Inside Thryv - A Conversation with Marc Vidal, Senior Director, Product & Process Development
Join us as we introduce Marc Vidal, our Senior Director of Product & Process Development at Thryv. Discover Marc's journey in the sciences, how it lead him to be the first employee to join the Thryv team, and learn how he consistently works to be relentless in pursuit of innovation!
Transcript - Marc Vidal - Senior Director, Product & Process Development
"My name is Marc Vidal and I am director of product and process development at Thryv Therapeutics. My works consists of overseeing all the development of our drug. After the research phase is complete and we elect our lead compound for the treatment of our disease, we need to develop this drug. This means we need to work on the manufacture of the compound, the formulation, and all the preclinical work before having the drug tested on humans.”
What does a typical day look like for you? "There is no typical day in this kind of role. I oversee different aspects of the development, of course as I said the manufacture. That's really the chemistry aspect of the work where we scale up the compound. The compound comes out of the lab and we know how to do a few grams, and we need to scale this compound up to hundreds of kilograms, so there are changes related to the scaling of this compound in terms of quality and repeatability of the compound, the purity of the compound, because in the end we do need to put it in humans. The other aspect of my day is all the preclinical development so all the toxicity studies in animals. So as I said there is no typical day. I work some days on a protocol for a preclinical study, some days on manufacture, and some days there is data coming in from the preclinical studies so we need to analyze the data and make decisions on the next steps. Within all of this, we have timeline and financial aspects of the program that I need to keep an eye on.”
What was your career trajectory that brought you to Thryv? “I have a PhD from Universite de Montreal in organic chemistry, I also have a post-doc from Universite de Montreal. After that I started working directly in Biotechs. I was first a bench chemist in the first biotech that I worked in. I worked about 3 years on the bench before I moved to the head of chemistry position where I started working on the scale up and manufacture of the compound. Finally, in November 2019, I joined Thryv Therapeutics as employee #1. At that time I was hired as Director of Research, so I was on the research side of Thryv until we detected our lead and I moved to the development position.”
What motivates you to be relentless in our mission to treat rare diseases? “That is linked to my passion for research and science. That's why I decided to do a PhD in the first place. That's the number 1 thing that always motivated me, was the challenge of solving a problem. There are 2 aspects in research that drive me. The first is discovering something new, but the second is solving a problem that doesn't have a solution yet.”
What are you passionate about outside of work? “There are a couple. Sport. I am a marathon runner. I have 9 marathons so far and I'm looking forward to my 10th marathon. Looking for a cool place to do it, because I've done the Montreal marathon too many times, so looking for a cool place to celebrate this 10th marathon. Apart from that I am pretty in to photography, and for the past 18 months I have been learning to play the piano.”
Marcs's message for the Thryv community: "To The Thryv community, and all rare disease patients, my message would be that their courage and resilience is inspiring to us to continue working on all of the diseases that we hope to cure soon. They are not alone in this journey, we have a dedicated team that is working relentlessly on cardiovascular diseases and rare cancers.”
