LabOps_John Curran: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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Samantha Black:
By building a platform to share challenges, network, and thoughts from leaders, the LabOps Leadership Podcast is elevating LabOps professionals as well as the industry as a whole. With the intent of unlocking the power of LabOps, we deliver unique insights to execute the mission at hand, standardize the practice of LabOps, their development, and training. Welcome to the LabOps Leadership Podcast.

Kerri Anderson:
Hi, I’m Kerri Anderson and I’ll be co-hosting today. I am the, one of the co-founders of the LabOps Unite Group.

Samantha Black:
Great, thanks, Kerri, and we’re excited to be here today with John Curran, who is the VP of Laboratory Operations at BostonGene.

John Curran:
Thank you, you’re welcome. I’m happy to be here.

Samantha Black:
Great, so we’re just going to get, jump right in, and get you to tell us a little bit about who you are and where you got to be where you are today.

John Curran:
Sure, so if it’s not immediately apparent, I have a little bit of an accent. I’m not originally from these shores, so I’m originally from Scotland, specifically from Glasgow, and I did my Ph.D. in molecular genetics at the University of Glasgow and then a post-doc in Glasgow, and then fate brought me to the US. It was actually my wife who is also in biotech and she went for an interview for one job and was offered a different job which involved moving to the US, so we jumped in with both feet, moved over here. I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do at the time. I presumed I would try and get another postdoc, but I didn’t think I was that good at being a scientist, I didn’t think I was a great research and development scientist. And luckily for me, despite the accent, I was actually born in Canada. So through my Canadian citizenship, it was relatively easy to get a visa and a job. And my first job was in the R&D department at a company called Athena Diagnostics, and they still exist, but they are now owned by Quest Diagnostics. And in that role, I was developing, Sanger-sequencing-based PCR tests for a variety of different neurological disorders. And I’ve been doing that for a couple of years and thought to myself, what am I going to do when I’m older? I’m still going to be a bench scientist. What does the future hold for me? And at that point in early 2000s, I decided to go back to school part-time. So I was still working, but I went back to school and did an MBA at Clark University. And the rationale was to learn more about the business side of science, and in doing that, I got really fascinated with operations management, and so my specialty was in operations management. Then in 2004, I joined my first startup company, a company called Correlagen Diagnostics. They no longer exist, they’re now owned by LabCorp, so there’s a little bit of a trend here of my previous companies being bought up by large companies. And again, I started out there developing Sanger-sequencing-based tests, this time in endocrinology. And right about 2006, the company Correlagen decided to shift their model, and we actually opened our own laboratory. We had been working essentially as a contract laboratory for somebody else, and so we opened our own laboratory which led me down the Massachusetts-licensed clear cap, New York state-licensed pathway and learned the law and the process of building a lab that met all the regulatory requirements that the clinical diagnostics industry operates under. And we developed a bunch of tests and it was a lot of fun. And about that time, towards the end of the 90s there, end of 2010, that was a revolution happening in the sequencing industry and that was the evolution of next-generation sequencing. And in 2010 was where I got my sort of big break if you like, and I joined another startup company, this company you may have heard of, they were Foundation Medicine, and Foundation Medicine pioneered the use of next-generation sequencing and cancer diagnostics. And of course, we’re not diagnosing cancer, we’re looking at the genetics of each individual’s tumor to see if we can understand what’s driving that tumor and lead to a better therapeutic outcome for the patient. But I joined that company as employee number 17 and that company is now absolutely massive, fully owned by Roche. So another large takeover, continuing my trend of my previous companies being bought by larger companies, but a very successful operation, so I took us through the licensing process. They built the first lab, we moved lab to their current location, that I believe they are now building a mega lab down at the seaport in Boston. So a tremendous success story, a lot of fun, learned a lot there as well, and really moved from sort of lower volume, moderate volume, high complexity diagnostic testing into much higher volume, Foundation Medicine was doing hundreds of samples per day. From there, I actually took a bit of a brief hiatus into the biotech world. So I spent all of my career thus far in sequencing and managing sequencing labs, operations management of sequencing labs, but I never took the process to the end where I was involved in some something that directly helped the patient via drug. So I moved to Neon Therapeutics. The goal was to build them a sequencing lab and manage that, amongst other things. It didn’t quite work out, but that company were developing cancer vaccines and they were bought by Biontech. If that name’s not familiar, Biontech, the company who made the Pfizer vaccine. So I guess you could see that another form of company bought by a larger company or involved with a larger company. And then in 2019, and I apologize for the length of this introduction, I moved to BostonGene to get back into clinical diagnostics with the remit to build BostonGene a lab, take us through the licensing process and then help us scale and grow as we try and take a bit of the market away from Foundation Medicine and other companies like Caris and Tempus and develop a platform, a sequencing platform that harnesses the power of RNA sequencing as well as DNA sequencing. So BostonGene sequences the whole exome of each patient’s tumor as well as the transcriptome, that’s kind of novel in the industry, and our RNA sequencing, although much harder to do, is a much more delicate molecule. It does give you a lot more information than DNA, a lot more powerful insights into the patient’s disease, and we’re developing a whole platform around that as we speak. And that’s where we are today. That’s where I’ve arrived at today after what’s that, 22 years in the US, at least 18 of that involve directly in clinical diagnostics, laboratory operations type roles.

