5 Questions with Chris Adkins, Business Development Manager, Kymanox
Chris Adkins, Business Development Manager at Kymanox, shares his journey from aspiring physician to a leader in the biopharma industry, discussing the importance of early career experiences in manufacturing, the impact of innovative therapies, and his passion for building connected communities in life sciences.
September 26, 2024
| This article is part of our 5 Questions With series, one of our ongoing People & Places Features. We love it because despite the consistent questioning, the answers are all unique. Be sure to FOLLOW us on LinkedIn to tell us what you think. |
1. What did you want to be when you grew up? How’d you get from there to here?
I spent my entire childhood convinced I would become a physician, likely because education was so highly valued in my household, and I honestly didn’t know what engineering was or what it entailed. As I became more exposed to medicine and its heavy reliance on memorization, I started to notice my own Achilles’ heel and decided to explore alternative paths as I approached high school graduation. When I met with a guidance counselor, armed with a love for math and science, engineering seemed like an easy path to follow, which ultimately led to my incredibly formative years at NC State.
After stumbling through chemical engineering and then switching to mechanical, I finished my undergraduate studies thinking I would pursue a PhD (that strong emphasis on education never left me!). However, I pivoted about five months before graduation, with six semesters of part-time research, three summers of full-time research, and zero actual industry experience! Through a stroke of luck, I landed a job at a flu vaccine plant in Holly Springs, NC (now its own biotech hub!) and fell in love with the industry, its regulations, the dedicated people, and most importantly, the difference we can make in people’s lives.
In a pilot plant environment, I was exposed to support roles, drug substance, and drug product. Being part of a small team, I was fortunate to wear many hats, from managing material enrollment and deviations to performing splits, harvests, and purification. Unfortunately, corporate restructuring impacted our pipeline, signaling the end of an era. I then seized the opportunity to move into a technical sales role with SaniSure, a single-use integrator with a range of novel OEM components. This was a huge leap for me, marking both a shift into sales and a transition from working in a manufacturing facility to having my nearest colleague 600 miles away!
Thankfully, I fell in love with technical sales, particularly the challenge of bringing solutions to clients in various forms. I learned a tremendous amount at SaniSure, and later accepted an opportunity with Datwyler to gain experience in the primary packaging side of the industry. After navigating a steep learning curve and enjoying several successful years, I found myself selling stoppers and plungers during the pandemic. Eventually, I had the chance to join Kymanox, where I could apply everything I’d learned throughout my career (CMC, manufacturing facilities, QA, primary packaging), along with new areas like human factors, regulatory affairs, and clinical.
Two years later, I now have a unique role that allows me to collaborate with clients on a wide variety of projects, helping to accelerate novel medicines of various types as they journey to market. I’m also fortunate to work alongside the talented team we’ve assembled at Kymanox.
2. How are you helping to build a more connected community?
I am a firm believer in purpose statements that are created through a culmination of values, talents, and ambitions. I strive to establish meaningful communities in various aspects of my life. These are evident in my faith community, the men’s workout group I belong to (F3 Nation), and the networking and communication I engage in with everyone I interact with at Kymanox. I see my role as one where I can facilitate connections—sometimes internally within Kymanox for potential project work, but also with others in the industry who can provide suitable solutions or references for hires.
3. What are currently buzzing about? Anything and everything…
I was raised by my grandparents, and my grandmother suffered from many chronic health conditions, which ultimately led to her spending several years in long-term care facilities. Two current trends in modern medicine development give me a lot of excitement and hope, and working on both of these at Kymanox brings me personal fulfillment.
The continuous push toward at-home care. Advanced devices, delivery systems, and drug presentations that allow for more treatments to occur at home give me hope for the quality-of-life improvements that patients will continue to benefit from going forward. It is no coincidence that this push aligns with the FDA’s emphasis on Human Factors as a focus area. It is now more pivotal than ever for companies to begin thinking about presentation design, human factors engineering, and the associated manufacturing and regulatory impacts as early in the design process as possible.
Advanced therapies. Stories like those of the first patient treated with Zolgensma and other breakthrough gene therapies offer tremendous hope for the future of modern medicine. However, these companies have a significant amount of work to do in terms of CMC readiness, modernization of their manufacturing, and, of course, the comprehensive need to make their processes GMP-compliant (or as we say, to bring compliance to their science). These are projects we work on daily, from Pre-IND regulatory projects to standing up GMP manufacturing facilities.
Aside from what we work on professionally, my experiences growing up have also made me prioritize daily movement as a habit to maintain physical health. For me, this takes the form of running, and right now I’m also excited about taking another shot at Raleigh’s hometown marathon, the City of Oaks Marathon, which was my first marathon 9 years ago. While I certainly won’t be the fastest person there on November 3rd, I’ll be quite a bit faster than the Chris who ran it in 2015!
4. If you could travel back in time – what early career advice would you give yourself?
I’m going to tailor my advice to biopharma/pharmaceutical manufacturing specifically, but it probably applies to most industries centered around some type of physical product manufacturing. My advice is to start your career in a manufacturing environment. I believe there is a perspective to be gained in doing actual rubber-meets-the-road production, whether it is in development (e.g., lab or pilot plant) or commercial manufacturing. From there, you can move into specialized areas if they interest you and the right opportunity presents itself. My beginnings in a pilot plant environment allowed me exposure to upstream, downstream, and support manufacturing environments, quality systems work (deviations, CAPAs, change controls, DCEs, validation, decommissioning, material enrollment), lab work, and manufacturing campaign execution, all in a relatively short period of time. I believe the best way to have a solid perspective in whatever your area of specialization turns out to be is to have an appreciation for the production of the actual products you are seeking to enable and support.
I would also encourage people to stay curious. No matter where you are in your career (or life), there will always be far more things you don’t understand than things you do, and this only becomes more true as our world continues to grow more technologically complex. I had a professor once who said, “There are very few people in the world who can explain everything about how a computer works.” This quote has always stuck with me—something that everyone reading this uses quite frequently, and the overwhelming majority of us can’t explain its function in its entirety because it is such a culmination of different specialties. The same is true in biopharma! Very few professionals truly understand all of the nuances and complexities from drug discovery and cell line engineering through to fill-finish and device assembly, let alone through to market distribution, access, and reimbursement. This only further emphasizes the importance of building connected communities that enable us to work across functional areas (and even companies) to continue to bring novel products to market and keep them there.
5. The fun (and rotating) one… What’s something on your bucket list?
It has been interesting throughout my career to work for two very large commercial entities (Novartis and Datwyler) and two much smaller entities (SaniSure and Kymanox). One thing I’ve observed at smaller companies is the incredible impact that small companies and their leadership teams can have on the lives of all their employees. Obviously, being employed at a large entity has a significant impact on its employee base, but the influence that a CEO and a core group of leaders can have at a company with fewer than 500 people is remarkable. This, combined with my educational background in entrepreneurship, has always made me want to start some type of company someday. I thoroughly enjoy working with startup founders because of their passion, great ideas, and get-it-done attitude (shoutout to the Kymanox Hyper Virtual Model). Given the right opportunity, I would love to be a part of a startup team someday. I would probably start by doing something on the side (I’m always dabbling in things, be it real estate or coaching runners professionally) since I’m relatively risk-averse. But with the right opportunity—both in terms of idea and team—I would love to take the plunge into entrepreneurship!
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