Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
I’m Naji your host, joined today by Moise Khairallah a serial entrepreneur and investor in pharmaceutical drug development and biotech. Moise acquired his experience over a 40-year period in diverse pharmaceutical environments including large pharma, contract research, and biotech. His latest startup venture is Emergo Therapeutics that develops drugs to modulate inflammatory cytokines and improve the functioning of the immune system in infectious disease indications. Emergo is his fifth biotech startup. Moise is also Chairman of the Board and co-Founder of QuatroBio, a biotech focused on developing drugs for central nervous system disorders. He is also currently on the Board of Directors of several startup companies in the pharmaceutical or information technology industries. Prior to these current positions, Moise co-founded Aerial BioPharma, which sold its major drug asset, Sunosi (solriamfetol), to Jazz Pharmaceuticals in early 2014. In 2010, Dr. Khayrallah was co-founder, President and CEO of Neuronex acquired by Acorda Therapeutics, and Addrenex Pharmaceuticals acquired in late 2009 by Shionogi. Moise holds a Ph.D in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from the American University of Beirut. Moise is also actively involved with several entrepreneurial and non-profit networks in the United States and beyond. He currently serves as the Honorary Consul for Lebanon in NC, a position that allows him to assist the Lebanese American community and represent its interests in Lebanon and the US.
I could go on for hours about Moise’s remarkable journey, but it’s much better to hear it directly from him! Moise great to have you with me today.
Moise, you’ve had an extraordinary journey from studying psychology at UNC Chapel Hill after growing up and studying at American University of Beirut, to building multiple biotech companies. Take us back to the beginning, what shaped your path and ultimately led you into the world of biotech and entrepreneurship?
Moise Khairallah: Well, thank you. Thank you for this nice introduction, uh, more extensive than I was, uh, looking for, but I truly appreciate it.
Very kind of you. Uh, I have to say that, uh, I attribute a lot of my. Success eventually in the biopharma industry to my starting in Lebanon. I think, uh, my education here, the way we grew up, the chances we took to really grow and to achieve here, set the stage for quite a bit of what later became achievements for myself.
I never forgot where I started from and I was always very proud and very rooted in Lebanon and the community that I grew up in. Early on, I decided when I was studying at a UB that I was interested in research. I studied psychology and I dabbled in counseling and clinical psych, but I was always enthralled with the phenomena of the mind and trying to understand them.
So I really geared my program when I left and went to the United States for my PhD. I gave it squarely at research and I really perfected my skills and research methodology, uh, statistics and other, uh, core skills that allow researcher to take a program from point A to point B successfully. And that set the stage then for my entry into the pharmaceutical industry.
Without me, me expecting it, I, I never expected that I would be in pharma, but it turned out that the skills that I learned in psychology and in research were very applicable to the pharma industry. It was a different topic, a different content, but the methods were the same, and what could have been a disadvantage ended up being a huge advantage for me because a lot of my colleagues.
Who are MDs and PharmDs and PhDs in pharmacology never learn how to do research. They never teach you how to run clinical trials. They never teach you how to take a program from A to B. You may know the physiology very well, the biology very well, but, but my colleagues didn’t have a, any idea and, and I, I became the leader.
And how to run clinical trials, how to organize clinical programs, and what I lacked in the medicine and the biological sciences. I was able to supplement with skills for the team around me. It is truly in our industry. It is truly a team endeavor. You can never succeed alone. No matter how skilled you are, no matter how uh, uh, forceful you are and how courageous you are, you really need a great team around you.
And I was very successful in putting teams around me that led to my successes. And so I’m really very proud of this because I. I loved the moment I arrived in the pharmaceutical and biotech sciences. I just fell in love and I never left. I was working on products that made the real difference in people’s lives.
These were real products. They were not theoretical constructs, and I was able to really contribute my skills and have a very successful career. Never regretted it.
Naji Gehchan: Wow. And you’ve co-founded, uh, and founded several biotech companies, uh, over the past, uh, the past decades. What are the most important lessons you’ve learned about building companies and developing medicines in such high risk industry?
Moise Khairallah: Yes. And so, uh, after an initial period of working in large companies like Lao Wellcome and and others, I decided that the small company environment is my. My environment, I always shaved at, uh, bureaucracy. Uh, my Lebanese entrepreneurial skills were in high gear, and I always thinking, oh, gee, I can do this better.
