The Human Face Of Drug Development With Samuel Blackman

Drug innovation is more than just scientific breakthroughs; it’s a transformative force that profoundly impacts the lives of millions, offering hope, healing, and improved quality of life. Today, Tony Martignetti takes us into a poignant conversation with biotech leader Samuel Blackman, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Day One Biopharmaceuticals, who reflects on his remarkable career in drug development. Sam candidly shares his career transition to becoming a pivotal figure in biotech. He discusses the humbling nature of his work, emphasizing the significant human effort involved in creating new medicines. Through his story, he aims to motivate and enlighten fellow professionals about the true impact of their work.

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The Human Face Of Drug Development With Samuel Blackman

Sam Blackman

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Sam Blackman. Sam is the Cofounder and Chief Medical Officer of Day One Biopharmaceuticals. He’s a physician-scientist trained in pediatric hematology/oncology and neuro-oncology and has led the early clinical development of more than ten novel cancer therapeutics. Prior to founding Day One, Dr. Blackman was head of clinical development at Mavupharma where he led the advancement of a novel immunotherapeutic toward phase one clinical trials.

Dr. Blackman has held roles of increasing responsibility at Juno Therapeutics, Seattle Genetics, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. Sam was responsible for the pediatric development of dabrafenib, resulting in the first industry-sponsored pediatric oncology basket trial. Dr. Sam Blackman is a graduate of the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellowship program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Children’s Hospital of Boston, and the pediatric residency program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

He received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago. While he was living in Chicago, Sam supported himself through medical and graduate school as a spinning instructor. When he’s not making new medicines for cancer, he’s writing and performing stories on stage for the Moth. I’m so honored to welcome you to the show, Sam.

Thanks, Tony. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

I tried to do my best to introduce you because there are many great accolades you have to bring to the table. One of the things that impressed me the most was your humility and your ability to make an impact. Also, to get other people engaged in the work, that it’s not just a one-person show. That’s powerful.

Thanks. I have to say, I’ve taken the long view on being a scientist. Now, in my role as a leader at a biotech company, every day that goes by, it’s hard not to be humbled by how many things you don’t know because you are learning them from the people that you hire and work with. It’s only after you’ve had a good long career in science, particularly drug development. You can appreciate the magnitude of it and how many human beings it takes to make a new medicine if you’re even successful at getting there. It’s a remarkable thing and I’m grateful. It inspired me to try to put words to that. Mostly to help inspire other scientists, trainees, and the people on my team.

It's hard not to be humbled by how many things you don't know because you are learning them from the people that you hire and work with.

Exploring The Journey

I love hearing it. This is what we need. People like you out there doing this work is what makes the difference. It’s not just one person doing it. It takes an army of well-trained and passionate people to make this industry run and have the resilience to keep bouncing back. We’re going to have a great conversation as we often do on the show.

We explore what’s called flashpoints, the points in your journey that have a net in your gifts into the world. I’d like to have you start wherever you’d like to start and share what you’re called to share. I’m looking forward to giving the audience a sense of what got you doing this work and what are the things along the way that had been the challenges that you face that have tested you along this.

Maybe just to pick a point somewhere in the beginning. It never ceases to amaze me that I ended up where I am mostly because I was vehemently opposed to going into medicine and science when I was younger. My father was a pediatrician and he was a chemistry major in college. When I was growing up, as the first-born son, he would tell me, “Sammy, you could be anything that you want to be in this life after you graduate medical school.”

He was so intent on programming me or all four of us to go into medicine. He had four sons. While that made a real impression, as I grew up and watched, I was disinclined to go into medicine. It was clear to me, even from a young age, that medicine was all-consuming. My father was always on call. He was a solo practice doctor and was never around. Whenever his pager went off, we immediately had to be quiet if he was going to call his answering service.

It was pretty clear after 10 or 15 years, we knew what was first place in his life and it was his career. I remember when I applied to college and got in. He was not thrilled with my choice of college. He asked me, he goes, “I don’t know how you’re going to choose between majoring in chemistry or biology.” I told them all, “It’s very simple. I’m going to major in neither. I’m going to study philosophy as an undergraduate.” He was not happy about that. Not impressed at all.

