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Most preclinical companies, Baseimmune’s CEO Kevin Walton argues, are building their evidence backward.
Cheap assays first, a run of supportive results, the expensive question deferred until the package looks respectable enough to survive it. Eighteen months later, the money is gone and the central hypothesis still hasn’t actually been tested.
Kevin says that’s the wrong order. He spent years in investment banking watching companies do exactly this, then took over a platform-stage biotech and made the opposite call.
Nick Capman sat down with him to work through the obstacles facing a lot of small biotechs right now:
Turning science into something investable.
Building culture with a lean team.
Steering through the pivots that early-stage companies rarely avoid.
Kevin is the CEO and board director at Baseimmune, a London-based company developing active immunotherapies for fibrosis, with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis as its lead indication. He joined as Chief Business Officer and stepped into the CEO role, where his first move was a strategic pivot. Before Baseimmune he was Senior Director of Corporate Development at Moderna, VP of Corporate Development at StrideBio, Senior Director of Business Development at Curis, and held corporate development, strategy, and chief of staff roles at G1 Therapeutics. He started in investment banking and consulting and holds a law degree from Duke.
The team has 23 people and Kevin lives in Boston. None of that is particularly convenient, and a good bit of the conversation is about what he’s built to make it work anyway.
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Kevin's key insights and practical takeaways
If you’re short on time, here are the most important lessons from the discussion.
A platform’s problem is that everything looks possible. Baseimmune started as a platform company, which sounds like an advantage until you have to choose! Kevin’s framing is that potential and possibility are the same thing as ambiguity when you’re deciding where to spend a limited budget. His team ran a large analysis before landing on IPF, and he describes picking the beachhead as the genuinely hard part. Not the science — the choosing.
Go after the data that could end the program. This is the core of the argument. Run the experiment that tells you whether this works, and do so early, before the construct is optimized and the supporting package is assembled. Either you find out you have something and raise on it, or you find out you don’t and you pivot while there’s still runway to pivot with.
The reason people avoid this isn’t laziness. Kevin’s read is subtler than that. Science is genuinely difficult, and there’s a persistent belief that continued tinkering will produce better proof and more confidence. It usually produces neither.
“It gives you a false sense of confidence.” His words on incremental de-risking, and the most useful sentence in the episode. You feel like you’re reducing risk. What you’re actually doing is spending time and money to postpone the question. Nick’s version: is the juice worth the squeeze?
Fast, cheap, good, and the bill you pay twice. Everyone knows the triangle. Kevin says he never wanted to believe it and has come around, with one hard-won addition. Choose fast and cheap and you get neither, because you’ll redo the work with someone else. His ordering now is quality first, speed second, and accept that cost surfaces somewhere regardless. Pick quality and cheap, and the slowness extends every downstream timeline, which is a cost with a different name.
Vet the people, not the logo. On CRO selection, Kevin and Nick converged. Kevin’s point is that the relationship matters more than the transaction, and that finding a partner who can actually hold your timeline is worth real effort. Nick added the practical version: reputation counts for something, but interview the individuals who will work your project, understand their approach, and confirm they’ve done this before. A recognized name doesn’t tell you who gets assigned.
Culture starts from where you are. Kevin has been at companies that began the culture exercise by asking what they wanted to be, and he thinks that’s the wrong door. If the aspiration is disconnected from the present, people can’t simply switch into it. He starts instead with an honest read: if someone walked in today and watched, what would they say our values are? Then you build stepwise from that.
Nick offered a method for this that’s worth stealing. Each member of his leadership team independently named five of their best employees and wrote descriptors for them. Then they put all the descriptors up together and looked for overlap. What emerged sat between aspiration and reality, because these were real people already living it, which made the resulting values credible rather than pie in the sky.
Data over ego. Baseimmune’s core tenet, and Kevin means it operationally rather than as wall decoration. Show me the data I probably don’t want to see. The behavior he’s protecting against is the instinct to figure out how to soften bad news before delivering it, which costs the team the discussion it should be having.
Transparency is a defense against invented stories. Nick’s framing, and Kevin agreed immediately. When you’re on the line about whether to share something, share it, because people will construct an explanation for the gap and their version is usually worse than reality. Nick added the part that makes it workable: the truth sets you free with hope. There’s a meaningful difference between telling your team things are going badly and telling them what you’re facing alongside how you intend to get through it.
Kevin’s own version of the job is turning uncertainty into clarity and action. Start with the direct account of where things stand, then say what happens next.
Write the decision down. Kevin’s team is in England and he’s in Boston, five hours behind, remote most of the year. What he’s lost is the hallway conversation that resolves the ambiguity a meeting created. So decisions get written, along with who owns what and what comes next. His line on why it matters more at distance: ambiguity compounds a lot faster when he’s out of the office for two or three straight weeks.