Samantha Black:
That’s amazing. That was that’s a great summary. I think there’s a lot to dig in there. I’m fascinated first and foremost, from your transition as a research scientist into operations management. I’m fascinated by that because we do see a lot of people who love the intention of being a scientist, but, you know, maybe it’s just like not the right fit for them, the pressure isn’t what they want, they don’t like being stuck at a bench all day running numbers and experiments. So I’m fascinated by that. So, you know, props to you for making that transition, and obviously, it’s served you well. What I’m a little bit more interested in specifically is you’re running lab operations at this large organization. So can you dive a little bit more into what your group is doing and how it’s directly impacting the development of these, this new platform that you’re working on? Like how is the LabOps department or teammates contributing to that?

John Curran:
Sure, so in clinical diagnostics, the R&D department is mostly small R, big D, it’s mostly development work. We take techniques that have been perfected typically in academia or elsewhere, and we commercialize them to make them work in the clinical setting at volume. And so that’s what we’ve been doing here. Obviously, next-generation sequencing is not new. Now, there’s a lot of companies doing that and they’re doing everything from small gene panels to the whole genome. We chose to do the exome. So not a technically difficult process. RNA sequencing is a lot different in that getting high-quality or good enough quality RNA out of FFP samples, which is typically the sample type that we receive for testing, is not easy, and what we do is run both the whole exome sequencing and the RNA sequencing as well as full exome sequencing of our normal samples. So a nontumor sample from the patient, a blood sample, or a saliva sample so that we can truly understand the somatic alterations that are taking place within that tumor. And then we analyze all three together and it gives us a really broad and deep dive into the patient’s genetics and understanding of what might be driving their tumor. So what my team does is, quite simply, we receive the samples, we enter the patient details and the order details into LIMS and our laboratory information management system. And then we perform our assay in the laboratory, making sure that we’re adhering to all regulatory requirements, to all of our protocols, making sure that we’re taking accurate, detailed notes of each step that we perform, the reagents that are included, the equipment that are included, the personnel that are performing the tests, making sure that they’re qualified for use, both the reagents and the personnel, and making sure that we deliver high-quality data to our analysts to turn that into a report. So at the end of the sequencing phase of our process, and I guess you could call that the wet bench element of a process, that’s typically the end of my team’s involvement. At that point, the analytics team will look at the data and understand what is in there and turn that into a report. Now, of course, there are instances where something goes wrong, the quality is not high enough or there’s a failure. And then the sequencing department will repeat. My team will repeat some of the work, but by and large, it’s a fairly straightforward and unidirectional flow where samples arrive. We process them through our laboratory, using the various techniques to generate sequencing libraries and then sequencing those libraries, and then passing the data off to the analysts for report generation. And what we do, on a daily basis, is very routine, and a lot of people would call it boring, but it’s really, really important to be boring. It’s really important to be consistent. It’s really important to maintain extremely high levels of quality and to be always looking for opportunities to improve that quality, that process, that turnaround time. And so that’s what we’re doing right now. We’re a relatively small and young company. We’ve developed a process. We’ve automated that process, and we’re now in the process of scaling it, making sure that the process works at higher volumes. And that’s the large part of operations management, is making sure that something that works when you’ve got ten samples will also work when you’ve got a thousand samples. And there’s something that my R&D colleagues fail to understand despite my continual banging on about it. You know, if they run an experiment with ten samples and nine of the samples work, they’re really happy with that, that’s a great result and nine out of ten is pretty good for them. But nine out of ten equates to 90 out of 100, 900 out of 1000, and then we’re talking about 100 failures for every thousand samples, and that’s really bad, that’s really bad for our operations. So another part of the rule is to work with R&D to make sure that what they’re building, what they’re developing essentially for clinical use is going to be stable, it’s going to be scalable, and is going to work with high reproducibility, and reliability across all of the tests that we run.