I spent a good number of years trying to do everything that I could to not end up in science or medicine, but I ended up there. You might wonder why that’s the case. I can tell you that one of those early flash points for me was the result of a job that I had as an undergraduate. I was a security guard at the Science Library at the University of Chicago. This was just somebody who would man the door.

That library had to be open 24 hours a day. Before the internet was widely available, if you needed access to medical journals or books or whatnot in the middle of the night for research, patient care, or something, the physicians and trainees and whatnot at the University of Chicago hospital needed to get access to the library. They needed somebody there to let people in and that was my job.

I would sit in that library and try to do my homework, but I would end up getting sleepy and tired. What I would do instead is walk to where they put out all the new medical journals, which used to be on rows and rows of shelves. I didn’t know anything about medicine or science, but I would pick the journals I thought would have the gnarliest pictures by the minimum. I could look at the gnarly pictures.

As I started leafing through these stacks of medical journals, you’d see research papers and there would be Kaplan-Meier curves and tables full of statistics and all this other stuff in technical language that I couldn’t possibly understand. In a number of them, in the back were case reports, which were stories. As I began to read these stories, I would recognize that these are the stories of people’s lives and oftentimes, not great moments in people’s lives.

They’d be these stories of illness, disease, and injury. Sometimes of survival and death, but they were always incredibly compelling to me. It hooked me. It was the perfect intersection of the vocabulary that I had learned indirectly from my father. This vocabulary of medicine, with an understanding of people’s stories, which resonated with me as a Philosophy major in college.

The more I read, the more I started to view medicine not as just this job, technical field, or thing that my father had done. Rather, it is a way for me to ask and answer fundamental questions about life, people on an individual scale and macro scale, meaning, and purpose. These were things that were important to me as a human being, and I allowed that gravitational pull of science and medicine to take hold of me. Eventually, it led me to apply and get into medical school.

I love this gateway that you’ve taken because it’s like the sense of theory. Philosophies are based on theory and thinking, but when you practice medicine, it’s an action. It’s taking and putting it in applied to make a difference. That’s where the leap that sounds like you made is the sense of like, “If I want to make a difference in the world and an impact, this is a way, a vehicle for making that impact for applying philosophy in its best form which is to do something that will impact lives.

I would say it’s very closely related. You almost got to the realization that I had made. I love the study of philosophy, but I recognized that there were things that I was good at. There are so many different sub-disciplines. For example, I was terrible at formal and symbolic logic because it was too much, but I was good at ethics.

What I came to recognize in myself is that I’m not as talented of an abstract theoretician when it comes to philosophy or frankly, any liberal arts discipline. What I’m good at is wrapping my head around the practical applications of some of these concepts. When I was an undergraduate, I kept being drawn to ethics, particularly in the field of medical ethics. There was an interesting intersection that happened to me between that Science Library job in medical ethics and my undergraduate studies.

There was a professor named Mark Siegler who ran the Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He had a study room at the library and would come in every Sunday morning to write. Eventually, I figured out who he was. Over time, you recognize faces. We got to talking and I told him that my father had was a doctor and I was studying philosophy, but I kept thinking about a career in medicine.

He suggested that I come to ethics rounds at the University of Chicago Hospital. He did and I was hooked immediately. It was back in the ‘80s when some of the fundamental concepts in modern medical ethics were being debated by the group there. It completely hooked me and it was that set of experiences that made me want to go to medical school. I wanted to work in a field where it was technical. There’s a lot of science to be learned and many amazing things going on.

Also, to be able to consider the human problems associated with what we do as physicians or scientists and so much of my career subsequent to that has been deeply satisfying because I have come to appreciate that intersection of philosophy and science and even theology in science. It is a wonderful human enterprise of what we do.

One of the things that has me thinking about what you shared is because of the deep meaning that it has. When you say theology and philosophy, you’re looking at it from the perspective of technical skills, but they’re applied in a very personal setting. Let’s be honest, many places here deal with shifting and changing people’s lives. In many ways, that is the most personally can get. That’s where the interconnection starts to come to gather. It’s this sense that you’re applying these technical skills, but you’re doing it in a way that’s creating deep meaning not just for you but for the people who you’re working with to help. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s a great intersection.

I’m fascinated so far. Here you are, you see the burnout and the potential challenge of what it looks like to grow up with a doctor as a father. Here you are, moving into this field and realizing, “There’s more to this than you thought.” What happens next along the journey as you step into this field where there are moments along the way you said, “I need to do something different?”

