Open Door Salon

The healthcare system is broken. Open Door Salon is a place where patients can find an easier way to navigate treatment—and where those working within the system can come together to solve the problems they hear about every day. Change starts with conversation.

Open Door Salon is a health podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 30 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Open Door Salon, a health show with 30 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #33

  Is Your Biotech a National Security Target? | Chad Raduege

  Sep 30, 202648 minS1

  Retired Air Force Brigadier General Chad Raduege spent 29 years in communications, IT and cyber operations, commanded the White House Communications Agency, and finished his career as Director of C4/Cyber and CIO for U.S. European Command. Today he is President of Cyber, Data & Communications at Elara Nova. He explains why he sees biopharma data as a national security matter, how ransomware differs from espionage by advanced persistent threats, and why the CEO owns cyber risk at a 40-person biotech with no CISO. He describes what an adversary could learn from a venture firm's due diligence files, how he reads the summer's incidents at Amgen, Boston Scientific and McKesson, and why the industry should build security in and share what it learns. (00:00) First to market, first breached, and meet Chad Raduege (05:36) Taking the Oval Office anywhere: the White House Communications Agency (09:45) EUCOM: Afghanistan, COVID and Russia's invasion of Ukraine (14:24) Where biopharma sits on a nation-state target list (19:17) Ransomware vs. espionage, and the 40-person biotech with no CISO (25:50) VC diligence files, accountability and crown jewels (33:14) Amgen, Boston Scientific, McKesson: an adversary mapping the industry (37:40) Build it in, don't strap it on, and the path to 29 years (43:59) Stop casting stones: ISACs and learning together

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  Episode #32

  Why Digital Twins Won't Replace Patients | Nindhana Paranthaman & Paul Agapow

  Sep 23, 202649 minS1

  AI arrived in drug development carrying a very large promise. Nindhana Paranthaman, Vice President of Early Clinical Development at Bicara Therapeutics, and Paul Agapow, Chief Scientific Officer at Bayezian, work on opposite sides of that promise and agree on more than the marketing would suggest. Paranthaman names the gains that actually arrived, all of them operational, and the one that did not: more drugs advancing into the clinic. Agapow explains why a trial completed inside a year is marketing, takes the digital twin apart on logical rather than technical grounds, and estimates that about a third of what the industry is building today will still be standing in five years. They close on target herding and what an investor should ask an AI-first company. (01:24) What AI actually delivered in clinical development (05:24) Whether a one-year trial is marketing spin (10:30) Digital twins, and why a twin cannot replace a patient (16:39) What survives five years, and the breakdown (18:48) Protocols, amendments and the unglamorous gold (29:29) Why biology breaks AI: discovered, not invented (36:35) Target herding and the hundredth me-too drug (39:09) Advice for VCs, family offices and private equity

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  Episode #31

  What Gets a Biotech Pitch Funded: Mike Goguen and Christian Schubert

  Sep 16, 20261h 5mS1

  Six hundred investable opportunities in a year. Five investments. Christian Schubert, Vice President and Global Head of AbbVie Ventures, walks Lori Ellis through where the other 595 fall out, and almost none of it is about pitch quality. Mike Goguen joins him from the other end of the market. He spent twenty years as a general partner at Sequoia Capital before founding Two Bear Capital in 2019, and has served on more than eighty company boards. Two investors, two entirely different mandates, one table. They cover what separates a funded biotech pitch from a passed one, what loses a pitch inside the first twenty minutes, whether warm introductions still move a founder to the front of the line, why the amount raised early was almost inversely correlated with success in Goguen's own look back at the data, and what makes a rejection useful instead of vague. (00:40) Out of 600 opportunities, five investments (02:46) The five to ten percent in the middle, where the work is (03:31) Is the problem big enough? Why biotech is not tech (07:04) Passion, resilience, and the North Star nobody else believes yet (09:58) Sequoia in 1996: should we ever do life sciences again? (11:53) The capital gap corporate venture is stepping into (14:04) What is the fastest pitch you have ever lost? (16:34) What loses a pitch in the first twenty minutes (18:07) How much diligence goes into the team, not just the founder (20:42) Social worker and fireman: what early stage leadership actually is (26:50) When a founder should step aside, and who says it out loud (28:08) Do warm introductions still move you to the front of the line? (31:05) Why raising less money early correlates with bigger outcomes (35:13) Groupthink: the biggest fallacy in venture capital (38:31) What a fundable company looks like in 2027 and 2028 (43:58) The anatomy of a useful no (49:24) The fund dynamics hiding behind a rejection (53:48) The hardest questions: a random walk into venture (56:38) Three billion lines of code in every cell (01:00:30) The choice that lingers (01:02:26) Venture capitalist, philanthropist, first responder. Pick one. Mike Goguen is Founder and Managing Partner of Two Bear Capital. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-goguen-23314/ Christian Schubert is Vice President and Global Head of AbbVie Ventures. https://www.linkedin.com/in/crs79/ Episode page: https://opendoorsalon.com/what-gets-a-biotech-pitch-funded/