I can do this faster. I, I wish we would get rid of this X, Y, Z. So I was always shaping to do things better, faster, and then looking for avenues to develop drugs in a more efficient way. And so this really became the. The mandate for the companies that I launched, they had to be very small companies. Uh, I never had a core team more than about 10 to 12 people.
Of course, our research reached hundreds of people because we were running large clinical trials, but anything we did not have on, on board as a core team, we supplemented with contract work and on demand. Uh, skills if you want. And so this, uh, idea of looking at drug development from a different angle became my key signature for developing the companies that I did.
And we, my team and I perfected this model of looking. Uh, drugs that were already on the market already approved for one indication or maybe studied extensively for one indication and rethinking their used in other areas where we had a good reason to believe that they could be successful in those new areas.
That allowed us to capitalize on a lot of data that was already generated. Mostly safety data, because that’s really the biggest concern for the FDA and then developing programs that were fast, nimble, and that got us. An answer quickly whether a product could be repositioned into another therapeutic area successfully.
And then we never had any ambitions for building large organizations with marketing and sales on, because that was not the skills set that I had. So we focused on getting a drug to a, a position where it proved it’s worth in a new therapeutic area, and then selling the whole company, the whole drug to another.
Larger organization, pharmaceutical company that could then take it into the market and then do the deal. And then we would benefit from upfront milestones and royalties, which was very successful for my partners and my investors. And so we perfected this model. Of moving nimbly, capitalizing on data that’s already available, and then developing a drug beyond what it’s or originally been, uh, its potential.
And that became very successful. I have to say that several others after me started learning from this and then started the same, the same type of capitalizing on data before, which when I first started, people were shaking their heads and it was, it was really funny. The other thing that, uh, that was very, very important for me is to have the courage to take risks, and that’s something that I realized was lacking in my industry.
Large pharmaceutical companies are very, very risk averse. FDA is very risk averse. There is a lot of fear because of course we have patients’ lives and safety in our hands, and so people are very, very careful and the pharma industry in general is very conservative. So by deploying a little bit of courage and not being foolish.
My, my, uh, my, uh, line to my, uh, staff was that there is a line of foolishness and you have to step up all the way up to this line of foolishness without crossing it. Of course, if you cross it, you’ll die, but if you stay far back, you will also die because you have not taken the steps to really push the agenda.
And so this idea of being courageous enough to undertake something that scares others became also very important in our success.
Naji Gehchan: Well, I, I, I love those and certainly relate to your impatience and moving fast and trying to do it better. Uh, you know, as also Lebanese, uh, I, I, I wonder that a pick actually on this, uh, I like this concept of line of foolishness, as you called it, and you, you need to go and.
And as you said, like there’s always this balance of the risks we are managing, you know, for, for patients. Uh, so help me, how, how do you, especially when you’re leading teams who are doing this. How can you always reinforce this balance to make sure that you’re taking the appropriate risks and never crossing this line?
Do you have, do you have some sort of a magic way of dealing with it? Is it, it does, it boils down to people’s own personal integrity line, or what is it? I’d love to talk about this.
Moise Khairallah: It’s, it’s kind of a little bit of a complex construct. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, uh, Malcolm Gladwell’s book B Blink.
Uh, I, I love this book, and b, blink is truly this. Uh, it, it, if, if you want, encapsulates a little bit how my team and I operate, that is an element of knowing something without knowing that, you know. And it’s not intuition. People talk about intuition. It’s really not that. It’s built for years after doing something again and again, and again and again, and you start seeing patterns that are, excuse me, visible.
Visible and to you, but they’re not visible to others. And so when you look at, uh, when, let’s say you look at, you’re looking at the drug and you’re trying to decide how, how much can I push this? Is this, am I getting into. Into a danger territory where I is dying here, or am I still in, in, in, in a safe area?
Just shy of dying if you want. And this, this, there is no rule book for that. There is no, nobody tells you. There’s not little person on your shoulder that says, wait, wait, wait. You’ve crossed the line. Be be careful, come back, et cetera. It’s something that you have to make up on the go all the time. And, and really there is no formula for it except you have done this so many times before and you have seen patterns that are clear to you but not to others.
And, and this is if you want, the magic there is not really a, it’s not magic, it’s just this experience of doing something again and again. For example, my first drug, my very first entrepreneurial company. We developed a drug that was originally developed for hypertension, but it is not a drug that works on blood vessels in the body.
It works centrally in the brain, so it tones down NORAD adrenalin in the brain and leads to reducing the, the pressure in the in the veins because it’s centrally activated. My partner in that very first company started using this drug that was developed for hypertension in A DHD in children in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.