When I decided that I was going to go into medicine, which was late in my undergraduate career, from a grade point of view, I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t taken the prerequisites. I spent three years doing clinical research in anesthesia based in the hospital. I spent a lot of time in operating rooms running drug trials and learned a lot about clinical research. I completely fell in love with medicine at that point and became obsessed. I started spending more time in laboratories and ended up in an MD, PhD program and was hooked. It was like a fish to water and I completely immersed myself. Eight years of combined medical school and graduate school.

I came through the other side. I knew that I wanted to be a pediatrician. It had nothing to do with my father. It had everything to do with the fact that I love taking care of children and families. Once I started in pediatrics, this is when I was doing my residency and started taking care of pediatric oncology patients. It was even better. It was all the joy that I had for medicine multiplied by ten because obviously, it’s a particularly happy field. There is a tremendous amount of hope and joy in the care of children with cancer.

There’s also a lot of tragedy but because I found what felt like a true calling and a true sense of purpose for my life. Even beyond that, pediatric brain tumors, which for me were some of the most challenging tumors to take care of and devastating cases that I was ever involved in. Where pediatric brain tumor patients knew that I could specialize in that and that led me to Boston and subspecialty training in pediatric oncology and pediatric brain tumors.

By the time I was almost 40 years old, I had found the most powerfully motivating path and passion that I had ever come across and then I quit. I walked away. It was a surprise to many people. Not only the people who trained me but my father, who had been overjoyed to watch me spend all those years training in science and medicine, pediatrics, and pediatric oncology. He thought that I completely lost my mind.

The reason I did it had to do with him and with the realization that as a new father and newly minted pediatric oncologist, I was going to essentially do the same thing that my father did. I was not going to be able to separate who I was as a physician from who I was as a person. My daughter, who at the time was only nine months old, was going to be competing against my pager, patients, and career, and my career aspirations in this incredibly powerful motivating thing in my life.

If I allowed it to happen, I could potentially repeat everything that happened to me when I was a child and a teenager. I wasn’t ready to do that, so I made a commitment to my wife and my daughter as husband and father. Even though I made a commitment to my patients, I also realized that I could serve their needs and my needs as a physician and scientist in a different way. I decided to make a very sharp 93 return and go into a career in cancer drug development, which I knew, by the way, almost nothing about but it seemed like a good idea at the time. That was back in 2008.

It’s an amazing leap. Also, having that clarity in your mind that “I’m doing this and these are the reasons” is important. It’s important to have that because a lot of people don’t take the time to reflect on what’s important to them. They just keep moving forward and get trapped in the path that they’re on. It’s hard to change course.

You’re right. Maybe I am now at the midpoint or hopefully, I’m at the midpoint of my life. At 56, I’m probably past the midpoint of my life by most modern actuarial tables. To the right of the midpoint of my life, maybe one of the recurring patterns for me as a human being is that I tend to play the long game. Anybody who has an MD, PhD program or anybody who works in drug development or science understands the value of deferred gratification and places a much longer and more strategic game. As a parent, it’s the same thing.

I’d rather make the investment upfront because it’ll pay off in multiples in terms of the quality of my relationship with my child. I much rather pay upfront or something later. The same is true for a career in drug development. You invest a lot in the hope that one day it’s going to pay off big and I’m not talking about money pay off. I’m talking about making a difference and having an impact. That’s maybe, as I’ve discovered, something that’s thematic in my life.

This is something that you’re tapping into. It’s this sense of like, there are many chapters to life. It doesn’t have to be defined by one thing. You can always turn the page and see what else is available, but you can’t turn it back. You can’t go back and do it over again. A child is only young once and that’s an important thing to think about.

Work-Life Balance In Medicine

One thing that’s coming to mind and not to lay this heavy thing on you, but I want to ask. I know that there’s not a lot of people going into medicine these days or not enough. Part of it is because maybe there’s a sense of not a strong desire to give up all their time and energy towards a demanding career. Is there a different way to have the life of a doctor and also have the life of a balanced life and in medicine?

What we’re seeing is a shift in American medicine and many people have written about this. I had the occasion and continue to have the occasion when I go to different places around the world to encounter physicians from different countries, societies, and ways of thinking. The American model, certainly my father’s model, which is your physician 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, is not necessarily the same type of model or mindset of physicians in France, Spain, Brazil, or whatnot.

