BROADCASTS.com

For many professionals, the period stretching roughly from March 2020 to December 2022 will forever be known simply as \u201cCOVID,\u201d as in \u201cI changed jobs during COVID.\u201d

Thus it was for Erin Colgan, who in July 2020\u2014after having invested 9 years within the finance rank-and-file of pharma giant Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and 8 years with PwC\u2014opted to become the 20th employee of a promising biotech start-up.

Still, Colgan\u2019s game change was prompted not by COVID\u2019s well-earned reputation for employment displacement nor by the allure of start-up dreams but by what recruiters have long referred to as \u201cthe call to leadership.\u201d For Colgan, this meant joining Boston-based Sensei Bio as senior vice president of finance, a title that guaranteed her the status of being the firm\u2019s senior most finance executive.

At the time of her appointment, the pandemic had already begun to be recognized as having certain accelerant qualities for business, which were perhaps nowhere on display more than inside the biotech realm, an industry that was experiencing a COVID-fueled adrenaline rush.

\u201cIt was only about 6 weeks after I joined the company that we found ourselves meeting with banks to talk about how we could go public to capitalize on the market being especially hot for biotechs,\u201d explains Colgan, who alongside her CEO spearheaded an IPO process that ultimately raised $152 million for Sensei Bio in February 2021.

However, as Colgan was to learn, a more formidable leadership challenge still lay ahead, as a Phase 2 drug trial rendered disappointing results and the biotech market at large suddenly began to cool.     

\u201cSix months past our IPO, some data on a Phase 2 program came in that wasn\u2019t what we had hoped for, so we huddled,\u201d recalls Colgan, who reports that the company\u2019s cash runway then became top-of-mind as management debated whether the capital markets for small-cap biotech firms might turn around in 6 to 9 months.

\u201cI said, \u2018Let\u2019s assume that this period lasts a lot longer and see how long we can stretch our cash while still enabling ourselves to achieve what we feel is most important,\u2019\u201d continues Colgan, who tells us that Sensei Bio ultimately advanced down her preferred path, which allowed the firm to extend its cash reach by a year and a half.

In the 6 months that followed, Colgan remarks, the finance, science, and medical areas of the business achieved a shared mind-set that allowed them to work together in the new, capital-constrained biotech environment.  

In January 2022, nearly a year after Sensei Bio\u2019s IPO and 6 months after Colgan had made her compelling argument to extend the firm\u2019s cash coverage calendar, she was named CFO\u2014an appointment that we would wager she had sealed up a half-year earlier when certain hard decisions had been called for.  

Colgan observes: \u201cYou can\u2019t make those types of decisions \u2018later.\u2019 You have to make them early and often.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney