LabOps Leadership_Andrea Johnstone: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Kerri Anderson:
By building a platform to share challenges, thoughts from leaders, and network together, the LabOps Leadership Podcast is elevating LabOps professionals as well as the industry as a whole.
Samantha Black:
With the intent of unlocking the power of LabOps, we deliver unique insights to execute the mission at hand, to standardize LabOps, and empower LabOps leaders.
Kerri Anderson:
I’m Kerri Anderson.
Samantha Black:
And I’m Samantha Black. Welcome to the LabOps Leadership Podcast.
Samantha Black:
I’m so excited today, we’re here with Andrea Johnstone, who is senior product, Senior Director of Product Development at EpiCypher. Thanks for joining us today, Andrea.
Andrea Johnstone:
Thank you so much, I’m so excited to be here.
Samantha Black:
Awesome, so can you just kick us off and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?
Andrea Johnstone:
Sure, yeah, so I have to be honest, when I was young, it wasn’t super obvious I was going to be a scientist. You know, I did well in school and stuff, but not particularly well at science. I remember my seventh-grade science fair project was really boring and uninspired, and I didn’t have anyone in my family who had gotten a four-year college degree, let alone an advanced degree, and was a scientist, so I didn’t really know what that meant. But in high school, I started getting really into the question of how the brain functions, how does it control personality, how your personality changes when you’re exposed to things that change brain function, like drugs or addiction, for example, how it’s changed in mental health and how just your mental state can impact your physiological health and your physiological wellbeing as well. So I started just voraciously reading any books about neuroscience and finally in college got connected to a great mentor who said, you need to get your PhD, you need to go into science, there’s so much that you can do in this career. So that’s what I did, I went to University of Miami, I got my PhD studying neuroplasticity after spinal cord injury and how we can regenerate nerves and restore function, and then ended up doing a postdoc in a lab studying epigenetic mechanisms of psychiatric disease. And epigenetics to me was just so cool. I was instantly hooked once I learned about it. Because really there’s two main things that influence how organisms develop and their health, and that is your genetics and things you’re exposed to in your environment, and epigenetics is really at the crux of those two influences. So I knew that’s what I wanted to do in my career, I did that for my postdoc and then ended up joining this startup company called EpiCypher that nobody had ever really heard of. They’re a really small company, a spin-out of UMC, founded in 2011, they had this really kind of rudimentary website with kind of random products on there. It wasn’t really clear exactly what they did other than they made products kind of related to epigenetics. But when I interviewed there, I could really feel that there was something special. The people there were just so brilliant. They had just gotten their first Phase two grant through the NIH Small Business Innovation Research Program. So they had a few years of funding for the first time ever in their company, they were all really excited, and so I joined as a research scientist. There were about ten people, and now six years later, we’re about 60 plus people growing very quickly. And I’ve moved my way up, as you said, to Senior Director of Product Development, and I still feel, even more than I did in the first day, that what we’re doing is special and unique and really fun.
Samantha Black:
That’s awesome, that’s a great story. So I know, I already know about EpiCypher, but for everybody else out there, it can be kind of a complicated topic or a scary topic to talk about, so can you break down epigenetics and the work that you guys are doing at EpiCypher, a little bit more so that people can understand what you guys are doing and why it’s cool?
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, absolutely, so everybody’s probably familiar with the central dogma, right? DNA by itself is not really functional, it’s a template that the cell can use to make decisions. And so DNA needs to be transcribed into RNA, which has some functions, and that’s translated into protein, which has even more functions. So central dogma is DNA to RNA to protein, we all know that. But what we don’t appreciate from that view is there’s this middle layer between DNA and RNA that has enormous level of complexity that’s really involved in making those decisions between all the genes that exist in a cell, the thousands of genes that exist at any given time, and which of those genes is actively transcribed and then translated, and that’s influencing the overall health and function of the cell, and that exists in the form of chromatin. Chromatin is that regulatory layer which is involved in packaging the DNA into the cell, so just, so it fits, right? So the histone proteins that wind the DNA around to form the basic repeating unit of chromatin, and then also transcriptional complexes that are interacting with that chromatin to modify it, to make modifications and essentially decorate those histone proteins in a way that changes how the DNA is packaged. It makes it more accessible to turn genes on or it compacts it to turn genes off, like, for example, growth genes, you want those active during development, but then you want to shut them down later and prevent diseases like cancer where those growth genes might be reactivated. So this chromatin regulation is happening in every cell in your body at any given time, and it’s really coordinating those genetic and environmental influences, that’s how the cell functions in normal development. And now we’re starting to appreciate that these epigenetic and chromatin regulatory pathways can go awry and they can contribute to diseases. And so there’s a few pharma companies and actually clinically approved drugs now that are targeting these chromatin regulatory processes to set things right again and restore normal gene expression and prevent disease.
Samantha Black:
So you guys are developing what products? So that’s a lot about epigenetics and that was a great overview, I wish I had that in college, that would have been great. So, but you guys are, you’re actually serving as a service to other companies, is that right? So can you talk a little bit about, you’re not directly baking the drugs, but how are you guys impacting or speeding that process?
Andrea Johnstone:
Exactly, yeah, yeah. So basically, what we say is, in the epigenetics field there’s a gold rush. Everyone’s trying to understand how epigenetics is working and how we can leverage that to cure disease, to find drugs that are improving human health. And so we’re not trying to find those drugs or find those answers, but what we’re trying to do is sell people the most sophisticated tools that they need to find that gold. What are the most sophisticated technologies and picks and shovels that people can use to really develop a really high-resolution understanding of how chromatin is regulated? And so we started out kind of making the basic repeating unit of chromatin, which is the nucleosome. We actually make fully defined nucleosomes that people can use to better understand what’s binding to the chromatin, and also they can use it as substrates in assays where they’re screening for new drugs and trying to find things that are inhibiting that interaction with the chromatin. And now we’re starting to move more into an in vivo type of setup where we’re looking at what’s bound to the chromatin and how is the chromatin regulated in cells and in disease, and that’s using epigenomic mapping assays where we’re profiling across all the DNA, where our specific proteins of interest bound, what genes are they regulating, and again, how is that changing throughout development and disease? And the field has been really limited by some older technologies, but we’re coming in and trying to improve by developing really next-generation technologies that let you do things faster, cheaper, with higher resolution, and also making sure that while we’re doing that, we’re developing the most reliable tools. We have robust controls that we’re using to really do science that has high integrity and reproducibility, which we know can be a problem if you don’t have reagents that are well-characterized and controls, so that’s always a focus of ours as well.
Kerri Anderson:
That’s incredible. It’s really interesting to hear of this next-generation technology happening in the lab. I’m really curious to hear how are the lab operations people at your company helping to support that?
Andrea Johnstone:
Oh, my gosh, so essential. So I have to say that LabOps is a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart, because when I started it as a research scientist, like I said, we’re only ten people and now we’re 60 plus, so I’ve seen the company scale and I’ve seen the process of developing really robust LabOps from the beginning, really establishing these processes. And also, I had, when I was a scientist, two really talented associates that worked for me, Danielle Maryansky and Kelly Rodriguez, and they’re both now running their own groups. Danielle is running our Epigenomic Services group, and Kelly is our lab operations manager, and so she’s really been essential to establishing some of these rigorous processes. And also for us, LabOps is especially important because we’re not just doing science internally, what we’re doing is building products and services that people can use externally. So the kits and the products that we’re building get shipped to thousands of labs, so we need to make sure that our internal processes are top-notch. Everything’s going through really rigorous quality controls. Our equipment and our internal SOPs are our top line and, that we’re making things that are really easily used when we ship them out to these thousands of labs all over the world. So LabOps has been really crucial to that from bringing in new equipment, scaling things on robots, as again, as we grew and started to put these epigenomic mapping assays on 96 plate robots and use them in service projects for integrating with clinical trials where we’re screening clinical samples and trying to find new biomarkers of disease. We’ve adopted electronic lab notebooks, when I first joined it was all paper lab notebooks, and now it’s, everything’s electronic. All our reagents are tracked and linked back to your experiment, establishing SOPs, safety protocols, I mean, the list goes on and on, expanding to larger spaces as we grow, so LabOps has been absolutely critical for all of that.
