Welcome to Partnology’s Biotech Leader Spotlight Series, where we highlight the remarkable accomplishments and visionary leadership of biotech industry pioneers. This series is about showcasing the groundbreaking strides made by exceptional leaders who have transformed scientific possibilities into tangible realities. Through insightful interviews, we invite you to join us in following the inspiring journeys of these executives who continue to shape the landscape of the biotech industry. This week we are recognizing:
Derrell Porter, M.D. is the CEO of cTRL Therapeutics, a company transforming the cell therapy space by developing autologous cell therapies for patients with solid tumors. Derrell also currently sits on the boards of Passage Bio, Acumen Pharma and Portal Innovations. He has over 20 years of experience in the biopharma space, bringing deep interdisciplinary expertise in the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics in immuno-oncology, rare disease and cell and gene therapies. He has previously served as founder and CEO of Cellevolve Bio, working with partners to bring cell therapies through late-stage development and commercialization with a focus on neglected diseases. Prior to that, he has held various leadership roles at Atara Bio, Gilead Sciences, AbbVie, and McKinsey & Company, among others. Derrell earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, his M.B.A. from The Wharton School, and B.S. in Neuroscience from UCLA.
Walk me through your career, highlighting key moments or decisions that shaped your path toward becoming a biotech CEO:
I’m a physician by education, but I was always intrigued by the business side of medicine. That led me to pursue a dual degree at the University of Pennsylvania and The Wharton School, attending medical school and business school at the same time.
At the time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to work in biopharma, but I knew I wanted to be involved in managing the delivery of healthcare. Initially, I imagined working within academic medical centers or large integrated health systems. But the more I learned, the more I was drawn to the innovative technology and therapeutic side of the industry.
After graduate school, I joined McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, where the healthcare practice was based at that time. There, I worked with a large number of team members tackling all kinds of healthcare issues—everything from drug development, commercialization to medical device strategy. I stayed at McKinsey for a while, working on a number of fascinating projects, but ultimately decided management consulting wasn’t my long-term ambition.
That’s when I joined Amgen, a large biotech company in Southern California, marking the start of my therapeutics and pharmaceutical journey. At that time, Amgen was still an emerging biotech, though it’s essentially a Big Pharma company now. My experience there was invaluable—I had the opportunity to work on a wide range of challenges, launching several products (most notably Aranesp and Neulasta), and participating in the acquisition of Immunex, among others. That particular experience gave me a “front-row seat” to the critical decisions made by the CEO, Chief Commercial Officer, and Head of R&D, and it was there that the first seed of wanting to be a CEO was planted.
From Amgen, I continued to broaden my responsibilities and experience set with the goal of eventually running a company. I served as General Manager at AbbVie, spent several years overseas in Paris as an expat, and later joined Gilead Sciences. At Gilead, through the acquisition of Kite Pharma, I was introduced to cell therapy—and I fell in love with the field. I saw it as a major scientific breakthrough with the potential to cure multiple diseases, particularly in oncology, where I had spent most of my career by that time, and I knew I wanted to focus on the next phase of my journey there.
In 2020, right as the pandemic began (fortuitous timing!), I founded my first company, Cell Evolve. Starting from just a piece of paper, I raised capital, built the team, struck key deals, and identified unmet medical needs that we could address with cell therapy. While we eventually transacted our lead program and are still working to place our second and third programs, it was a deeply rewarding experience. After that, I was recruited to lead my current company, cTRL Therapeutics, where I’ve been Founding CEO for two and a half years.
Tell me more about cTRL Therapeutics, what are you currently working on?
cTRL Therapeutics is a cell therapy company focused on solid tumors, built around a novel technology that lies at the core of our platform: IsoQore. IsoQore enables us to isolate circulating tumor-reactive lymphocytes (cTRLs) directly from the blood and engineer them into therapeutics.
While circulating tumor-reactive cells have been described for years, there was no effective method for extracting them from blood in quantities sufficient for drug development—until the invention of IsoQore. Developed by our founding scientist, Dr. Shana Kelley, IsoQore overcomes this challenge, allowing us to capture these cells at scale for the first time.
We are now advancing this technology to create new cancer treatments for indications such as melanoma, lung cancer, head and neck cancer, and colorectal cancer, among others.
Looking ahead, what trends in oncology and cell therapy do you think will separate tomorrow’s winners from the rest?