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  Episode #30

  Pivot or Close: What the Last 90 Days of a Biotech Wind-Down Look Like

  Sep 2, 202648 minS1

  David Esposito has built biotechs to exit and taken biotechs into bankruptcy. Pavel Khrimian spent most of 2026 winding down the company he co-founded, after a pharma collaboration collapsed at the diligence stage. They talk about what the last ninety days actually look like, the three questions that separate a pivot from a closure, and the obligation to patients that outlives the company. Lori asks about the ninety days before the decision rather than the day of it, and both answers land in the same place: the data was there earlier, and it did not arrive labeled. A manufacturing delay. A term sheet that was supposed to be a hundred million, drops to eighty, then oversubscribes to a hundred and twenty five. A program that is performing but is no longer the priority. Khrimian reduces the closure decision to three questions. Do you have a credible hypothesis or asset. Do you have the cash to test it. Do you have the time and money to reach a realistic value inflection. Two answers of no and you are closing rather than pivoting. Esposito's version is structural: after a couple of rounds of capital a company has often prioritized itself into one swim lane, and the data then makes the decision for it. Neither treats the people as a footnote. Patients on therapy have to stay on therapy, which turns a wind-down into an operational problem of narrowing sites and continuing to ship drug. Employees who did nothing wrong need somewhere to land. (00:00) Why founders are drawn back to biotech (00:38) How this sponsored episode worked (02:04) Exits, launches, and companies taken into bankruptcy (03:37) Letting go of the obsession with control (06:04) Reading a new data point and deciding whether to pivot (07:35) Pay attention to every data point, not just your own (10:26) Build a base case, then watch it move (11:26) The acute study, and the pivot to chronic indications (12:31) Why it is always about the team (16:06) Healthy tension between science, finance and strategy (17:47) Doing everything right and still losing (19:05) A word from Lab Thread (19:28) The ninety days before the decision (21:21) When a pharma collaboration collapses in diligence (23:31) Optimism as a gear, measured against cash (25:05) Pivot or close: the three questions (26:54) The binary swim lane, and the calls that are never clear (29:21) What the CAR-T pivot into autoimmune teaches (30:52) You are not rewarded for a platform anymore (31:57) Carrying the news (33:14) Two hundred grand in the bank and no January calendar (34:42) Investors, patients, and your team at the same time (35:42) Take your own shoes off first (36:42) The obligation to patients still on therapy (39:20) Helping your team land somewhere good (40:17) What inspired you to take this path (44:12) The hardest decision you have had to make (47:10) Thank yous David Esposito is President and Chief Executive Officer of ONL Therapeutics. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidesposito2/ Pavel Khrimian is Co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Deka Biosciences. https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavel-khrimian-3219935/ This episode was made possible by Lab Thread. Nobody went into science for the admin. Lab Thread is the integrated lab management platform that scientists actually enjoy; Built to fit the way you work, from first idea to final report. Everything connected. Nothing lost. Never in your way. Visit labthread.com to learn more, or book a demo Episode page: https://opendoorsalon.com/biotech-wind-down-pivot-or-close/ Newsletter: https://opendoorsalon.substack.com/

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  Episode #30

  What Happens When AI Gets Drug Discovery Wrong | Ryan Cawood & Raphaël Ognar

  Aug 26, 202655 minS1

  An AI fabricated a scientific citation. When Raphaël Ognar pushed back, it apologized, saying it had not wanted to fall short by giving him an unsatisfactory answer. He told it that "I don't know" would have been better than lying, and stopped using it that day. That anecdote opens a conversation that escalates. Ryan Cawood pastes in a DNA sequence he already knows the answer to and gets a confident, wrong one back. A cell line takes nine months to build and fails at the door of a GMP facility because a chain-of-custody record has a hole in it. And the FDA does not care where your data came from: submit it, and you own it. Ryan Cawood, PhD, is Co-Founder and CEO of Lab Thread. Raphaël Ognar is President, CEO, Co-Founder and Chairman of NKILT Therapeutics, and carried two small molecules through to approval inside big pharma before leaving to build his own company. Both run companies with AI in the workflow. Neither will put it in the pitch deck. (00:00) "I don't know" is a good answer (00:24) What happens when AI goes wrong in drug discovery (01:40) The publication that did not exist (03:41) The AI apologized for not wanting to disappoint (05:02) The DNA sequence it read confidently and wrong (06:51) Who is liable when the model is wrong (10:01) What a mistake actually looks like in a lab (12:06) Build checkpoints into the prompt, not just at the end (14:47) Flawed data in, confident answer out (16:29) Failure at big pharma versus failure at a small biotech (21:01) Trials are designed for approval, not for the real world (25:16) When you cannot show where the answer came from (27:25) Nine months of chain of custody, recorded on paper (30:20) Confidence is not accuracy (32:34) Integrating AI instead of renting it (35:24) Greed versus outcome in the AI bubble (37:04) Who is really paying for your AI subscription (39:33) The energy and water nobody prices in (41:28) AI for AI's sake, and the colleague who rewrites your email (43:31) The pitch deck with no mention of AI (46:07) What inspired you to take this path (50:20) The hardest decision

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