Kerri Anderson:
John, you’ve had an incredible career, and I’d be curious to know throughout the different labs you’ve worked, I’m sure you’ve faced some very common struggles. How have you worked to overcome those?

John Curran:
So the process of seeking a lab through the licensing is not easy, but there is a process, and the process of automating a process is not easy, but you can do it. What is harder? What I find the hardest element in LabOps management is employee retention. And that kind of touched upon it earlier, it’s not a glamorous role. You don’t get the freedom to do different things every day. When the company gets large, just Foundation Medicine did, as I hope BostonGene will do, then people become more and more pigeonholed or siloed, and so they don’t get the opportunity to try different things. And then they’re looking over the fence at their colleagues in R&D or other departments who get to do different things, who don’t have to work on holidays, who do not have to work on weekends. And, you know, they look for another opportunity. You know, there’s, in the Boston area, as I’m sure you’re well aware, there are lots and lots, many, many, many universities and colleges pumping out science graduates every year. And so despite the fact that the job descriptions that we’ll put out are very specific and we’ll be very clear, both in the job description and in any interviews that we’re looking for somebody to do a very specific role, kids these days, they want to get a job, I understand it. So they say, yes, that’s fine with me, I’ll take that job. And then a year or two into it when they realize, yeah, that’s just not that much fun, I don’t have the same freedom as my friends or my colleagues, then they look to move on. So employee retention is difficult and what I’ve done over the years is just try and find ways to continually recognize the team, make sure that they are recognized not just within my team but within the company. So every year there’s a lot of professional’s week and we will celebrate that, and the whole company will celebrate that for our team. And there is events put on that everybody gets to participate in, but it’s specifically and principally for the LabOps team. So that’s a really important week for us to make sure that we recognize the employees. And then in various companies over the years we’ve had recognition schemes where you could nominate an employee for outstanding work, or for example, if the company has core values and you see somebody exhibiting one of the core values, you could nominate them and they would get a small gift voucher or some other recognition. At the end of the day, if there’s more money somewhere else or a better opportunity or a more exciting opportunity, you’re going to lose people. There’s not a lot you can do about that, and that’s true of any industry, I would guess. But that’s really what we’ve done over the years, what I’ve been involved in over the years. It’s just trying to think of novel ways to recognize the employees and make them feel like they’re truly part of the process. Another thing that I’ll do personally is I’ll have my team present at company meetings rather than me doing it because people know me anyway and they’ve heard me speak before, they don’t need to hear me speak again. It’s much more important than my team get the credit and the recognition for the work that they’re doing, and it’s amazing how small things like that can really boost somebody’s confidence and make them feel part of the team when they get to stand up and do something that they haven’t had a chance to do before. And the company as a whole can then see them and say, wow, I didn’t realize that so and so was doing this kind of work, and that’s really interesting and really impressive, and I have a newfound respect for them. That’s been helpful and rewarding in the past as well. So those are, I guess, just a few examples. I hope that answered the question.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, that was great to hear. I actually relate to that a lot. I got my start in a clinical diagnostics lab and I do remember being surprised when I first started as to what the role was. So it’s great to hear that your team has such an incredible leader that is helping them to be recognized and feel that. So one thing I’m also wondering, you know, you did mention automation. One thing we see in LabOps is we’re often trying to see how we can make the lab more efficient. So I’m curious, what’s one thing or something that you’ve seen in LabOps in which we’re trying to do that?

