Kambiz Shekdar, founder of Secondcell Bio: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Kambiz Shekdar (LinkedIn), biotech inventor and founder of Chromocell Corporation — now Channel Therapeutics — and Secondcell Bio. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I’m Dr. Kambiz Shekdar. I got my PhD in a Nobel and King Faisal Prize winning lab at the Rockefeller University. During this time, I took on some of the most challenging projects, and invented my first biotechnology [through] my company Chromocell Corporation.

We took on very challenging projects that were almost out of reach — drug discovery has an average failure rate of 98% — but we were able to succeed. We discovered and developed a leading non-addictive pain drug candidate that the FDA fast-tracked, and we IPOed on the New York Stock Exchange. Now, I am exploring exporting this drug discovery technology to the UAE to help start a new and world-leading biotech economy in the Middle East. I also founded SecondCell Bio, a research and drug discovery facility.

To show how broadly applicable technology is, in the field of food biology, we partnered with Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, and Nestle, where we used drug discovery methods to discover new natural flavors, including the first known natural salt taste enhancer — like stevia but for salt.

I grew up in Tehran, Karachi, London, Hong Kong, and then New Jersey, but for most of my life I’ve been a New Yorker. About three years ago, a friend of a friend recommended that I visit the UAE which was looking to [kickstart] its biotech sector. I was at a point where we’d invested USD 125 mn into Chromocell’s technology — it was ready and I wanted to scale it up. I took a trip and I was so impressed by what the country had done by building the cities from the ground up and overtaking global competition, and I heard that they’d decided to invest in biotech and expand their knowledge-based sector.

I felt that this is a country which could leapfrog the global industry if it really invested in a few demonstrated technologies and scales them up. There is no legacy technology — older companies have dinosaur technologies that are hard to uproot, but the UAE, with no entrenched technologies, can cherrypick developed technologies and really scale them up. So as a company creator and builder, the UAE really captured my imagination and for three years I’ve been focusing on getting a national level biotech JV partnership here.

In terms of my routine, I am in a transitional period right now but ideally, I would get up and rush to the lab. In the US, I built a 24/7 team so I normally touch base with the shift that is working overnight and with my management team, which would be about three people. As the day moves on I would focus on expansion and business development. I’d love the chance to also to look at Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait — places that aren’t established in biotech but they’d want to invest in.

My work-life balance is very blended. For me, work is life. I think for science, like any creative space, like if you’re a musician or an artist, there is no hard boundary. I want my team members to have that boundary and to enjoy their life, but personally I enjoy science and I enjoy pulling a partnership together.

Here, my life is different than in New York, where I meet friends and have a lot of dinner parties. It is much more streamlined and orderly. Life is simpler and you can focus more on work, and it’s almost like a zero-distraction environment.

I don’t have a TV, and the only kind of movies I like are bad, scary movies because it stops me from thinking — kind of like if you were on a rollercoaster. If it is a good film with a wonderful story, my mind goes right back to work, and so if it is a B-level, terrible, scary movie then that is the kind of movie I’d watch. As a kid, I used to love Doctor Who when I was living in England.

When I am not working I’m scrolling on social media, or on Google News and Apple News. I usually read the news later in the day or during the evening when I am resting.

I live in an old part of Abu Dhabi without many expats. When you leave the apartment there are lots of little shops, and two minutes from my apartment there is this shisha area with hundreds of tables. I was never a shisha person but there is something communal about just going there and hanging out. I usually go there in the evenings and have a shisha and have some Moroccan tea.

Hope is a constant in my life — I am always thinking of what opportunities I can still find and I am still hopeful. I know this sector has so much potential.

I [always] go for projects that are very difficult, and my professor used to tell me to choose projects that were an achievable climb. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t settle for a project that is more achievable, rather than try to build a massive biotech project in a region where it doesn’t exist yet, but then that could also be boring. It’s daunting, but so far I have only ever picked things that [had seemed] impossible, and we succeeded, so I am still hopeful, even though it can be frustrating at times too.

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