Nick runs something in parallel: a short-term to-do list reviewed at the top of every meeting before anything else is discussed. Last week you said you’d do this by today. Did it happen?
One name per item. Both were blunt here. If more than one person is responsible, nobody is. Nick’s supporting evidence was his daughter rewatching The Office and hitting the episode where Jim becomes co-manager.
Servant leadership has a cost, and that’s the point. Kevin gets up most days at 4:00 or 4:30 to work London hours, then works Boston hours after. He could make the team meet at his convenience. He doesn’t, and he’s clear that the commitment is visible and that visibility is what builds the reciprocal thing, where people know he has their back. Harder to establish at 70% remote than it would be sitting next to someone.
Nick connected it to a story about Arthur C. Brooks, who worried before joining Harvard about whether he’d succeed and was told he’d just need to be twice as productive and four times as nice.
Hire a scientific advisory board that argues with you. Among the signals Kevin watches for a needed pivot, SAB feedback ranks alongside the data itself and the capital environment. His standard is explicit: you hire a good SAB not to tell you you’re right but to challenge you and make the work better. He credits Baseimmune’s with real influence on the pivot decision.
Nick’s parallel is Vistage, the CEO group he’s been part of for 11 years, where the valuable sessions aren’t the ones that confirm what he already does. Those are the comfortable ones. The useful ones sting.
Change management takes twice as long as you plan. Every time. Kevin says he’s been wrong by roughly a factor of two, consistently, because the work isn’t with data sets, it’s with people. His three C’s are clear, consistent communication, repeated past the point where it feels redundant. And the shape of it surprised him: a long slow buildup where nothing appears to move, then alignment arriving almost at once. Looking back afterward, you see how long the invisible part took.
The story has to work for three audiences. Not just employees. Partners and investors need to understand why you’re pivoting, why it makes sense, and why you specifically are suited to do it.
Board management during a pivot is a deliberate workstream. Kevin paired the pivot with a corporate strategic plan, ran frequent board communication, and held multiple special board meetings to walk people through it. The plan leaned on competitive analysis, the fundraising environment, what large pharma is looking for, why the platform fit the direction, and SAB input for credibility. He describes investor management as a real part of the job rather than an interruption to it, and he put the time into making sure the board understood where the company was going and got genuinely interested in it.
Map your runway against your data honestly, even when it’s ugly. His number one instruction for founders raising early. Lay out when the data arrives, what it costs to get there, and where that lands against your runway. If the data you need for the next raise arrives after the money runs out, you’re in serious trouble, and that’s a fact worth discovering on a spreadsheet rather than in month fourteen.
Being always in fundraising mode means something specific. Not constant pitching. Telling investors what you’re going to do, when the data will land, and then following up when it does. The compounding effect is that they watch you predict and deliver. If the data is good, they now believe two things, because investors back teams as much as science.
Science gets you the meeting. Then it stops. Asked to weight science, team, execution, and strategy, Kevin gave science the most weight and then immediately qualified it. From banking he saw excellent science paired with weak teams and very little came of it. You need experience and credibility, and you need egos that won’t drive bad decisions. Strategy points the science somewhere, and pointing nowhere is worse than pointing imperfectly. Execution is what carries any of it toward patients.
Keep headcount flat and rent the rest. Kevin’s headcount hasn’t grown since he joined, by design. Work arrives in waves, three CRO studies running or a lull while the science resets, and a large fixed organization can’t titrate to that. He leans on CROs, CDMOs, and fractional people in the lab or in technical areas when the need spikes. Lean during the quiet, able to ramp when it isn’t.
Disagree and commit, with no ledger. His closing thought, tied back to data over ego. Have the hard debates, challenge each other with respect, then decide and move as a group regardless of whose idea won. The reason it works at Baseimmune, in his telling, is that he doesn’t track who said what. He tracks the best way forward.
One thing to bring back to your team
There’s a question buried in this episode that’s worth asking out loud at your next program review, and most teams would rather not.
What is the experiment we haven’t run because we’re afraid of the answer?
Every program has one. It’s usually expensive, usually scheduled late, and usually justified by a plan to build supporting evidence first. Kevin’s argument is that the supporting evidence isn’t support. It’s delay wearing a lab coat, and the eighteen months it buys come out of the runway you’d need to actually do something about a bad result.
Ask the question, then ask what it would cost to run it next quarter instead of next year.
Kevin Walton is Chief Executive Officer and a board director at Baseimmune, a London-based biotechnology company developing active immunotherapies for fibrosis, with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis as its lead indication. He joined the company as Chief Business Officer before moving into the CEO role and leading a strategic pivot. Previously, he served as Senior Director of Corporate Development at Moderna, Vice President of Corporate Development at StrideBio, Senior Director of Business Development at Curis, and held roles in corporate development, strategy, and as chief of staff at G1 Therapeutics. He began his career in investment banking and consulting and holds a law degree from Duke University School of Law.
Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn here.
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