It turns out that the same mechanism that causes hypertension in adults also causes A DHD in children because it’s centrally activated and it causes these bursts of impulsivity and hyperactivity in children. And so my partner, who was an MD in North Carolina, in Charlotte at the time, developed an extended release version of this drug called Clonidine.
And started using it in his patients to great effect, but he had no idea how to develop drugs. He was a clinician. He was just using it for his patients. So he and I are talking with me, examining this opportunity to develop this drug, and it just made sense to me. Why, because I had developed earlier drugs by lengthening their effect, using a, an extender of the effect of the drug.
And I saw that you could blunt the peaks and, and even the drugs and lead to a successful drug. And so what he was telling me just made sense. And I had developed a drug that was initially for, for, uh, depression in the smoking cessation, nicotine craving arena. So I knew that you could do this, you could take a drug and really, if, you know, so stuff made sense to me when it didn’t to others.
That formed the basis of my first, very first company that was a successful one, and we exited the, uh, the company and rewarded our investors. And so it is this knowing, without knowing why you know it at some level, that really allows you to get the courage to say, yes, I’m gonna take this on and I’m gonna try it.
And I, I have, I have good confidence. I’m not 100% sure you can never be 100% sure of anything, but I have high confidence that it would work because of X, Y, and z.
Naji Gehchan: I love this. And it’s, it’s, you know, I’ve been thinking recently a lot about exactly what you said, this, this capability of pattern recognition, you know, on the science side, on the people side too, right.
And really understanding where things might be going. So I’ve been thinking a lot about pattern recognition. I love that you brought it up. Uh, do you think like that’s when you’re thinking about how you’ve built biotech and really this intersection of. Science business and people you thought, you started by saying it’s all about the teams and the people you have around you.
Um, so what, what would be, what would it take if you, if, if you’re talking to startups, entrepreneurs, and you do this quite frequently and you’re one of the most successful ones, what would it take actually to take an idea to patients, basically from an idea to patients at the intersection of these three aspects?
Moise Khairallah: Well first we have to be realistic. For example, if you are tackling a, a very tough area, let’s say Alzheimer’s or autism or cancer, we have to be realistic that a small company has to be really niched so well and, and can limit its action to a very narrow place to, to be successful because truly. These constructs that we call cancer or we call Alzheimer’s, are not really one disease.
They are a huge collection of diseases, and because we don’t understand them well, we really lump them all under this one umbrella because of the end result. But the causes are so diverse that. You don’t really have a chance. That’s why, for example, nearly all the drugs in Alzheimer’s have so far failed.
All we can do is just delay some of the symptomatology. So you have to start with the realistic. Uh, assessment of what your chances of success, and again, this comes from having done something repeatedly. So, for example, that’s why I never tackled cancer. Even though cancer is a very important therapeutic area and we need to devote their attention to it, but I deem that larger setups or people who are very knowledgeable in very, very narrow, specific field that can tackle a specific drug or disease, have a chance of success.
So you have to start with some realistic assessment of your chances. That’s why I tackled, for example, diseases that I know very well in the neurology or in the psychiatry arena. And then again, narrowed down my, my, uh, scope. And so it can be done, but you have to be, uh, realistic. Not all companies can be entrepreneurial companies.
There. We have to spend. Money. We have to spend a lot of resources to tackle the big constructs. And by the way, with ai, we have a chance Before ai, I don’t think we, it is, it was gonna be years and years and years because we cannot control, we cannot have adequate controls in our clinical trials. And control is the key.
To demonstrating efficacy and safety and without proper control, which we were lacking. When we have these gigantic constructs, that group multiple diseases underneath them, AI is gonna be the tool that’s gonna allow us to feed in all of this data into a machine learning system that has a faster and much better chance at seeing linkages and correlations that we human beings, would take us a hundred years to see.
So I am excited about the future and probably with AI tools. A smaller organization may finally have the chance to gather data from multiple sources to where they can make a difference. But it has to start with the realistic and and modest assessment of what you can do in Lebanon specifically. I’m very excited.
I’ve been talking to the leaders of Biolink about what can we do to really encourage the sector in Lebanon, and I think with ai. And we don’t, we don’t necessarily have to limit to very esoteric diseases like some sort of rare cancer that only happens in the Middle East or some sort of a genetic disease or something.
Those are obviously some things we can pursue. I think we can go after bigger targets and more meaningful ones using AI tools and by having a realistic assessment of what we can do. I think we have a shot, but it’s gonna take some doing.