I don’t know exactly and honestly, because I’m thinking about it off the top of my head. I don’t know how I would necessarily substantiate that other than with the anecdotal data. I don’t think that I see my international colleagues as suffering the same degree of burnout in the same existential crisis that my peers who I trained with are suffering in the United States.

I do wonder as the next generation of physicians goes through and we move away from this maybe more Antiquated model of the physician being the captain of the ship and at the center of everything to a team-based model and a recognition that physicians play an important role. Not necessarily the central role in the care patients. We have more advanced practice nurses and physician assistants, and we give and license other people to be experts and to take on more technical aspects of care or things that a physician may not necessarily been trained in but are important to the care of the patient. Maybe that’s the way that we burn out.

The old model was that the physician knew everything. He was the leader of everything, and there’s no way that an American physician would know every single aspect of everything. Medicine is too technical and too complicated. If we move away from that model and we’ve got physicians as project leaders or team leaders and recognize it’s important to be able to delegate and it’s okay to delegate. That takes some of the burden off of American physicians.

The old model was that the physician knew everything. If we move away from that model and recognize that it’s important to delegate, it may make the experience more rewarding.

It may make the experience more rewarding. This is independent of all the reimbursement challenges and the tyranny of the electronic medical records system that I hear so much from my colleagues about, but I do hope that there’s a way out because you’re right. We are running into a crisis where we’ve got an aging population and an insufficient number of physicians in primary care settings to be able to take care of them. It’s something that we need to pay attention to as a society.

It has me thinking a lot about how we made so many great advances in terms of medicine, but the burden will not be on, do we have the right therapeutics. It’s whether or not we have the right practitioners to go along with it. That’s where we have to make sure we have a balanced approach to how we’re doing the whole system.

The Entry Point To Research

I want to get back into your journey and hear more about some pivotal moments along your way that have tested you. I know when we last left off, you decided to go into research, and you contributed some amazing medicines along the way. Tell me about what it was like, first of all, in the entry point. How was it like to enter?

It’s so interesting to have worked to what feels like the top of the ladder even though it wasn’t, but to get through all my training and whatnot, then to switch ladders and realize that you’re at the bottom again. Having to learn a whole new vocabulary in a way of thinking and a system that is completely foreign to you.

I remember when I was interviewing for my first job in the industry. It was a personal minor squid, and I gave a talk and met with about 8 or 10 people. I would go from office to office and ask people questions like, “How does it work? How do you make a new medicine? What do you do all day long?” When I tell people like, “You could drop me in any hospital in the United States of America and give me a stethoscope and a log-on for the lab system, I’ll be able to do my job. I know how to be a pediatrician and be a pediatric oncologist. It doesn’t matter where I am, but I have no idea how you make a new cancer medicine. What do you do all day long?”

People would say, “We have study team meetings or project team meetings or sub-team meetings or we’re going to review documents or we’ll be working on this submission or review this or we’ll have cross-functional X.” I’m like, “I still don’t understand. Tell me more because it sounds like you spend all day in meetings.” They go, “Yes.”

I go, “It sounds like you spend the rest of the time reviewing documents,” and they go, “Yes.” I said, “It also sounds like you spend a lot of time on the phone and sending emails.” They go, “Yes.” I go, “Is there something else that I’m missing?” They’re like, “That’s pretty much it.” I’m like, “I have no idea how new medicine gets made.” It seemed impossible to me.

Nevertheless, I jumped in and I’ll tell you the reason I jumped in. It was one of these serendipitous moments. I had gone through Bristol Myers Squibb. I met all these people and the very last person that I interviewed with was a guy named David Berman. What I knew of David Berman came from a talk I heard in 1994 when I was a graduate student given by Al Gilman, who won the Nobel Prize in ‘92 or ‘93 or ‘94 for the discovery of heterotrimeric G proteins.

Gilman was giving this plenary talk in a meeting about a brand-new class of signaling proteins and how they had been identified, included, and cloned in sequence by this hotshot MD PhD student named David Berman. However, many years later, I’m at Bristol Myers Squibb, and then there’s this guy, this hotshot MD PhD student. From a Nobel Prize laboratory is now an executive director at Bristol Myers Squibb.