Kerri Anderson:
Did your company start, so you said you grew from about 10 to 60 plus now. When did you really hire, like, a full-time lab operations person?
Andrea Johnstone:
It was probably about three or four years ago, I want to say, and we definitely were really initially focused on the science and bringing in all these scientists to the team and then realize like, oh, we need someone who’s just in charge of this, who’s not trying to be a scientist at the bench and also doing LabOps. We need a full-time dedicated person just to manage LabOps. So I think the earlier you establish that, the better. For us, we were growing so fast, and then it was like, oh, we need, we really need to put this in place, so yeah.
Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, that’s something we’re seeing more and more, is people hiring that role a lot sooner. I think companies used to wait a long time before they hired that, but they realize how beneficial it is now.
Andrea Johnstone:
Absolutely, yeah.
Kerri Anderson:
So what’s something you’ve seen for LabOps that’s been a common struggle recently for you guys that you’ve had to overcome?
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, so as we grow, again, it used to be ten people here, they’d all talk to talk to each other, and we all knew everything everyone was doing, but now it’s 60 plus, and a lot of the projects that we make or the collaborations we work on, the services that we do, it touches almost every team in our house. So things might start with the production team who’s making something, they go to the R&D team, who’s testing it and evaluating it. They might go to the services team who’s using it in their services. They go to my team, the products and applications group to be evaluated for commercial launch, right, and make sure we’re designing the product, doing all the quality control checks, talking to customers and thought leaders in the field to make sure the product meets their needs, and then they go to marketing and sales and customer service to be shipped out. And so as that project is transitioning hands across all those groups, we need to make sure that everything that they’re doing is scalable and repeatable, right? They need to do sort of the same basic things every time. They need to grow their teams and make sure new people are trained. And we need to make sure that there’s really reliable handoffs across groups. So implementing task management processes where we’re able to, we have a resource for that project that we can go to know exactly where it’s at and its development phase. So all these other teams can plan their timing and plan ahead for that and then just be able to communicate about the status of the project and what’s the next step. What exactly needs to be done? My team might want something special in the quality control process that the production and services teams need to know about. And so our LabOps was really critical in developing a task management process where we’re able to set up this really sophisticated process of handing off tasks, keeping them organized, keeping all those notes, and keeping everyone in communication.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, I think that is really undervalued in some places that, small things that can add up and the communication between teams and when you have a more complicated business, you know, when you’re selling services and also doing product development, I think that can make a huge difference in the process and maybe you’ll still get there in the end, but it can be a lot less painful along the way when you have some of these systems in place and people dedicated to thinking about that and not worried about, did this experiment run correctly, or like, did I get the result that I want out of it? You actually literally have people thinking about the process and can help navigate and move the whole team forward in a more efficient way. I think that’s maybe one way that LabOps is really helpful, a lot of people don’t think about all the time.
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, and it absolutely enables like stress, scaling is key. Like as our teams grow, as our customer base grows and we’re sending out way more kits, way more products, we’re doing services that are not just a couple dozen samples, they’re several hundred samples. All of those processes, as you scale and make them bigger, you need to make sure that your base efficiencies are really maxed out. You have a really reliable process that you can go back to and just scale as you grow and repeat that process and ensure that all the correct checks are being done along the way, all the correct teams are being notified of where that is and what the next step is.
Samantha Black:
So what do you think is the next evolution of LabOps in your business? I’m just curious, you know, it seems like the team members and the LabOps individuals have grown along the way. So what do you maybe predict as the next evolution for EpiCypher’s LabOps team?