Naji Gehchan: So Maiz, you, you are saying you started with realism, which is certainly something important.
Like, and it is some, I’ve seen it time and time again where people struggle on, on like really being humble and realistic on even what their asset, what their drug or the company is actually doing and solving for, right? And what it does not, you know, so really understanding the clear value, but then you continued on this future, right?
Ai, the futuristic approach that we’re seeing. So I would love to hear your view of how do you see this future? You’ve done this for several decades, you’re excited about ai. Why, why, where do you see the most incredible breakthrough happening in the next five to 10 years? In medicine,
Moise Khairallah: it’s again, in the, um, being able to break down, uh, in my opinion.
My, my modest, uh, uh, opinion, it’s being able to break down what are umbrella diseases into smaller silos that we can tackle one at a time. And the reason we haven’t been able to do that is because we lack control. Let, let me explain to you, when we are on a clinical trial, we, the, the, the gold standard, the best tool we have is what’s called a double blind placebo controlled trial.
Meaning what? Meaning you take a group of people that you think are homogenous, are the same. They all have quote unquote Alzheimer’s disease or they have depression or they have, uh, cancer of the ovary or what have you, right? You take these, this group and you do your atmos best to, uh, show that at baseline before you give them any drug.
They are similar. Right, and then what you do is you split them into two or three or four, four groups, what have you. One of them is a placebo. When you can, in some diseases you can, but most often you can. And the others take some sort of a drug or a combination of drugs or different dosages. And then what you’re doing is you are using your placebo as your control to show that your drug.
Which in this case is a placebo has x effect, but your drug will have Y effect. And the measure and the measure between the two can be statistically shown to be statist statistically, uh, efficacious, meaning positive. The problem with that is that we have no idea truly because we are latching onto some very simplistic assessments, that the group is the same when you first start.
And so what is your control may not be a control for everybody because this is a heterogeneous group of people, not homogenous. And so because your group is also not represented the same in the placebo group, so the control is, is flawed. So far, we don’t know. We don’t know how to assess that these people are similar.
It’s like doing surgery with a hatch check. So we go in and we try, we, we do our best. We, we, we, we thought when we had the. Uh, broken the human genome that we had it figured out because we could figure out the differences between people on gene on the genome, but it’s way more complex than that because you have to turn the genes on and off, and you have to also assess not your genes, but also the genes of the biome in use.
It’s just way more complicated. So this, this problem, the lack of control cannot be solved by us because we, we cannot do indeterminate clinical trials with peoples, with peoples. The only way to do it is by feeding the data into a faster learning system than our simple human brain system, which is still very complex, complex, but still nowhere near what machine learning can do so that it teases apart all of these variable.
Maybe the, this group seems similar, uh, on the surface, but when you look at their biome, they have certain genes in their biome that differentiate them. Now, all of a sudden you have maybe, wow, this may be the key here. I’ve been missing that. For example, we know that in Parkinson’s disease, the effect the effectiveness of, of the, uh, drugs of choice for Parkinson’s are impacted by the, by the gut.
They’re impacted by the proteins that you take along with the drug. But, but we cannot measure. It’s too complicated to measure. With ai, if you feed those data points one by one, AI system can really learn. I’m not an expert on ai. I want to learn more. But my feeling is that as we move forward with the help of ai, a smaller group of people or a smaller organization will have a chance to isolate certain, promising, uh, tidbits of data and then build a study with adequate control so we can then really come to faster at the solution.
And this is where my hope is.
Naji Gehchan: Yeah, this is, uh, for, for sure, like when you look at these things, uh, the, the possibilities are extremely exciting. You know, I think we’re just at the very start of, of the hype, but it’s gonna be real for medicine and it’s, uh, it’s truly is super exciting. Uh, uh, Moise, I’m gonna give you a word now and I would love your first reaction to it.
And the first word is leadership.
Moise Khairallah: Um, courage.
Naji Gehchan: So tell me a little bit more about this. Especially, you know, we’ve, you’ve led through a lot of what we call uncertainty, and I think, uh, for people like us, uncertainty is multiplied by, I don’t know how much, I don’t want to give a number, uh, but I’d love your perspective a little bit more about courage.
Moise Khairallah: So you, you have to inspire people. If, if you are very cautious and you are, uh, always afraid of what your actions are gonna do, then um, it, it is not inspiring you. You have to really, you have to have the courage of your conviction. You have to move. You cannot be paralyzed by fears of what could happen. I having studied psychology, I’ve always felt that fear is the biggest motivator, positive and negative in the lives of, of human beings.