I remember saying to him like, “You’re David Berman.” He goes, “Yes, I know. It says that on the itinerary for your visit.” I go, “But you’re David Berman.” He’s like, “You’re creeping me out.” I said, “You were in Al Gilman’s lab. You had this huge scientific discovery. You could have gone anywhere. What are you doing here at Bristol Myers Squibb?” He said to me, “It’s because I can do bigger and better things here.” That was exactly what I needed to hear to help get me over the hump and see the possibility of a career in cancer drug development.

It was that. The fact that somebody had made that leap who had a lot more in their backpack than I did and made that leap and was pleased with the decision that they had made. That was what I needed. I needed somebody to hold my hand and say, “Take a chance. This can be important and meaningful.” That was a remarkable moment. David Berman, if you’re out there reading this, thank you because if you hadn’t done that, I probably would be toiling away at some hemog clinic somewhere. Thank you for showing me the light.

There’s something about that, which is that we often limit ourselves because we think, “It’s not possible to do this amazing work inside an organization.” Our environment can be the most powerful influencer of how we make an impact. It’s a matter of how we look at it. We have to change our view of the place we’re in and the people around us. If we see them as a limiter or an obstacle, then they become an obstacle. If they are something we look at and can leverage, not like using them, but leverage them and use them as a way to move forward and catalyze into some new change, then that changes the game. Any organization, whether small or large, can be the place that happens.

The other thing that David's statement demonstrated to me was how opaque the complexity and challenge of discovery in drug development is. Honestly, we do ourselves as an industry a significant disservice by not pulling the curtain back and showing people, first and foremost, that the human beings who chose to go into industry. Be it a big pharma or small biotech companies, there are people who go there because they want to make a difference. They want to have an impact on human health. They want to advance science. They want to create new things that are going to make people feel better.

The complexity of drug discovery is often opaque, and it’s essential to pull back the curtain to show people the human dedication behind every new medicine.

I don’t know anybody who goes into drug development for cynical reasons. Maybe I’ve just been very lucky, but I’m pretty sure most people go because they want to make a difference in human health. The second is it shows the potential good that we can do when all of the forces aligned and it also shows people the challenges if you pull the curtain back of making new medicine because we can be very comfortable in this country.

We take for granted that the pill on the shelf that you take is not going to kill you. Nobody pops an ibuprofen and worries about the fact that there may not be ibuprofen in that pill. They don’t worry about the fact that it might have been manufactured in some substandard way or there’s impurities in there or the chemistry is wrong and it’s going to make your percolate on fire.

We have this privilege of being able to go when we are in pain or we don’t feel well and take a bottle of medicine off the shelf and put a potent chemical into our bodies. Not only does it make us feel better, but it also makes us trust that it’s not going to hurt us. That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because thousands or tens of thousands of people worked on finding that molecule, figuring out a way to manufacture, testing it in human beings, working on the regulatory submissions, reviewing those regulatory submissions, and making sure that we monitor the safety of that drug over a long term.

We don’t pull the curtain back on that. If we did, it would do our industry and frankly, our society a great benefit to get people to understand how risky this venture is, how hard it is, and how genuinely lucky we are in this country to have so many people working to make existing medicines in new medicines to treat disease.

Sam, that was so brilliantly said. When you think about all the things that go into it, it’s nothing short of a miracle, honestly. The amount of coordination and effort goes into every single one of the medications we put on the shelf. Even to secure the supply chain and make sure we have enough of what we need. That’s it’s big. The way you described it was so beautifully said. I appreciate you sharing that at this moment.

Celebrating A Milestone

I want to come back to something. I am not coming back, but I am coming to a piece you shared a little while back on LinkedIn that caught my attention. You shared the moment of approval or a milestone that you had at Day One Biopharma. It caught my eye because you put together a video and shared some of your thoughts about celebrating a milestone. I’d love to maybe have you share a little bit about that moment, if you don’t mind and if you remember.

I definitely remember. At Day One, we’ve been working for a long time on a drug called Tovoradenib. It’s now known as OJEMDA we were developing for the most common form of pediatrician preterm or pediatric low-grade glioma. This has been a project that I’ve been working on. This is the project that we build at Day One. This is something I’ve been working on now for years and, even before then, has deep roots in my previous life as a pediatric brain tumor doctor.