John Curran:
So the key is not necessarily the automation. There are plenty of robots, liquid handlers, various machines out there, you can get them to work. The key is integrating that equipment with your LIMS because, as I’m sure you know, the biggest cause of errors in laboratory diagnostics is transcription errors. And so we are working hard to eliminate all steps where manual data entry is involved. And so that involves both feeding the automation work list from your LIMS. So let’s say you’re doing extraction rather than having to fill out a paper form that left the samples that you’re extracting and so on and so forth. You can feed that work list directly to the machine. The machine knows what samples it is getting, the samples are barcoded, and we’ll talk about barcoding in a moment, and so the machine can verify that it’s received the right samples, it can execute the protocol, it can do the extraction, and then it can feed back the information to LIMS no extraction. At the end of extraction is just, yes, I’m finished, I’m done. But let’s see, it’s a QC step. Let’s say we’re performing quality control of the extracted DNA, and we want to know how much DNA we received and what the quality is. The machines we use will give a data fail from that, and we can suck that directly into our LIMS. We can pass the data back into the individual specimens. And then in LIMS, we have a set of rules which tell us whether the sample passed or failed. That’s also really important because we take away that element of or potential for error from the humans so a human could potentially pass a sample that should have failed or vice versa. So if we have hard and fast rules in our LIMS and the data comes in from, or take station, for example, or a machine that we use to measure the amount of DNA we have, then the samples that pass will automatically move forward in the queue, move on to the next work list, and the samples that fail will move back to the next available slot in the work list, and that really depends on what material we have left. Are we able to try new extraction, for example? So it’s a little bit long-winded there, but essentially what I’m saying is it’s really important to integrate equipment into your LIMS. It’s also important, therefore, when you’re selecting equipment, to automate your lab with that, that equipment is capable of talking to LIMS because not all equipment can do that. So that’s really important for us. I mentioned barcoding, so I’ll go a little bit deeper into barcoding, it’s really important to barcode your samples. You know, people like human-readable forms, they like to write on tubes and be able to see it, but there’s nothing better than a barcode and a barcode scanner to verify that you have the right sample, that you verify that you have transferred liquid from tube A to tube B correctly. You have full transparency of the pipetting action, of the transactions that take place from plate to plate to plate, etc… So should anything go wrong, later on, you have an easy way of going back and seeing where that could have happened. But it gives you that confidence that you’re working with the right samples and executing the right protocols when you have samples, barcoded. And what we’re trying to do at BostonGene, is take a step further and have everything be barcoded. So as you’re aware, all reagents that are used in a clinical diagnostics process need to be validated or verified before use, and if they’re not there, they’re quarantined until that takes place. So if the reagent is barcoded and you scan the barcode into your LIMS, LIMS should tell you, yes, you’re able to use that reagent or not. This reagent is not yet verified, you can’t use it and it won’t allow you to use it. Each person is required to be trained on every protocol in which they operate. So we can have training records in the background in LIMS, and when you scan your barcoded badge, when John scans his barcode to see how I’m about to execute, the DNA extraction protocol, LIMS can check and make sure that I am within my annual training cycle for that protocol. And if I’m not, it wouldn’t let me operate on it. So that’s really where automation can be powerful. It’s not just taking away from the manual pipetting, for example, and allowing you to do a higher volume of samples, but integrating all of the steps into your LIMS so that you have much, much tighter control over the process and much greater confidence in the quality of the data you generate.

Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, that’s a great answer. I think it’s important because a lot of times we think about just getting that instrument that’s going to help make the process faster. And it’s good to take a step and look at the big picture and see where you can really be the most efficient. And that’s a lot of times integrating into everything. So throughout your career, I’m sure you’ve learned a lot of lessons. What’s some advice that you would offer to our listeners?