In as much as we can conquer our fear, it is that we can achieve because fear makes you do stuff that you should not do and prevents you from doing stuff that you should do. And so I, for in my mind. This ability to not be paralyzed but move forward inspires people and they kinda see it and they are encouraged to continue, continue working because what we do in the biological sciences and the health sciences is tough.
We have a responsibility for people’s lives and their health and wellbeing first, which is very serious. We have agencies that are watching us like hawks. Uh, we have investors that are impatient and they wanna see results. It’s a, it’s a recipe for disaster if you don’t, if you’re not courageous. But at the same time, as we said earlier.
Have the sense of a line of foolishness and not really be completely oblivious to danger because you could hurt people. And so this, uh, and I’ve experienced that again and again and again in my very first, uh, clinical program, in my entrepreneurial companies, I didn’t have all the resources to run huge clinical trials, so we had to take risks.
Where do you take the risk? Where, where, where do you get the courage to say something like. I had a clinical trial with four arms, and I knew for certain I could not do one placebo versus three arms. I had to lock one of the active arms, and I locked the one that seemed to my clinicians who were working with me and my investors to be the one I should not lock.
So everybody was up in arms. How do you, what do you mean you killed that particular arm? I said, look, I’ve reviewed the literature exhaustively. I’ve really been thinking about this. I think we have a very high chance of succeeding. It’s gonna take some risk, but otherwise we would not be able to run the trial.
And this, this courage really inspired my team to keep going and we ended up succeeding. Success was not guaranteed. You, you, when you, when you’re an entrepreneur, you have to be realistic about that. Uh, we run trouble in my last companies. Uh, but my very last company, because we ran the major clinical trial in the middle of the pandemic of the COVID Pandemic, and it really hurt us.
And so success is never guaranteed, but without discourage, you can’t get anything done. You just get paralyzed and everybody just loses speed because if you wait until everything is crosschecked and, and all i’s are dotted, and t’s are crossed, you don’t get anywhere.
Naji Gehchan: Yeah. And I, I love this. It’s really profound what you said about fear.
Being in its positive or negative. It’s, I, I love this. The second word is legacy.
Moise Khairallah: Oh, this is very loaded to me because, uh, I am in the middle of that right now. It’s really ensuring that what you received gets transmitted. None of us is just perfect as we are. None of us just grows out of nothing. None of us just is so accomplished that we can do everything on our own. We are always indebted to a lot of people who came before us and who were thinking of us without knowing who we are.
And for me, this is very meaningful because I would not be here without a ton of people who came before me and did things to make me. To increase my chance of success without even knowing who I am. I’m talking about my family, my ancestors. I’m talking about my village, I’m talking about my country, uh, and these, all of these institutions and people that made me, who are who I am, who not by chance.
They were really there because they thought that at some time a young kid like me who grew up in a small village here in Lebanon will need this, and this is a chance for us for him to succeed. The people who left the WAF in my village, for example, my parents, my family, uh, my school, I went to the Paris Brothers School here in Ville.
And it’s really the result of long-term thinking about what young kids like me, Lebanon, would need. I went to A-U-B-A-U-B itself is an institution that was formed with the view of, of helping young people in Lebanon like me achieve higher education. All of these people, institutions that made me who I, I am, I cannot forget them.
And my part is to continue the legacy that started with them so that my, the children in the next generation and the next generations are also the recipients of this goodwill like I was. And that is my legacy at the moment. So I am back in Lebanon. I am fully in regardless of the difficult circumstances the country is in.
I am all in for Lebanon right now. Everything I’m doing, whether it be NGOs, whether it be on the board of universities, whether it be in schools, whether it be in my village, in my, in my, uh, parish, up there in my family, I am all in to continue this legacy of goodwill towards the people who are gonna come after me.
Naji Gehchan: Wow. Beautiful. The third one is biolink.org.
Moise Khairallah: Ah, I am, excitement is the, uh, is the word. I could not, uh, be more thankful to my friend Francois, uh, when he mentioned Biolink to me, because I think that. Um, we have a very good chance. We have been, we have been successful in the past, in the, if you want, the life sciences as evidenced by work that was done at a UB and other institutions like that and, uh, USG, et cetera.
So we are, we can be successful, but we’ve run through a lot of difficulties. There have been so many obstacles that decimated our abilities in the past, but we have to rebuild that, and I think that Biolink is a fantastic organization. Because it is really the link between the, the Lebanese who are here in the country and the Lebanese that are, that are distributed all across the world.