The new drug application process is incredibly taxing. It is one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done in my life. We’ve been working and we’re getting close to our FDA approval date in April. About a week prior to that scheduled FDA approval date, we coincidentally happened to have an all-company meeting down in San Diego.

Day One, which started basically with me and my cofounder Julie Grant from Canaan Partners is now 180 some people. I flew down to San Diego and there were 180-some people there. We are a week away from hopefully getting our first drug approved by the FDA. The entire 3 or 4 days there, if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me this question, I would have enough money for a couple of nice cocktails. People would come up to me and say, “What are you feeling now? How does this all feel like this? Tell me what you’re feeling about seeing a company that you started thriving and that you are literally days away from seeing a medicine getting approved?”

One of the best worst things or worst best things about being the founder of a company is that everybody knows you. Everybody is going to come up and talk to you. At some point, I realized I was probably going to need to come up with an answer to that question. It was a very emotionally heightened period of time because I’ve been working on this for so long and working so hard. I just was this incredible mess of emotions.

Towards the end of the all-company meeting, the last night, we were going to have a big party to celebrate in advance of the approval being all together. After three days of being at this meeting, I was exhausted because you’re always on. You have to present the face of what people want to see and I still haven’t written anything.

I went to my hotel room and took a nap because I was exhausted. I set my alarm to wake up at 4:00 in the afternoon for this party that started at 6:00. I’m like, “I better write something.” I sat down in front of my computer and I asked myself, “What am I feeling?” Somehow I found the thread. That’s my process for when I write. Usually, I think and think, and then, at some point, I start typing, and I’ll eventually find the thread. I pull on it and it all comes out.

I got very lucky because, after about an hour of writing, I had about 3,000 words, which is quite a bit. It’s about fifteen minutes and I did a little bit of light editing. I printed it out, went down to this party, and then read what I had written. The reaction that it caused in the team was proof that I had found the right words to describe, not just for me and the team at Day One. Hopefully, for other scientists, physicians, or people working in drug development, what it is that we’re chasing when we do this work, and we hope to touch it by getting a new medicine approved.

I was so pleased with how it resonated with people that I saved what I wrote. The next week, OJEMDA gets approved and I’m this huge mass of emotions. I was crying on the plane. We got approved at like 10:00 in the morning and I was at home in the Pacific Northwest. I had to fly down to San Francisco to be with the rest of the leadership team of the company for all the calls we were going to do with investors.

I was on the plane answering emails and crying to the point to which the person sitting next to me was starting to look concerned. I’m like, “It’s okay. I’m fine.” I went through this whole thing, experienced all these emotions, and got back home and realized that there were all of these emails and messages on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever all these congratulations for things. I said, “As opposed to answering everybody’s email, why don’t I tell them what I’m feeling? Answer the question.”

I basically set up my phone, opted up against the wall and took what I had written, massaged it a little bit then read it. I will tell you, I was blown away by the response to it and how much people appreciated the fifteen minutes of me talking about what it was that drove me all these years to try to get a drug approved. It was incredibly gratifying. It proved to me that we, as an industry, need to talk more about the human side of what we do. This is to bring the conversation full circle because what was it that got me wanting to be a physician? It wasn’t the science and memorizing lists of differential diagnoses or consuming book after book about pathophysiology.

It was the human aspect of medicine. It was the impact of positions on patients and patients on positions. The same holds true for drug discovery. It’s a human endeavor of enormous complexity. When we’re successful, it’s something that we should all celebrate because it is a remarkable human achievement to make a molecule that can fix a disease, make people feel better, or shrink a tumor.

I genuinely hope that more people talk about the victories and the defeats. Let everybody know lawmakers and people make decisions about funding this incredible enterprise, our fans and our critics, let them know that their people behind this work who go to their job every single day wanting to make somebody better. It is something that we should celebrate. We are so lucky in this country and this world as a species to be able to do what we do.

Sam, I don’t know how to follow that up because that was nothing short of amazing. Bio has their new spokesperson. If we can send this recording out to them, they’ll hear this and say, “Sam, you get a new job.”

I probably just hid in the curtains straight in his office. I don’t think he’s giving it up anytime soon. He’s very good about the talking about what we do as well.

On Books

Very well said. I always say that human connection is what we need most of all. All the AI in the world is not going to take away the human side of what we do and no matter what we do. When we share our humanity with others, it connects us and that’s what you just did. You shared your humanity not just in the moment, but also in this moment. I appreciate that. I don’t want to run you too late. I could go on forever about this conversation, but I do have to ask one last question. What are one or two books that had an impact on you and why?