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, I think, so more and more, as we get into these epigenomic mapping assays that I was talking about, where you’re really profiling across the whole DNA, where these proteins are bound and how they’re regulating, there’s a ton of data that’s being generated with that, and making sure that that data is really organized and accessible and is a resource for people is a LabOps issue. How do you store that data? How do people access it? How do you ensure that you have pipelines for analyzing that data and making sure it’s analyzed the same way every time it’s tracked, and you can go back to it later to reference old files? And we’re starting to layer on additional types of assays, not just look at where the proteins are bound on the DNA, but looking at the 3D conformation of the chromatin, how accessible is it, what are the transcriptional outcomes downstream of that, how is the DNA itself regulated? And so it’s only going to get more and more complex in terms of this data repository that exists, and so just making sure that that’s accessible but yet secure, we can hand off data to service customers and things like that. So that’s, I think, going to be a big challenge as well.
Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, absolutely. That organization is key.
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, the omics revolution, right, is I think a lot of people are dealing with that right now, especially as more and more people adopt next-generation sequencing technologies and we’re just generating tons and tons of data.
Kerri Anderson:
So being part of a startup that has grown so much, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of challenges, learned a lot of lessons. What would you say is something you’ve learned in your career that’s maybe your biggest lesson?
Andrea Johnstone:
I think my biggest lesson, and something that I wish people had told me earlier in my career, is that everyone has imposter syndrome. And I think just, you know, putting yourself out there and making sure, you know, even, you just don’t realize everyone seems like they have it all together, you know, they know exactly what the right thing to do is. And even this person, Kelly, who took over our lab operations management, she had never done something like that before and was kind of struggling with it, as we all do initially, like, am I the right person for this to take this on? But, you know, you just take on things that scare you, you do the best that you can and you use the resources around you. There’s always people who are willing to talk. There’s always the resources to help. There’s always programs out there and ways to learn and adopt new strategies to tackle problems and find solutions. So I think just accepting that, that we all have imposter syndrome and we’re all just doing the best that we can and continuing to put yourself out there is probably for me, the biggest lesson. I always used to think I was the only one who had that problem, right, but I think that we all do and we can all overcome it.
Kerri Anderson:
Yeah, absolutely, I think that’s great for our listeners to hear because that’s something in LabOps, a lot of us just fall into the career, and a lot of times I think we feel in over our heads.
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, you’re trying to manage, sometimes, the chaos. It feels like it’s almost like you get one situation under control, but then something else comes up that you didn’t anticipate. For us, just constantly growing, there’s always new things that are happening. You know, as soon as we, for example, move into a larger space, right? Because we started at one tiny two-foot bench that we rented out at UMC and we now have approximately 16,000 square feet, and now we’ve only been there for three or four years, I think, and we’re looking to double or triple that space and move into even larger space. So we need to, from a lab operations perspective, really make sure that we’re planning ahead for that move that we have the right space to go into. We’re working with architects and all kinds of things to plan out ahead and make sure that that move and that transition is seamless.
Samantha Black:
Yeah, I think it’s, that there’s always going to be that, you know, and if you’re not growing and learning and expanding, right, what, you know, I think a lot of people in LabOps really excel at that. And so I think it can be scary, but I think, from the people that I’ve met in LabOps, it’s, they really, even if it’s scary, it’s, they’re really good at it. So they should just trust their gut and just roll with it. And I, you know, I haven’t heard of a case where it’s been a complete disaster. Maybe some things have gone wrong here and there, but generally, you can get through it. So I think that’s a great message. Andrea, the last question that we have is, if somebody wanted to find out more about either EpiCypher, the work that you guys are doing, or even about you and follow what you’re doing, how can they find you online or otherwise?
Andrea Johnstone:
Yeah, so you can find EpiCypher at www.EpiCypher.com. That’s E P I C Y P H E R. We publish blogs, you can sign up for our newsletters. We’re also on social media, on LinkedIn, and Twitter. We’ll see what’s happening with Twitter for, right now we’re on it, but I know there’s other potential platforms that might be coming online too, so just follow us there. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Andrea Johnstone, with an E. Feel free to reach out with questions about epigenetics or careers or EpiCypher, anything else.
Samantha Black:
Awesome, thank you so much, Andrea. This has been really great. I really enjoyed learning more about EpiCypher. I know everybody else will too. So otherwise, we wish you the best of luck, and thanks for joining us.
Andrea Johnstone:
Awesome, thank you, guys, so much.
Kerri Anderson:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the LabOps Leadership Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today’s guest.
Samantha Black:
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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