Get to know Sachin Jadhav–Senior Scientific Program Manager

Sachin Jadhav is a Senior Scientific Program Manager at the Stanford Innovative Medicines Accelerator (IMA), a Sarafan ChEM-H partnership with Stanford Medicine that aims to translate Stanford discoveries into new medicines. 

Sachin provides program management support to the Drug and Vaccine Prototyping arm of the IMA, and almost every day he finds himself at the center of cutting-edge research. We chatted with him to learn more about his career path, a project that he is incredibly proud of--and happens to have a personal connection with--his best piece of advice, and how he and his wife (and their cat) are on a steady diet of true crime.

Can you share a bit about your background?

I’m originally from Pune, India where I completed my Bachelor of Pharmacy in 2007. I came to the US in 2008 to pursue my master’s, and then I continued to earn my PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Southern California. My PhD was in a lab that was focused on developing therapeutics to improve wound healing. At the end of my time at USC, I took a post-doc position at Merrimac Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA. There I became very familiar with what it takes to get a drug to the market. A year later my wife and I decided to get married, and I moved back to California and started a postdoc position at City of Hope, doing translational research. There I became familiar with the potential of using an academic environment to also develop therapeutics.   

For personal reasons I wanted to help discover therapeutics for neurodegenerative disease. So, when the opportunity to work at the Center for Innovation in Brain Sciences (CIBS) at the University of Arizona arose in 2017, I decided to pursue it.  A year into this post-doc, I transitioned into a project manager role. At CIBS I had the opportunity to work on several projects that focused on neurodegenerative diseases. This role taught me how to efficiently contribute to several projects at the same time. Our plan was always to end up back in CA, so my wife and I moved to the Bay Area in the summer of 2020 and I started to look for my next role.  I ended up at the IMA in January of 2021. In a strange way, all of my previous experiences have given me skills that I now use in my current role.

Tell us about your current role at the IMA.

I'm the Senior Scientific Program Manager at the IMA. My team and I support early discovery projects, which is all the way from high-throughput screening to preclinical proof-of-concept studies. This means that a project comes to the IMA when the scientists have made their initial discovery—they may have discovered that there’s a particular biological pathway or protein that helps cancer cells grow, for instance. We help them get from that step, when they have identified what they want a drug to target, to developing a molecule that could be a medicine. This involves testing tons and tons of molecules—that’s the high-throughput screen—to see what works, and then further refining the most successful molecules until we find one that is safe and effective.

We onboard new projects through requests for proposals. Once projects are onboarded, we help develop project plans and budgets along with the scientific directors and their teams. We also help maintain relationships with both internal and external stakeholders. Internally, within Stanford, we interface with the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL), which manages patents for discoveries made at the university, and with procurement services that handle contracts. Externally, we coordinate with Contract Research Organizations (CROs), companies that conduct outsourced research activities, as well as with other strategic partners for project advancement.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

It's been a real privilege to work at Stanford because there's so much cutting-edge research in biomedical sciences. I’ve especially enjoyed collaborating with experts in drug development and Stanford faculty to develop therapeutics for unmet needs. Also, every day that I’m here, I learn something new, and I really enjoy that.

What is a project you enjoyed working on?

A project I’ve really enjoyed has been the Paul Michel glioblastoma project, working alongside Paul Humphries. Dr. Mischel’s lab showed that Prozac, or fluoxetine, when given to animal models of glioblastoma survived longer as compared to the placebo treated groups. This project helped develop analogs of fluoxetine as potential therapeutics to treat glioblastoma. It was the first time in my career where I had the ability to see something that came in at a pretty early stage and watch the process of it possibly exiting from the IMA. And it’s been a great learning experience.

This project had a deep impact in my personal and professional life. Earlier in my career, I hadn’t considered how the importance of improving the overall survival of a patient with cancer by a few months was deemed a success. From my personal experience of watching family suffer through cancer, if you get a few additional months with a loved one, it makes a huge difference.

What do you like to do outside of work?

My wife and I both have demanding jobs, so we enjoy spending time together whenever we can. There are a couple of different things we like doing together. We’re both true crime nuts, so we love finding stories or shows and just chilling on the couch with our cat, Cali. We love cooking together, especially when we make up our own recipes. Outside of that, there are a couple of breweries in San Carlos that we just love to go to and grab a beer and a bite. That’s our way to relax on the weekend.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

The piece of advice was from a math tutor in high school who said, if there's one thing he could tell us, it's to always learn to laugh at ourselves. And what I took from that, and what I’ve tried to learn over the years, is that we're definitely fallible. It's important to acknowledge that. We make mistakes, but we can and should learn from them.