There are a few key developments on the horizon. First, simplifying the logistics of delivering cell therapy. That could mean eliminating the need for lymphodepletion and leukapheresis altogether, or, if those steps remain necessary, making them far less burdensome for patients and shortening the overall process. Currently, for some therapeutics, it can take two to three months from identifying the need to administering the first dose. If we could reduce that to a month—or even two to three weeks—it would be a huge improvement. Many in the field are working hard to achieve exactly that, whether by streamlining the process or removing those steps entirely, as is the case with in vivo CAR T therapeutics.
Second, pursuing true cures. The ultimate goal is to develop therapies that completely eradicate a patient’s cancer. We’re continuing to see advances that push this frontier forward, increasing complete response rates and expanding the number of patients who achieve a durable remission. Many next-generation cell therapies and in vivo approaches are focusing their innovation on exactly this outcome.
When building a company culture in a high-pressure, high-burn-rate environment, what have you learned about keeping teams aligned and motivated?
First and foremost, the biggest factor in attracting and retaining people is the founding mission of the company—what you’re ultimately trying to achieve as an enterprise. In drug development and healthcare, having a mission that truly improves or even saves lives, especially in the most critical settings like ours, is incredibly motivating for many individuals. A clear, direct, and impactful mission is essential.
The second key is cultivating a culture that truly empowers and enables team members to deploy their talents in the best way possible. At the end of the day, our business is built on three pillars: impact for patients, the team, and the science—and you need all three to succeed combined with capital in order to fuel the mission. That means creating an environment where both the team as a whole and individuals have the opportunity and support to perform at their very best.
In your career, you’ve turned declining brands into growth stories—what’s your framework for diagnosing and reversing a performance decline?
I think in situations like this, you need to spend a little time—though not too much—assessing the landscape. The goal is to quickly identify the top two or three problems. Those could be related to the people, the product, or, as I mentioned earlier, the culture and environment. Once you’ve diagnosed the core issues, you have to move decisively to address them, reset the organization and strategy, and focus on improving performance—whether that’s for the product, the team, or the broader organization.
What advice would you give to biotech CEOs on balancing investor expectations with long-term patient impact?
I think the challenge—especially depending on the stage of the company—is that the impact on patients may be far in the future. For a research-stage company, you might not enter clinical trials and begin dosing patients for three, four, five, or even six years. To deliver an approved therapeutic, that timeline could stretch to seven to ten years.
Because of this, it’s important to continually keep the company’s mission in mind and the impact you aim to achieve, even if it won’t be this exact team or company configuration that ultimately delivers the therapy to patients.
At the same time, one of our most important stakeholders is our investors. We need capital to do what we do, which typically comes from venture capital, private investors, or—if public—shareholders. We must also focus on delivering a strong return for them, whether in the short, medium, or long term.
Ultimately, it’s about striking the right balance between all of these perspectives over an extended period and constantly recalibrating.
From your perspective, what’s the most significant shift happening in the biotech industry right now, and how is it influencing the way leaders need to think about building companies?
The biotech field is at an interesting inflection point right now. With the downturn in the public markets, a more challenging private financing environment, and policy shifts in Washington, many of our long-held assumptions about how this business operates are being questioned.
I don’t have all the answers any more than the next person, but in conversations with my fellow CEOs, I sense we’re all asking ourselves questions we haven’t seriously revisited in 10 or 20 years. Change can be hard, but it’s also healthy, and I think it’s right to be asking these questions now.
For example:
- What’s the right business model?
- Does drug development have to cost as much as it currently does?
- Can we leverage other geographies—like China—for innovation and efficiency?
- One recurring question I’ve been hearing is: Do we need as many companies and, by extension, as many “crowded-in” technologies?
Take bispecifics—PD-1/VEGF bispecifics, for instance. Whenever there’s an innovation, there’s often a rush to produce similar or nearly identical products. Rarely has that approach led to sustained success across a broad swath of companies. Instead of having 20 or 30 companies pursuing the same patient population, could we focus on unique areas of unmet need?
Another important shift I’ve noticed—something I recently heard discussed on a podcast—is companies deciding to shut down and return capital to investors. Historically, our industry has been reluctant to do that, preferring to pivot to another indication, repeat a trial, or try a different approach even after disappointing data. But now, some are concluding that the most responsible move is to close operations and give the money back. This represents a notable change in mindset and again, I think it is healthy.