I’m going to give you a one and a half answer. I’m going to give you a book and an essay because I was thinking about this. The first one is a book called The House of God, which was under a student named Samuel Shem. It’s a book that was written in the ‘70s. It is like many movies from the ‘70s. It’s something that has not aged particularly well. It is a first-hand account, a pseudonymous account of a young doctors intern year at a hospital in Boston.

It is raunchy and, at times, wildly inappropriate. It is the epitome of medical training in the ‘70s and something that we should all avoid in 2024. It was the first book that I read that made me begin to understand the psychology and the culture of medicine, the highs and the lows. The tragedy of physicians and patients, the victories physicians and patients, its side-splitting the funny in the most just awful ways.

I hope nobody judges me for having read it, but anybody in medicine who’s in their 50s or 60s now read The House of God. It’s wildly inappropriate, but it was something that was important to me when I was coming up. The other is an essay by William Osler called Aequanimitas, which was a graduation speech he gave. The word equanimity is something that I’ve carried with me throughout my entire career. The ability to keep a level head in the storm and something that I witnessed first-hand as a very young student watching a senior surgical resident manage a complicated trauma case in the trauma bay while there’s this frenzy of activity going on around.

This particular position was the conductor of the orchestra and seeing it all but not losing his head and mind and always keeping the end game gaming line. In drug development, that’s all so true. There are lots of ups and downs in everything that we do in moments of sheer panic and moments of fear. Playing the long game, it requires keeping a level head.

That essay by Osler, for me, epitomized the qualities of being a physician and now being the quality of being an executive and a leader that I hopefully have internalized and will continue to manifest in my job and teach to the people on my team so that as they go on and take leadership positions, they’ll remember that as well. Aequanimitas by William Osler and House of God by Samuel Shem.

I’ll just say that both of those are interesting for different reasons. Particularly, the essay. It’s something that relates to the work that I do, but what I focus on is called grounded leadership, which is being calm and chaotic, which is exactly what you’re tapping into. This is beautiful that you shared that. I don’t want to keep you much longer, but I’ll just say, Sam, this was amazing. I’m so grateful that you took the time out of your busy schedule to come join me for this conversation. Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

Before you go, I just wanted to ask one last thing. Is there someplace where people can find you if they want to reach out and chat?

I’m @DrSam on Twitter or Sam.Blackman@DayOneBio.com.

Thanks to the readers for coming on the journey. I know you’re leaving completely amazed and inspired. That’s a wrap. Thank you.

Thank you.

Before you go!

In a few weeks, Sam will be heading off to Tanzania to attempt to summit Mount Kilimanjaro as part of a $1M fundraising effort to support Sickle Forward.

Sickle cell disease is the most common inherited disorder of the red blood cell, affecting over 6 million people worldwide. SCD is a chronic, painful, debilitating illness that disproportionally affects individuals from malaria-endemic parts of the world. Its highest rate of prevalence is in sub-Saharan Africa. About 236,000 babies are born with SCD in sub-Saharan Africa each year (more than 80 times as many as in the United States), and up to 90% will die during childhood, typically before their fifth birthday.

In the United States, by contrast, people with SCD often live into their 40s or beyond. While recent advancements in research and treatment in the US and Europe have been promising, SCD continues to be a 'forgotten' illness for individuals living in the global regions where resources are limited.

After climbing Everest Base Camp a couple of years ago and then climbing the mountain of their recent New Drug Application and approval, Sam believes that he has a little higher to go—the trek to Kilimanjaro will take him to 19,300 feet. More importantly, the $1M+ we hope to raise will have a meaningful impact on children, adolescents, and young adults living with sickle cell disease in Africa.

Please use the link below to make a generous donation, help him achieve his fundraising goal, and help our team make a difference. If your company provides corporate matching funds, or if you'd prefer to donate directly from a donor-advised fund or other source, please let him know, and he can help.

Thank you in advance for your support: https://givebutter.com/TimmermanTraverseforSickleForward/samblackman

Important Links

• Day One Biopharmaceuticals

• The House of God

• Aequanimitas

• @DrSam – Twitter

• Sam.Blackman@DayOneBio.com

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