachs. It was a great training ground, she said, “But one thing that I learned after a couple years working in finance is that I really missed the science. So, that was when I decided to make a big pivot and change industries.”
Zhang took a role at biotech BridgeBio, where she initially worked on corporate strategy for the lead asset now known as Attruby. The drug, which received FDA approval in 2024, treats transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM), a potentially fatal heart disease.
After seeing Attruby make its way from clinical trials to commercial launch, Zhang had her second career turning point: moving from business development to entrepreneurship. Seeing an unmet need for depleter therapies that could go beyond halting ATTR-CM and instead reverse it, she created the BridgeBio affiliate Evanesco.
“It really started off as a passion project, but the more I dug into the idea, the more I really believed that this could be a great opportunity,” Zhang said. “And, it would cement Bridge Bio’s dedication to the ATTR-CM space and to this patient community, because even though we had one commercial therapy, we don’t just rest on our laurels. We continue to innovate.”
Zhang’s months of preparation for presenting Evanesco to BridgeBio’s CEO and board of directors included partnering with a network of experts. That network included biopharma professionals working in antibody engineering and discovery; ATTR-CM cardiologists; and BridgeBio and industry leaders. Zhang would ask her network to identify potential program obstacles, then go home and determine how to mitigate the concerns before presenting proposed solutions. If those solutions did not address the concerns, she would return for another conversation, telling her network, “We will just go through this process until either you convince me that Evanesco is not a good idea, in which case we shouldn’t fund it, or I convince you that this is a good idea, I properly mitigate all of your concerns, and then I would love to get your backing to support this program.”
Zhang got that backing, which allowed her to hire a team of scientists, build a lab in Palo Alto, California, and start discovery experiments. A development candidate nomination that will be BridgeBio’s first antibody program is expected to move into the clinic between 2027 to 2028.
