The Power of People
By Niki Stojnic
May 2024
In the course of running a company whose goal is to develop treatments for allergic and autoimmune diseases, Andrea Choe has gone from studying the language of roundworms to studying the language of people.
The language of roundworms underpins the mission of the physician and scientist’s biotech company, Holoclara. Studying people has helped Andrea double the size of the company and advance on a huge goal: to send Holoclara’s first program to clinical trials this year. It will be the first time a worm-derived molecule has ever been manufactured to scale and returned back to mankind.
Andrea founded the company in 2017 after making a discovery at Caltech’s Sternberg Lab. “I quickly became fascinated with this molecular language [of worms], and how that had evolved over hundreds of millions of years,” she says. “I was eavesdropping on this language of theirs, and I ended up discovering this unique family of molecules.”
Roundworms’ immunomodulatory properties are the basis for Holoclara’s work developing therapeutics to help treat allergic and autoimmune diseases — and eventually, a host of other things, as well.
Looking to nature for therapeutic innovations is popular, Andrea says. (Wegovy and Ozempic, for example, come from a hormone in Gila monster venom.) And decades of preclinical evidence point to the therapeutic value of worms, including in disease models for diabetes, asthma, multiple sclerosis and lupus.
"People that come to biotech are really passionate, motivated people. They don’t want to be told what to do. They want to be inspired."
But what has propelled the company forward over the last year is Andrea’s commitment to invest in people. “I came to appreciate the power of people, and how important it is to have a clear vision and value system — to instill that set of values in the existing team, and to recruit the right people to the organization,” she says.
That’s no small feat when it comes to working with scientists who, like Andrea herself, might be used to operating differently. “One way of thinking about it is we’ve all got to row in the same direction — but no one likes to be told to row in the same direction as everyone else,” she says. “People that come to biotech are really passionate, motivated people. They don’t want to be told what to do. They want to be inspired.”
Running a company with a singular mission is “a massive shift of brainwaves” from working at the lab bench, where she had the luxury of spending more solo time looking through the microscope, making observations and taking notes. Nowadays, those notes are often derived from the management and leadership books cluttering her desk. It’s paying off, however, with four new hires — a huge transition for the small startup.
Being a CEO “really forces you to have to look up and out and see what’s going on in the world,” says Andrea. “A mission like this really requires working with [and] understanding a lot of people — not just the people on your team, but the patients that you ultimately want to serve, and the partners that you need to recruit to get there.”