Olga Granaturova is a pharmaceutical scientist who fell in love with the business side of life. Established in the United States since 1989, she co-founded Parthenon Therapeutics, developing new treatments for cancer. She was awarded a special prize by HEC Mercure’s jury for her entrepreneurial achievements and commitment to women-led initiatives.

As a pharmaceutical scientist, you spent more than 20 years working for big pharma. How did your entrepreneurial adventure start?

I have been working at Merck, Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb… There were a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurship there as well. I brought new medicines all the way from discovery to commercialization. That is where I really got interested in business. I decided to get an MBA and move to corporate development.

Education removes fear. Being in a program like the TRIUM EMBA makes you feel like you can do anything. Every three weeks you are going somewhere, merging yourself in learnings, in discussions with the professor, with your classmates, exchanging ideas. You understand that what you know and what you already have does not only belong to the industry you studied before. It is cross-linked. Learning from other industries and see what can be applied to yours is extremely valuable.

While I was doing the MBA, I realized that I didn’t necessarily want to go back to the pharmaceutical industry. There was a lot of opportunities to do drug development better and really address unmet medical need in a more efficient way.

 

50% of cancers continue to be highly aggressive

 

Indeed, in 2019, you co-founded the company Parthenon Therapeutics, which develops new treatments for beating recalcitrant cancers. How is your approach innovative ?  

Biotech is a bit different than big pharma. Parthenon Therapeutic was started with the idea that we are not necessarily addressing cancer in the best way possible. Realization came really from being part scientist, part entrepreneur, and understanding that a majority of people, unfortunately, still have someone in their life that suffers from cancer. Despite all advances in biomedical research, over 50% of cancers continue to be highly aggressive.

We have to see not only what cancer does but what is going in its surroundings, what we call the tumor micro-environment. We realized many cancers build protective barriers around themselves. A person’s immune response understands that there is a cancer and rushes to the site to fight it. But there is a wall, a barrier it cannot penetrate to get into the tumor and kill it. We developed a novel kind of targets, another way to go around the tumor, making holes in that barrier, allowing the immune system to get into the tumor and then exterminate it.

In April of this year, this new program called PRTH-101 went to clinic and is now being tested in patients. Many sites are investigating the PRTH-101 agent, including MD Anderson in Houston.

You now have been appointed COO and CBO of Normunity, with cancer treatments still in discovery and preclinical development. Will you now dedicate your life to curing cancer?

I would not necessarily say so. As you learn more and more, there are many different pathways that work together. I’ve been doing medicine development for a very long time and one of the reasons I love this industry is because you learn something new every single day. I have worked in diabetes, neuroscience, I spent a lot of time in oncology. You can create a new medicine that could impact millions of people. I am actually right now also helping to incubate another company that is in fibro-inflammation space. Some things are related, but it is a different disease area.

 

“Introduce female entrepreneurs to VCs !”

 

Being also a business angel, you co-founded Brighter Ventures, a non-profit for advancing women-led entrepreneurship. Figures you put forward are dramatically low, with only 2.2% of all venture capital dollars that went to women founders in 2018, in the United States. What does the picture look like in 2023?

We show, with a lot of research, that access to networks is one of the huge reasons why women actually get so little of the investment. Most of the VCs are male. Even if a male is the most feminist male you know, most likely his network is going to be male. It just takes the realization that one of the biggest thing people can do is introduce female entrepreneurs to VCs. If you know a female entrepreneur, introduce them to your networks, help them make those connections in corporations ! For example, if there’s any panels that people are invited to, and you see the panel only has male, telling people to say, I can introduce you to a couple of female experts to join this panel.

We would like to organize this kind of really high-level spotlights around women’s startup competition. We would do to really to concentrate on high-growth area to really to demonstrate a variety of businesses that start to really break the barriers : AI, tech, biotech, etc.

Is this something you have experienced yourself?

We started Brighter Ventures right after I graduated from the TRIUM. We were heartbroken that numbers have not really changed eventhough there are a lot more female founders now starting enterprises. Realization first came from research. Then, when I was looking at my own LinkedIn in my industry and scrolling through, I also realized that even in my network, a majority of the people are men.

 

“I love starting companies”

 

What’s your vision of entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship is starting something new from scratch without a safety net. Finding people who share your values, who you trust and share a purpose with is important. You need people with skills and money to be able to execute on that vision.

I love starting a company. Now that I’ve done it a couple of times, I know what I enjoy the most. What I enjoy the most is this early part of building a company and bringing everything together. And now that I’ve done it, I have a lot more credibility. People in academics now reach out to me, asking for help in many different ways. As a co-founder, as an advisor, as a board member. I love doing this and I can do it forever.

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