John Curran:
I think one of the pieces of advice I’d give is to not take things too personally when samples fail. There is an inherent failure rate for every assay. When you’re working with patients, you know, you feel for every patient and especially when you’re working in cancer diagnostics, because I’m sure we’ve all been touched in some way, shape, or form by cancer in our families or friends’ lives. And so there’s a real desire to always make everything work. But in our instance, for example, we take in tumor samples, and this is more of a bioinformatics rule than a lab rule, we need to have at least 20% of that tumor sample have cancer cells. It’s actually something that, believe it or not, I didn’t understand until I joined Cancer Diagnostics that a tumor isn’t 100% cancer, it’s a mixture of cancer cells and normal cells. And so bioinformatically, if you have less than 20% of your tissue as cancer cells, then it becomes really difficult to make the right kind of calls on the data. And there’s a higher chance of error. There’s a lot of noise in the data if you want to put it in simple terms. And unfortunately, that’s just what it is. You know, sometimes you have to reject a sample. Sometimes you have to say, I’m sorry, we can’t process that sample. Do you have another sample? And people who don’t understand, especially leadership, sometimes they’re like, why are we rejecting these samples? And you have to be strong and say, there are reasons for it and you present the evidence. And the good thing about working in science is you can always present data to back up your arguments. And so that’s what I would say is don’t get overly involved. It’s difficult not to, but you have to be pragmatic. You have to be a little bit removed and make sure that at all times your operations are strong, that the quality is high, and that you’re doing the best you can for most of the patients because you simply can’t help every single patient. That’s one lesson. Another lesson that is not, kind of a similar theme, not to get upset when people leave, when people move on to pastures new, because as I explained earlier, there’s a reasonably high turnover in clinical diagnostics. What you should do instead, my advice would be to be well prepared to have as many staff cross-trained and as many different protocols and disciplines as possible to cover for people leaving and to somewhat anticipate that people will turn over so that you have a process in place to replace them either with a new hire or moving somebody from a different department. Actually coming back, sorry if I may, one of the things I do for retention is give people opportunities to grow within the company. So one of my own personal philosophies is give people projects outside of their daily routine, their daily job. And sometimes these are small projects, obviously, because their daily job is very busy and then see how they get on. And a lot of people will tell you, I want to do extra things, I want to do X, Y, and Z. And then when they’re presented with that opportunity, perhaps they don’t really grab it with both hands and others may. So give people opportunities, and for those that show real hunger to succeed, then I move them forward in the process into more sort of glamorous, as glamorous as clinical diagnostics can be, roles. So if you’re in the extraction department and you’re performing really well, then we’ll move you into the sequencing department because that’s a little bit cooler and it’s something different. So we try that as well. But coming back to your question, yes, people move on. My advice would be don’t get too attached to people. Understand that they’re moving on for whatever reason. There’s nothing you can do about it. If you have good retention policies in place, if you’re doing the best you can to provide the best work environment, the best training for your employees, then people will move on and you just have to have plans in place to replace them when that happens.

Samantha Black:
That’s amazing advice, and I think that that can save us all a lot of heartache along the way. But, you know, I think it’s it’s interesting with the workforce today, it’s just kind of become the standard. So I think that’s great advice and I think it’s been amazing to hear about your career, and I love the perspective that you have on a lot of these topics. And they definitely resonate with things that we’re hearing in the industry, too. So that’s just great validation. And I really have learned a lot about clinical diagnostics here, so I really appreciate that. That’s where we’re going to leave it today, but before we leave, I did want to just throw it out there for all of our listeners. Where can they find you? Where can they follow what you’re doing? How can they get in touch with you, if they have questions and want to join your team, where can they find you?

John Curran:
Well, so they’re welcome to visit the BostonGene website, that’s BostonGene.com. I am not hugely present on social media, but I do have a LinkedIn account so you can look me up there. John Curran, BostonGene. And we are growing, so if there’s anybody in the greater Boston area who is interested in a career in clinical diagnostics or learning more about it, they can, by all means, reach out to me through LinkedIn would probably be the best way to do that. Or you can send a message through our website, but we’d love to hear from anybody who’s interested in joining the team. As I said at the start, we think we are building something pretty special here. We’re differentiating ourselves from the other players in the diagnostics market. I didn’t go into all the details of what BostonGene is offering or planning to offer. But very briefly, if I may, we have a holistic approach to diagnostics in terms of cancer diagnostics at least. So we have other technologies which will complement our sequencing. We’re going to be launching various assays in immunoprofiling, and immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, all designed to allow a deeper dive, and as I said, a more holistic view of each patient’s tumor, and there’s nobody else in the market that’s doing that right now. There are certainly people who offer sequencing and IHC, and IF for example, but those are all individual tests. Ours will be a complete comprehensive test with all the data analyzed in one place at one time, and when you do that, you find associations, you find links, you find things that you wouldn’t see if you looked at each data set independently or individually. And so we think that’s something that’s really going to differentiate BostonGene, and so I encourage anybody who’s excited to hear that or when they look at our website, excited to learn what we’re doing, to get in touch and we can have a conversation about where you might fit into BostonGene in the future.

Samantha Black:
Amazing, amazing. Thank you, John, so much. This has been a pleasure and we look forward to catching up with you soon.

John Curran:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Samantha Black:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the LabOps Leadership Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today’s guest. For show notes, resources, and more information about LabOps Unite, please visit us at LabOps.Community/Podcast. This show is powered by Elemental Machines.

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