And we are truly unique in that Lebanon is truly unique. I’m working, I launched a new, another organization called Lebanon and Beyond that tries to build bridges between the diaspora and, and the country. And, and Biolink is one such instrument. Because everywhere you go, you find people of Lebanese descent who are very accomplished in the life sciences, in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research.
And we have to marshal those resources because I think they could be tremendously helpful for not just the country here, but also the communities that are outside and the whole wide world around those communities. And so I’m really excited. About the chance to marshal these resources. And it’s not enough to just basically be there as advisors.
It’s great when they do networking, it’s great when they do training, when they do mentoring, et cetera, but I think we can work on something more substantial. And I’ve been talking to Francois quite a bit about that. It’s to really. Use the skills, the resources, financial and brain and otherwise to really improve the status of life sciences in Lebanon and use it actually to improve life science research and accomplishments all over the world, not just in Lebanon.
I’m very excited for Biolink. I just joined just a few months ago and very happy to be on the board. Closely coordinating with, uh, with and on that. So I’m, I’m excited about the future.
Naji Gehchan: Yeah. Well, I, I am excited too. I, and I’m biased. I’ve been with Biolink for a couple of years now. Um, the last one is spread love in organizations.
Moise Khairallah: Spread love and organization. Yes.
Naji Gehchan: In organizations, yeah,
Moise Khairallah: in organizations. Well, I don’t want to be, uh, hokey, but love conquers all in the end. I, I truly believe that, and I think that we have plenty of that here in Lebanon. However, uh, it’s been suppressed by a lot of fear. We go back to fear and when, whenever you are in a fearful and, uh, anxiety and anxious state, you tend to retreat.
And this is one of the problems in fear, and then you lose this ability to spread love, you lose, you lose this ability to see the other human being as your equal. All of a sudden we are just retreating each one of us in our own world. And then this causes all the mayhem and all of the, uh, destruction that we see around us.
I am somebody who is intent on doing the opposite. I’m not gonna be afraid. Uh, I know that all of the barriers that are, that have been erected either by either willfully or just because of the circumstances between people can be dismantled. It’s gonna take a lot of work. I’m not very optimistic for our organ, for our generation because I feel that we have been so traumatized by the events and not just Lebanon, but all over the world, that we lack clarity.
We are kind of boxed into our us versus them thinking. That’s why in my new organization, Lebanon and Beyond, I’m focusing on the next generation because I think we have to give them the tools to not repeat the same mistakes that we did, and I think we can do that. If we start now, we cannot leave it to chance.
We have to use the tools that are at our disposal and equip this next generation. We are working very hard on that in Lebanon and beyond, but I’m also trying to do it in everything I do in my hometown in Lebanon overall. So. I, I am a preacher for peace and love, and I just, uh, will do everything I can to continue doing that and, and hope that, and I’m, I’m not just hope.
I’m confident that a lot of people feel like me and are joining in, so I’m excited about the potential.
Naji Gehchan: Any final word of wisdom? Uh, for healthcare leaders?
Moise Khairallah: For healthcare leaders?
Naji Gehchan: Yes.
Moise Khairallah: Um, re repeating some of the highlights from what I said earlier. First, have the courage of conviction in your, in, in, in your potential.
While at the same time, be realistic and, and clearly identify this line of foolishness that I talked about. And then second. No matter how great you are, no matter how skilled you are, no matter how accomplished or how knowledgeable you are, you cannot do it alone. Our industry is very complex. It deals with people’s lives.
It deals with diseases that have really eluded us for so long because they are just heterogeneous and difficult to tackle. So surround yourself with skill with people who are skilled, more skilled than you, and then have the courage to just lead, but then let them come and get together in order to use their collective power to solve these problems.
We can solve them. And it’s gonna take a lot of work, but we are capable of doing it if we deploy the right tools and the right teams for that.
Naji Gehchan: Oh, that’s, that was great. Thank you so much, Maiz, for joining me. It’s been a real honor and pleasure to have you with me today.
Moise Khairallah: The honor and the pleasure of all mine.
And I wish you the best as you continue your collection of these, uh, uh, episodes and call on me anytime. I’m very happy to be here and, uh, reconnect with you again, and I will see you I’m sure at one of the Biolink uh, events.
Naji Gehchan: Yes. Yes, you all. Thanks for listening to the show. More episodes in partnership with biolink.org can be found on our respective websites.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
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